Econ courses today aren’t particularly useful. They don’t tend to instill the economic way of thinking and instead convince students that we need lots of government intervention to solve “market failures.”

In today’s Martin Center article, Mani Basharzad explores this regrettable state of affairs.

He observes that Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel Prize and is among the most influential economists of all time. “And yet, in most classrooms,” he writes, “Hayek’s name never appears. Why? Because economics education today is not primarily designed to train economists but to produce social engineers.”

Indeed so. Economics departments have become training grounds for people who believe that big government can and must manage the economy as if it were a machine.

Basharzad continues, “This approach instills in students the illusion that social problems can be solved by finding ‘optimal solutions.’ In that worldview, markets are seen only in terms of failures — problems that supposedly require government correction — while genuine market solutions are ignored.”

Economics students are rarely taught to consider the trade-offs and unintended consequences of policies. They only look at the supposedly good intentions.

Read the whole thing.