3.1 What an economist should know?

Since World War II, there has been a standardisation of academic curricula all around the world. The books used, most of them American textbooks, are the same worldwide..

As already discussed several times, for instance in the discussion of mathematical modeling, this only makes sense if we abstract from the individual circumstances of each country.

To be more precise, the possible monetary transmission mechanism can be the same all over the world. However, the organisational structure of money supply differs. This is not recognised at all by academic curricula, or only as an annotation. At the same time, when it comes to discussing a real problem, the organisational structure of money supply is crucial.

Another more illustrative example is that every textbook explains verbally, graphically and mathematically the Neoclassical theory of unemployment and that unemployment occurs if the wage is higher than the (monetary) marginal product of labour. That is, of course, true, but not the correct question.

If we have substantial differences in the (monetary) marginal product, the interesting question to pose is why these differences are so high. That there is no unemployment if the wage is one dollar a week is obvious. Instead of using a washing machine, people would hire servants to wash their laundry, and the servant who could not survive on one dollar a week would die and would therefore not become unemployed.

In other words, if the matter to be studied is not the same in different places, it does not make any sense for academic curricula to be the same worldwide.

The problem is that academic curricula have been devised by people with no working experience. At the best they have worked in "scientific" institution or universities abroad, where they remained in the same parallel world as in their native countries. There is no faculty of economics on the globe which mentions the promotion of public debate as a task of economists and no university where the necessary instruments to reach out to larger groups are taught, for instance, how to use the internet efficiently, HTML programming, establishing a connection between a programming language and a SQL database, typo3 etc. Students are not even taught to write in a way to be understood by a larger audience and attract the interest of larger numbers of people.

Actually, economists are not even relevant to politics. It 's hard to analyse the phenomenon, but some experiences of the author suggest that many of the papers commissioned by different ministries, and funded by the taxpayer, are not even read by those who commission them.

(To provide a concrete example, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research ordered a study about the impact of education on economic growth. This study stated that Alfred Marshall paid no intention to the importance of know how. The absolute opposite is true. Alfred Marshall claimed that know how was the most important productive factor. A subsequent request for clarification by email demonstrated that no one in the Ministry had read the study.) Annotations The goal of economists is to advise politics, in other words, to write millions of never discussed discussion papers.

No faculty of Economics sees any need to advice the public or teach the instrument needed to reach a wider audience.

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