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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

Does liberal arts teach critical thinking? Do students who study liberal arts vs a mathematics/engineering show greater improvements on critical thinking tests?

I get the idea we want a more educated population that can better make decisions. But the biggest way the populace makes poor decisions is they are economically illiterate, and they don't really understand how the government works. We should probably spend more time teaching this in high school and a typical degree spends very little time teaching these subjects.

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The populace making poor decisions isn't just economically illiterate, they are increasingly fundamentally illiterate. Teaching economic literacy in school won't matter one bit when an increasing number of people are graduating unable to read even at a basic level.

But in order to solve this problem you would have to overhaul our educational system and right now we have a party invested in destroying it so that it produces voters more aligned with their groupthink.

If you're arguing we should improve schools to increase rates of numeracy and literacy than I'm in 100% agreement. But I thought we were talking about liberal arts degrees.

While there are a variety of different interest groups that have influenced current federal government education policy, most of them don't seem to be trying destroy it just for the sake of destruction. Instead the policy seems to be based more on the perception that the education system has been co-opted and corrupted to indoctrinate students with values and political philosophies that conservative or right-wing politicians find abhorrent. They see this as so damaging to society that it would be better to have no educational system at all rather than what we have now. I don't agree with this perception or their actions, but there is at least a kernel of truth to their viewpoint. In a politically diverse nation if we want to maintain broad based support for higher education then we need to find a way to keep universities at least somewhat politically neutral.

Many groups that want to destroy things make up excuses for why it is good. Even Adolf Hitler said the Jews were attacking Germany and he was just acting in self-defense. So the mere existence of an excuse doesn't mean very much.

What is your definition of economic literacy?

A basic understand of supply/demand and how many well intended policies can have terrible effects.

I can agree with that. That's very basic and uncontroversial. I asked because terms like "economic literacy" often masquerade "thinks about economics the way I want them to". For example, some people would say that you must believe things like "financial markets are good" or else you're economically illiterate.

But supply and demand happen in every economy, even those without money and even post-scarcity sci-fi. And unintended consequences are just a thing everywhere.

Unless "unintended consequences" was shorthand for "if you hurt stock market investors that's bad for the country", of course.

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