College students love to defend democratic socialism ideals, writes Professor Samuel Abrams in The Wall Street Journal: “Rent control is necessary. Housing is a human right. Markets have failed.”
But there’s one way to shut them up — ask questions about how it all works, exactly.
“[W]hen I ask simple follow-up questions, such as how housing actually gets built if returns are capped, the class goes silent,” Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in his April 16 op-ed.
“These aren’t weak students. The issue is that they aren’t debating economic ideas; they’re blindly inheriting them. This is a failure of curriculum, not intelligence.”
Abrams offers a solution: require an economics class to graduate:
Young people’s concerns are rational. Housing costs are high. Debt is burdensome. Economic mobility feels uncertain. But the explanations they receive are frequently partial, and the range of solutions they encounter is narrow. …
This must be fought from the front line—on campus. Universities, especially those receiving federal funding, should require students to complete at least one course in economics or statistics before graduating. Students don’t need to study advanced theory, but they’d be well-served to acquire foundational literacy on how prices work, how incentives shape behavior, how trade-offs operate and how to interpret data. Institutions that shape how young Americans think about policy, inequality and democracy ought to ensure their graduates can reason through basic economic questions.
Abrams added statistics is another good course to mandate: “In a world saturated with data, students must be able to distinguish correlation from causation and evaluate competing claims. Without this capacity, even well-intentioned arguments can mislead. And we’d continue sending young people into a world of complex economic questions and social policy challenges armed only with slogans.”
Read the full op-ed at The Wall Street Journal.
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