Saturday 8 June 2024

Walter Frick's frickin' insane Economics

Physics textbooks brainwash young people into thinking that they have to obey the law of Gravity. Mahesh Yogi defied those textbooks and became a billionaire by teaching wealthy Westerners how to levitate. Similarly, Economics textbooks- in the opinion of Walter Frick who writes for Aeon- are brainwashing kids into the belief that the Government can't make everybody rich by raising the minimum wage to one trillion dollars an hour. 


What happens to the job market when the government raises the minimum wage?

Ceteris paribus- Employment for residents falls though better skilled immigrants may flood in and, because they have higher productivity, the real per unit labor cost falls and so employment as a whole rises. 

For decades, higher education in the United States has taught economics students to answer this question by reasoning from first principles.

Which are merely common sense.  

When the price of something rises, people tend to buy less of it.

Unless quality rises or the substitutes price rise even more or there is an 'income effect'- i.e ceteris is not paribus.  

Therefore, if the price of labour rises, businesses will choose to ‘buy’ less of it – meaning they’ll hire fewer people. Students learn that a higher minimum wage means fewer jobs.

For natives- yes unless there is a repugnancy market or a monopsonistic employer or there is an 'income effect' which swamps the substitution effect.  


But there’s another way to answer the question, and in the early 1990s the economists David Card and Alan Krueger tried it: they went out and looked. Card and Krueger collected data on fast-food jobs along the border between New Jersey and Pennsylvania, before and after New Jersey’s minimum wage increase. The fast-food restaurants on the New Jersey side of the border were similar to the ones on the Pennsylvania side in nearly every respect, except that they now had to pay higher wages. Would they hire fewer workers in response?

They hired better worker who were willing to cross the border to get higher wages.  


‘The prediction from conventional economic theory is unambiguous,’ Card and Krueger wrote. It was also wrong. Fast-food restaurants in New Jersey didn’t hire fewer workers – instead, Card and Krueger found that employment slightly increased.

Because good workers would found it worthwhile to commute across the border.  

Their paper set off a hunt for other ‘natural experiments’ that could rigorously test economic theory and – alongside other research agendas like behavioural economics – transformed the field.

But 'the field' consisted of junk social science producing 'counter-intuitive' results by ignoring the fucking obvious.  

Over the past 30 years, PhD-level education in economics has become more empirical, more psychological, and more attuned to the many ways that markets can fail.

Data mining has improved but the people doing it are getting stupider. This is fine if you are Jeff Bezos and know how to train monkeys to do boring but potentially useful work.  

Introductory economics courses, however, are not so easy to transform. Big, synoptic textbooks are hard to put together and, once they are adopted as the foundation of introductory courses, professors and institutions are slow to abandon them.

'Introductory' theories are 'anything goes'. They are undetermined. You can always explain a 'counter-intuitive' result by 'factorizing' the determinants of supply and demand and seeing why a particular 'substitution effect' gets swamped by something else- e.g. an income effect or entry of immigrants etc.  

So introductory economics textbooks have continued to teach that a higher minimum wage leads to fewer people working – usually as an example of how useful and relevant the simple model of competitive markets could be.

This is because kids are stooopid. They may ask why the janitor is being paid less than the President of the College. The answer, of course, is that the janitor does something useful. Pay him a lot of money and he'll spend his time gassing on about Gaza or DIE or whatever.  

As a result of this lag between what economists know and how introductory economics is taught, a gulf developed between the way students first encounter economics and how most leading economists practise it.

'Leading economist' means 'stupid monkey' unless the guy is making lots of money in which case he is just a smart businessman.  

Students learned about the virtues of markets, deduced from a few seemingly simple assumptions. Economists and their graduate students, meanwhile, catalogued more and more ways those assumptions could go wrong.

But this could also be done in a High School class.  

Today, 30 years after Card and Krueger’s paper, economics curriculums around the world continue to challenge the facile view that students used to learn, in which unfettered markets work wonders.

In High School, kids are taught about all the many many ways in which 'market failure' could arise. There are massive diminishing returns to higher education in Econ. It would be better to farm out mathsy stuff to actual mathematicians.  

These changes – like spending more time studying market failures or emphasising individuals’ capacity for altruism, not just selfishness

why stop there? Why not emphasize the individual's capacity to levitate?  

– have a political valence since conservatives often hide behind the laissez-faire logic of introductory economics.

Those pesky conservatives are always hiding somewhere or the other.  

But the evolution of Econ 101 is not as subversive as it may sound.

Econ 101 doesn't sound subversive. It sounds as boring as shit.  

Instead, it reflects the direction the wider discipline has taken toward empiricism and more varied models of economic behaviour.

e.g. Mahesh Yogi making billions by teaching 'Yogic flying'.  

Econ 101 is not changing to reflect a particular ideology; it is finally catching up to the field it purports to represent.

'Effective altruism' was supposed to be an Economic theory. It turned out to be a stupid Ponzi scheme. Anyway, the Chinese will eat our lunch soon enough. At that point, we can all set up as teachers of Yogic levitation.  

In 2019, Harvard University’s introduction to economics course, Ec10, changed hands. The respected conservative economist and textbook author Greg Mankiw

who quit the Republican party because of Trump 

handed it over to Jason Furman and David Laibson. Furman was chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under the US president Barack Obama.

in other words, a safe pair of hands 

Laibson, also a textbook author, focuses his research on behavioural economics – which he prefers to describe as ‘psychology and economics’.

Though 'nudge' failed. On the other hand, 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink' might succeed. I think Mia Khalifa should be made Chief Economic Adviser. That will cause markets to rise.  

As part of this transition, the course textbook shifted from Mankiw’s popular Principles of Economics (5th ed, 2015) to Economics (2nd ed, 2018) by Laibson, Daron Acemoglu of MIT, and John List of the University of Chicago.

Do kid actually read textbooks? I didn't though I taught the subject.  

Their goal in revising the course was threefold, says Furman. First, the course should be coherent and helpful for students, even if they never take another economics course.

It should help them explore their own sexuality and gender identity. Think of the kinked demand curve. If that doesn't turn you into Eddy Izzard, you are beyond hope.  

Second, it should speak to issues students care about – climate change, poverty and inequality, for example.

Students care about pizza and masturbation. It should speak to both issues- unless it already does and nobody noticed in which case it should speak a bit louder. 

Third, it should reflect the way economics is practised today, which means more empiricism, more psychology, and more attention to market failures and public policy.

Econ is best practiced by hiring people to do that boring shit.  

Historically, introductory courses have reflected the way that the field of economics evolved, says David Martin, an economist at Harvard and section leader for the course. Theory came first: 18th-century philosophers like Adam Smith and David Ricardo sketched out principles of how markets operate;

No. They wrote stupid shit. The first lesson an Econ student should learn is that Econ books are shit. They are written by cretins for cretins.  

20th-century economists like Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow turned those ideas into mathematical models.

That was happening in the second half of the nineteenth century- Gossen, Edgeworth, Cournot etc. Marshall was actually a good mathematician. Sadly Arrow-Debreu ignores Knightian Uncertainty. These are mathematical models of a world in which there is no language or need for inter-personal communication. Still, Arrow-Debreu securities- though weapons of financial mass destruction- are useful enough. 

It should be borne in mind that Samuelson, Arrow, folk theorem of repeated games etc all assume that Markets can be as good, not better, than a perfect command economy. Kantorovich got a Nobel same as Samuelson. 

This is science as described by the theoretician. Since then, a subtle but evident shift has taken place

Post-war, Bretton Woods, economies accorded higher prestige to Professors of useless shit. Then people noticed that guys who know how to economize can get very very fucking rich. Also, they aren't as boring as shit. The prestige of the discipline collapsed. Partly, this was because of the stagflation of the Seventies but the thing was inevitable. It was noticeable that a country with a lot of 'A list' economists tended to fall behind countries which had no fucking economists but which imitated what smarter countries were doing or had done. Mimetics matters. Mathsy shite does not.  

Two developments in the late 20th century changed the field’s direction. First, computers made data much easier to find and to analyse.

With the result that junk social science flourished.  

Second, advances in statistical theory led to new methods of inferring cause and effect from data.

Nope. Granger causality is correlation. Structural Causal Models in Econ tend to fall apart if a particular parameter is used for a policy purpose. This is 'Goodhart's law'.  

Those methods ushered in what economists dubbed the ‘credibility revolution’, and in 2021 three of its architects, including Card, received a Nobel Prize.

But 'Econ Nobel laureate' now means 'a guy who babbles nonsense in NYT op-eds'. Rothbard's Law- economists specialize in what they are worst at- has no exceptions.  Obviously, this does not apply to a guy who studied Econ but is now as rich as fuck. We say he is simply a smart businessman. 

The empirical turn in economics upended the discipline,

so what? A corpse floating in the river remains a corpse even if upended.  

but textbooks have lagged behind. Publishers typically require that authors not change more than 15 per cent for any new textbook edition to avoid upsetting instructors, which effectively capped the pace at which Econ 101 could evolve.

Who reads textbooks? There is such a thing as the internet, you know. 

The 1997 edition of Mankiw’s introductory textbook, for example, includes a section on observation and the scientific method. It also quotes Albert Einstein’s claim that ‘The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking’ and describes Isaac Newton seeing an apple fall and being motivated to develop a theory of gravity.

I suppose Mankiw had noticed that Econ students had grown a lot stupider since the Seventies.  

This is science as described by the theoretician. Since then, a subtle but evident shift has taken place. In the textbook that Harvard uses, first published in 2015, empiricism is elevated to one of the three core principles of economics,

Empiricism can't be the core principle of theoretical economics. It is a matter of applied, or descriptive, economics. 

alongside ‘optimisation’

which can only be done if there is an objective function. This is unlikely because of Knightian uncertainty.  

and ‘equilibrium’.

Though all life is 'far from equilibrium'. Anyway, everything mentioned so far is just 'Positive Economics' and was already there in Samuelson. Maybe it has been dumbed down a bit with talk of Newton and his apple. 

Their book includes sections on ‘evidence-based economics’ in every chapter.

As did previous textbooks which had 'case-studies'.  

Undergraduates in Harvard’s Ec10 read the Card-Krueger minimum wage paper in the second week of class.

Then they go on the internet and discover that native workers were displaced by immigrants.  

It’s introduced in a session on empiricism in economics, and the students complete a simplified version of the analysis, calculating the difference in employment at fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Philadelphia before and after New Jersey raised the minimum wage.

So, they are being brain-washed. That's a good thing. Economics is about sycophancy and producing the result your boss wants by doing a drive-by regression.  

The lesson is that ‘economic theories are only as good as the predictions they allow us to make about behaviour,’ says Martin.

Which is 'Positive Econ'.  

‘The way we generally teach is facts first,’

Lies first. You want to pretend minimum wages are a good thing and so you tell lies. It is obvious that Pennsylvania is going to lose workers to affluent New York. Maybe they will get retirees. Maybe not.  

he says of the course. Where theory once led, it now follows.

You don't need any fucking theory to understand that workers will move to where their pay will be higher. But this also means that shitty native workers may be displaced by hard working immigrants.  


The theory side of Econ 101 is changing, too. The workhorse of introductory economics courses is the model of a perfectly competitive market. Students were traditionally introduced to its principles by reasoning about a consumer good with which they were already familiar, like pizza or ice cream. If a slice of pizza is free, how many will you take? (Several.) What if each slice costs $4? (Fewer.) What if each slice costs $40? (None at all.) This armchair reasoning forms the basis of a demand curve, where the quantity of a good (pizza) is higher when its price is lower.

How stupid do you have to be if you need to be taught this shite?  

The exercise is then repeated for the supply side where things work in reverse: the higher the price, the more people will find it worthwhile to make and sell pizza. And the point where supply and demand meet is the market equilibrium. The model assumes that buyers and sellers are all rationally optimising according to their preferences; they act so as to maximise their ‘utility’.

The problem here is Knightian Uncertainty which causes us to 'minimize regret'. Suppose pizza is really expensive but I see lots of people queuing up to buy it. My FOMO (fear of missing out) kicks in. I may regret not buying pizza now even at this high price.  

Harvard students still learn this model, in the second week of class.

Only if they are too stupid to study something worthwhile- like Masturbation.  

But the third week of Ec10 kicks off a series of three lectures challenging its key premises – in particular, the idea that people are purely selfish, perfectly rational maximisers.

The Law of Large numbers apply. For a big enough market, the super-selfish cancel out the actions of the super-altruistic.  

Instead, over three lessons, students are introduced to psychology, game theory and ‘social economics’ – which includes questions of fairness, trust and altruism.

Sadly, they are not being introduced to Yogic levitation probably because they might fly away and start pooping on the heads of their Professors.  

Students learn that, even when people are motivated and trying to optimise, they often aren’t perfectly rational

Nor are they people. Did you know that 3 per cent of all actuaries are actually ducks?  

In one class, students play a game called the ‘Keynesian beauty contest’, where everyone picks a number between one and 100. The rule is that the student whose pick is closest to two-thirds of the class average wins $10.

If zero were included the answer would be Zero because two thirds of zero is zero and thus everybody wins ten dollars. However, zero has been excluded. But the same thing happens if they all choose one. The solution concept here is 'backward induction'.   

What number should they pick? If guesses are random between one and 100,

Why should they be? There is a 'Muth Rational' solution. One is the lowest number you can guess and the game incentivizes low guesses. Moreover, it is the one which gives everybody ten dollars. Only if you think other people think most peeps in the class are stoooopid, would this not apply. But that aint 'Muth rational'. You'd expect kids in a Harvard Econ class to be smart, not stoooopid.  

the average will be around 50, and two-thirds of 50 is 33⅓. But is 33⅓ a good guess? If everyone does that math, they’ll all guess 33 – and two-thirds of 33 is 22. But what if everyone does that math? Then the best guess would be two-thirds of 22, and so on. If everyone is purely rational and believes everyone else to be rational too, then the best guess is zero.

This cretin just said you have to pick a number between 1 and 100. 

That, in game theory lingo, is the Nash equilibrium.

No. Guessing one gives everybody ten dollars unless they are stoooopid. But why make that assumption? This is an Aumann correlated equilibrium. Nash is irrelevant.  


In reality, the most common guess is 33,

Which proves Harvard admits cretins.  

followed by 22; the third most-common guess is zero.

These kids don't understand that zero comes before one. It isn't a number between one and one hundred. No wonder the Chinese are eating our lunch.  

The point of the exercise is that the game-theoretic prediction fails to match up with the real-world behaviour. Students learn that, even when people are motivated and trying to optimise, they often aren’t perfectly rational (even Harvard students).

This is crazy. Everyone will pick one and get paid 10 dollars- unless they are Harvard students.  

Students also play the dictator game, where one student is given money and has the option to keep it all for themselves or to share it with another student. Most people share at least some of their windfall, says Martin, showing that ‘even when given the opportunity with no repercussions to be super greedy, a lot of people will give some money to the other person.’

How do we know there will be no repercussions? The fact is these kids aren't sharing their allowances or trust funds with each other. However, for reputational reasons they may share a windfall received in the class-room. What I would do is claim I'm donating the money to Gaza- by which I mean Pizza.  

These exercises challenge the notion that human behaviour is mostly selfish and rational.

No. Appearing altruistic has a reputational effect. Sociopaths will donate money in a public manner for this reason.  

Such challenges to ‘Homo economicus’ have long had a place in economics textbooks – in the very back. Courses mirrored the textbooks, with ‘back of the textbook’ lectures on topics like altruism coming at the end of the semester.

No. In High School, teechur explains that 'utility' can be gained by anything at all- e.g. giving money to a beggar even if you yourself are starving.  

Ec10 integrates this material throughout the course

only due to they are totes racist, they are not including material on Mahesh Yogi's Yogic levitation.  

and teaches it alongside more classic models. ‘From the first second we teach [the competitive model of supply and demand], we say we’re going to teach tons of ways it fails or goes wrong,’ says Furman.

This is not enough. They need to explain that dicks cause RAPE! Ban dicks now! 

What was once supplementary is now a central part of Econ 101.

Which is why China will overtake the US within a decade.  


Harvard is not alone in its shifting approach. In fact, for a team of economists in the UK, it doesn’t go far enough.

Due to dicks are not being banned.  

A decade ago, they set out to ‘bring the back of the textbook to the front’ and, most controversially, to relegate the classic model of a perfectly competitive market to the back of the book.

Though a lot of Econ graduates are going to end up working in 'open' financial or commodity markets.  

‘The spark was the financial crisis,’ says Wendy Carlin, an economist at University College London, of the unorthodox textbook she helped to create.

China's rise means that the West's intellectual property regime and 'exorbitant privilege' may collapse. This is why it is vital that we ban dicks now. Did you know that a leading cause of Climate Change is the incessant rape inflicted by dicks on trees and shrubs? How long can we stand by and watch the Environment being subjected to double entry by rampant dicks? What about Black Peeps? Don't Black Lives Matter? Did you know that trillions of Black Peeps are choking on dicks even as we speak?  

Students wanted to know what had gone wrong in the global economy, and introductory courses struggled to provide an answer.

Why didn't they just Google it? The fact is Gulf War 2 lost money and eroded American hegemony. The terms of trade shifted against oil importers (till fracking fucked up ISIS). There was bound to be a shakeout. Thankfully, the Germans and the African Americans in their 'sub-prime' houses took the brunt of the financial tsunami.  

Margaret Stevens was having the same problem at the University of Oxford: many of her students were undergraduates in philosophy, politics and economics – and finding that the latter couldn’t answer the questions they had about the post-crisis economy.

But, it was easy to answer. Dubya had fucked up. Voters were so rattled they put a Nigger in the White House hoping he would scare Wall Street straight. But he bailed out the Banks and let the weak go to the wall. How else could that story have ended?  

In truth, the examples in economics textbooks were ‘chosen to fit the model’ being taught, says Carlin.

Whereas we should tell stupid lies which fit our models in the textbooks.  

Whereas ‘when researchers work on a problem, we start with a question in the world – and often some descriptive data, some hunches,’ she says. ‘And then we step back and think: “Which economic tools and which concepts are going to help us make progress on this question?”’

No. Economists step back and think 'how can I build my career by telling some stupid lies about this?' 

Carlin and Stevens teamed up with Sam Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute, to launch a new, open-source economics textbook published by CORE Econ and called The Economy 1.0. The first edition launched online in 2017. Earlier this year, the project – now with dozens of contributors from around the world – published the second version of its microeconomics curriculum.

Old wine in new bottles except it wasn't wine, it was piss.  

They wanted to write a textbook that would draw in students and keep them motivated

to incur student loans and work as baristas.  

For Bowles, the project recalled his correspondence with Martin Luther King Jr in the late 1960s.

His dad was a very nice Ambassador to India. He himself attended an ordinary Indian school. More remarkably, his sixteen year old sister used to bicycle home from voluntary work at a Clinic in Old Delhi. Back then, America sent out some very remarkable people to the Turd World.  

They’d met through anti-war activities, and King sent Bowles a list of economic questions he wanted help in answering. ‘I opened the list when it came,’ says Bowles. ‘I didn’t have a clue about how to answer any of them. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know the answers – I didn’t know where to look.’

Marshall had supplied the answers long ago. Exploitation means 'rent extraction'. You get rid of it by raising elasticity of supply and demand- i.e. by giving everybody more alternatives. Technological progress did this- once the Government stopped hoarding patents.  

Carlin, Stevens and Bowles had all been teachers before they were economists: Carlin has a degree in education; Stevens taught high-school mathematics; and Bowles taught high school in Nigeria. They wanted to write a textbook that would draw in students and keep them motivated.

They didn't get that what motivates Econ students is the prospect of making lots of money.  

The result is a textbook unlike the ones most economics students encounter.

It teaches you how to become poorer.  

CORE Econ begins by charting the ‘hockey stick’ trendline of both economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions.

In other words, it is already out of date. Renewable energy has a 30 percent share of China's electricity currently but a lot of installed capacity hasn't come on line. It may be 50 percent by 2030. It is growth and only growth which can pay for curbing emissions. 

The first chapter spans technological innovation, Thomas Malthus’s theory of population growth, and colonialism. It is now used by almost 400 universities on six continents, according to CORE Econ, and in just over half of UK universities that offer an economics degree.

Thankfully, most Econ students don't read their textbooks.  

In CORE, the classic model of a competitive market does not make an entrance until Chapter 8. ‘What CORE is doing in micro[economics] is trying to bring to the intro classroom what grad students have been taught for a long time,’ says Bowles.

Brainwashing works better on kids. Anyway, grad students are losers.  

For example, in the CORE textbook, firms are introduced as having the power to set prices.

they may do but then again they may not.  

That might sound obvious but it’s not how things work in the typical introductory model of a perfectly competitive market.

that model is the stock exchange 

In that model, there are lots of identical sellers and the market sets a price.

there is a market clearing price.  

Firms can choose to either sell at that market price or not sell at all. Imagine a street with several very similar pizza parlours:

that does not meet the criteria of 'perfect competition'.  

if one tries to charge a much higher price than the others, customers will notice and stop shopping there, and that parlour will have to lower its price.

No. I live on such a street. Papa John has different prices from Pizza Express. Prices are fixed by head office.  

At least that’s the old Econ 101 logic. CORE puts that at the back of its approach to signify that it’s the special case rather than the norm, says Bowles.

But it is the norm on truly open markets. One stock broker can't sell at a different price from another stock broker. With Pizzas you have 'product differentiation' because this is 'imperfect competition'. Again, this is High School Econ.  

Instead, the CORE pedagogy teaches a model where firms sell different goods, and each has at least some power to dictate prices and wages.

So, they are merely teaching imperfect competition. But Econ graduates hope to get jobs in financial markets, not Pizza joints.  

This choice has implications for more than prices. By eschewing the perfect competition model, CORE introduces the idea that power is a central aspect of market interactions.

Market power means the ability to set your own price.  Even on open markets a big enough arbitrageur could 'corner' the market or else a 'cartel' could set prices more or less surreptitiously. 

CORE includes many other topics that, once, may not have made it even into the back of a textbook, including forced labour

Slavery existed in Adam Smith's time though, obviously, Stalin and Mao and Hitler did it better.  

and the gender wage gap.

which is covered by Marshallian theory of price, wage and service provision discrimination.  

Pirate ships of the 18th century are used to explore the role that institutions play in deciding who gets paid how much.

I suppose this guy means 'the Pirate's game'. The solution concept is given by Shapley.  

The most recent version contains a unit on colonialism and its role in the industrial revolution.

It had none. There have been vast empires which had no fucking industrializaton and there have been countries which industrialized rapidly without any fucking colonies. On the other hand, there was once a union of 13 Colonies in North America. Whatever happened to them? I suppose they were scalped by Red Indians.  That's what you get for telling Mad King George to fuck off. 

It’s tempting to judge CORE and even Harvard’s Ec10 in ideological terms – as an overdue response or countermeasure to a laissez-faire approach.

Arrow and Samuelson and so forth were way to the Left of these guys who are merely woke.  

But the evolution of Econ 101 is about more than politics. (Despite its focus on traditionally more progressive topics, CORE has been criticised for being insufficiently ‘heterodox’, according to Stevens.)

Why are they no campaigning for the banning of dicks? Did you know that Joe Biden is still refusing to have gender reassignment surgery? And they call America a Democracy! 

By elevating empiricism and by teaching multiple models of the economy, students in these new curriculums are learning how social sciences actually work.

They are learning that 'Social Science' is stupid shit.  

‘A model is just an allegory,’ says the economist David Autor in his intermediate microeconomics course at MIT.

No. It is a machine for turning out predictions which help in the economizing of the use of scarce resources. It isn't a story about how, once upon a time, there was a nice bunny rabbit which shared its carrots with other woodland creatures. One day, it met a wolf and demanded that the wolf undergo gender-reassignment surgery. The wolf ate it. This is an allegory of what will happen if Trump gets elected.  

For decades, Econ 101 taught one major allegory, in which markets worked well of their own accord, and buyers and sellers all emerged better off.

But those buyers and sellers were not chopping of their own dicks. This caused RAPE of the Environment and led to Neo-Liberalism and Racism and Islamophobia.  

Government, when it was mentioned at all, was frequently portrayed as an overzealous maintenance man – able to solve some problems but also meddling in markets that were fine on their own.

Did you know that Government is not chopping off its own dick? Nice bunny rabbits are crying their little eyes out.  

That is not how most contemporary economists think.

They think they are smart or, if not smart, should still get paid regularly.  

Instead, they see the competitive market as one model among many.

In nice models, bunny rabbits get power of Yogic levitation and shit on the heads of wolves who want to eat them.  

‘The multiplicity of models is economics’ strength,’ writes the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik in Economics Rules (2015).

I want a multiplicity of super-models queueing up patiently outside my bedroom door.  

‘[W]e have a menu to choose from and need an empirical method for making that choice.’

My empirical method in choosing super-models is to ask which of them has brought with her a large Pepperoni pizza.  

As the Econ 101 curriculum catches up, economics students are finally getting a taste of the variety that the field has to offer.

Sadly, that taste is the taste of the imaginary pizza brought to me by a gorgeous super-model.  


As much of an improvement as the new curriculums are, they raise a puzzle.

Why would anybody take out a student loan to be indoctrinated in this stupid shite? 

The traditional Econ 101 course was, for all its flaws, coherent and memorable.

and did not cause you to demand that the Government ban dicks.  

Students came away with a clear framework for thinking about the world. What does the new Econ 101 leave students with, other than an appreciation that the world is complicated, and that data is important?

They understand that China will eat their lunch. Is it too late to learn Mandarin?  

Carlin’s answer is that ‘the workhorse [of Econ 101] is that actors make decisions.’

That's not a workhorse. It is a stupid donkey. We must train that donkey to bite off dicks.  

Modelling those decisions remains a central part of economics.

Fuck that. Just spot and extrapolate trends in the data.  

What’s changed is the way decision-makers are represented: they can be selfish, but they can also be altruistic.

Also they can bite their own dicks off while doing Yogic levitation.  

They can be rational, but they can also be biased or blinkered.

It is perfectly rational to be biased or blinkered or 'woke' if that is what gets you paid.  

They are social and strategic, and they interact with one another not just with the faceless market.

Did you know that people sometimes talk to each other? Sadly, if they have dicks, they may also RAPE the Environment.  

Models help approximate the most salient features of these interactions, and students learn several different ones to guide their understanding.

Unless they quit skool and get rich buying low and selling high.  

They also learn that models must fit the facts,

No. Models must be fit and have shapely tits. Also they should bring me Pepperoni Pizza.  

and that a crucial part of economics is leaving the armchair and observing what is going on in the world.

Dicks are RAPING Environment. True, the Environment shouldn't dress so provocatively. Also, why is it constantly jetting off to take ayahuasca in some Brazilian rain forest? No wonder it keeps getting raped! Look at the Environment in the Home Counties. It went to Secretarial School and then married a Cost and Management Accountant. It is always polite and well-dressed as opposed to high on drugs and dripping with cum from every orifice. This is the message we much get across to our students- more especially if they are nice bunny rabbits.  

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