They have had a lot of snow up north this year.
But a University of Chicago professor found a way to add to the pile of snowflakes.
He did so by taking a swipe at self-proclaimed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and a liberal econ professor who wants to recycle a failed idea from the 1970s to fight Bidenflation.
According to the conservative website The College Fix, UC economics professor, Allen Sanderson, was giving his Econ 100 class a midterm recently when he posed a question:
“An economist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Bernie’s favorite institution of ‘higher education’, wrote an op-ed column on December 30 arguing that to tackle our current 40-year-high bout with rising price levels (an Econ 102 topic for sure) ‘we have a powerful weapon to fight inflation: price controls. How would a real economist respond?”
After a student posted a screenshot of the question last week, people erupted, and not just other students. The jab at Bernie, The Fix reported on Wednesday, “unleash[ed] a torrent of condemnation from academics upset Sanderson would criticize Bernie Sanders.”
Among those who swooned the furthest was Steven Durlauf, another UC professor.
Durlauf told The Maroon, the campus newspaper, that he was offended by the question.
“Exam questions should not mock, or for that matter support, political candidates. And in this case the candidate was someone many students supported,” Durlauf said. He claimed that the question had “caused hurt” at UMass-Amherst.
For what it’s worth, Durlauf was one of 1,084 alleged “economists” who in 2020 signed an open letter urging people to not re-elect former President Donald Trump.
Trump, the letter said in closing, “has rendered the United States unrecognizable, and has faced no consequences for doing so. He has carried out a sustained assault on democratic institutions, put his family members in charge of critical government functions during a pandemic, called for his political opponents to be thrown in prison, normalized corruption, and weakened the economic recovery with selfish and reckless behavior. For these reasons, we strongly recommend that the electorate do what no one else can: reclaim your democracy by voting to remove Donald Trump from office.”
As for Sanderson, he explained to The Maroon that “[w]hen possible, I like to use real-world, real-life questions, drawing from newspapers, books, and speeches instead of made-up, contrived examples. The principles involved come directly from a chapter in the text I use and assigned to the students in the course.”
Sanderson also took an adult approach to the brouhaha caused by his exam.
“I don’t have the time, and hope to never have the time, to follow Twitter and Facebook,” he told the campus paper.
As for those who exhibit outrage with their “chatter” on social media, Sanderson replied: “Grow up.”
Usually, he added, he tends to hear complaints “only from those who didn’t do well in the course.”
“And given I’ve taught over 15,000 UChicago students, the most of anyone in our history, I assume that population could be sizable,” he noted.
As for the issue at hand – price controls – some conservative economists note that President Richard Nixon temporarily imposed price controls 51 years ago to curb inflation – and it failed spectacularly.
Nixon’s policies, they argue, laid the foundation for the crippling runaway stagflation later in the ’70s.
Writing about the issue last month on the blog of the Mises Institute, a free-market research group, Frank Shostak, an investment consultant, wrote, “A policy of restricting price adjustments due to the monetary pumping is going to weaken various marginal producers. Consequently, these producers are likely to move to activities which are not subject to government price controls.”
“As a result,” Shostak added, “the supply of some key consumer goods will come further under pressure. So rather than benefiting consumers, such a government policy would hurt consumers’ well-being. Hence, a policy of price controls is likely to increase shortages and stifle the production of goods and services.”
“In fact, this could ultimately lead to the imposition of the price controls on a large variety of economic activities, which in turn is likely to result in the economic system that resembles the former Soviet Union,” he concluded.
Which, come to think of it, would probably be something Bernie and economists in Massachusetts pine for.
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I thought that the idea of education was to prepare students for the real world, not academia. Practical examples to deal with rather than some contrived, nebulous questions force the students to come up with practical ideas.
Oops, I forgot that you can’t expect students to think too hard. They hardly ever have to in school now.
A red state High School Diploma is worth more than a degree from a University these days. Learn $killed Trade$, you won’t regret it. Bypass the Marxism.