SOME STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT ECONOMIC GROWTH.

DeKalb's public schools are back in session as of today, 13 August.  It's all too much for the editorial board at Chicago's Tribune.  "Back to school? Summer shouldn’t be over this early."  Something about balancing the semesters such that the fall semester wraps up before Christmas.  And the obligatory nod to "the very real learning loss that takes place when kids press pause on their studies for months on end."  I don't recall any such fretting in the Leave It to Beaver era, and I've undoubtedly triggered somebody by pointing that out.  Too bad.  If they're serious about balancing the semesters, why did DeKalb bring all the kiddos in this morning only to dismiss at 11 am?

Students will soon be returning to Northern Illinois University as well.  It might be that students come to university equipped with conventional wisdom that is wrong, or they might be exposed to faculty lounge commonplaces that are misleading.  Dominic Pino contemplates the ways.

The problem is that people believe that the New Deal ended the Great Depression, free markets caused the Great Recession, the Industrial Revolution led to increased poverty, and free trade hollowed out America. They really, sincerely, believe these things to be true. And that really does matter.

“Conventional wisdom firmly holds” that the myths in the book “constitute strong evidence for expanding government’s role,” Gramm and Boudreaux write. If you think a lot of that government expansion has been detrimental, as conservatives do, then that conventional wisdom is socially harmful.

It can be a bit uncomfortable sometimes for conservatives to say that people’s beliefs can be socially harmful, because too often the follow-up to that is some kind of imposition on people’s freedom. Climate activists, for example, have argued that dissent from their alarmist view of climate change should be criminally prosecuted.

The role of education, as ever, is to equip students with the ability to determine when a man is talking rot, and the intellectual chops to ask the right questions, rather than to go straight to questioning somebody's motives or accusing him of a thought crime.

Whether the "seven myths" Mr Pino then raises as a way of introducing that conventional wisdom are well-posed or might conceal some question-begging in the way they are posed is left to the reader as an exercise.

1. The Industrial Revolution made workers poorer.
2. Consumers and workers demanded Progressive Era economic reforms to protect them from big businesses.
3. A failure of markets caused the Great Depression, and the New Deal policies ended it.
4. Free trade hollowed out the manufacturing sector.
5. Financial deregulation caused the Great Recession.
6. Income inequality is high and has been rising in recent decades.
7. Poverty remains stubbornly high, and this is due to American capitalism.

The challenge to those readers who might still be in the academic trenches this fall is to brace themselves to their duties, and, when one or more of those claims comes up either centrally or tangentially in the classroom, to treat the arguments and counter-arguments with respect.