[Max Sawicky]

> 
> I was eating dinner at the same table with 3 UC Berkeley economics grad
> students and I thought it would be an interesting opportunity, but they
> didn't seem to have any particular opinions on the stock market situation
> (totally unpredictable, let's not talk about that), and they didn't know
> who Ayn Rand was, and the one I was mainly talking to didn't know what
> libertarianism is. He was just interested in finance and how fast various
> other students are making it through grad school, and issues completely
> unrelated to what I'm interested by. 

When I was in grad school, approx the Pleistocene Era or
thereabouts, whenever I was carrying around some book
that had not been assigned in any course, I would be
asked, "what's that for?"  In our History of Thought
course, Dudley Dillard (actually a very sweet guy)
would ask things like, "What is the Marxist concept
of capital?", I would say, "a social relation,"
and people thought I was some kind of Marxist
rocket scientist.

A committee of American Economic ASsn members,
I think it was a formal committee of some kind,
recently issued some kind
of statement of concern that econ grad departments
were producing cohorts of idiot savants who could
manipulate equations but had no clue about anything
else.

MBS

EPI, where our unofficial motto is
"Protecting the World from Economists"