The Danger of 'Ec 10'

To the editors:

James Allen Johnson's March 9 editorial on the virtues of capitalism was a hilarious but depressing example of what happens when gullible undergraduates apply the toys we are given in Social Analysis 10: "Principles of Economics" (Ec 10) to the real world. What is taught in Ec 10 has the dubious virtue of being very, very simple. As Johnson went to such offensive lengths to point out, "(a)nyone who has learned to spell the word economics should understand this theory."

Unfortunately, many of our economics concentrators seem to have stopped thinking critically about the world immediately after learning to spell that word.

The model taught in Ec 10 describes how people choose between variously "preferred" goods. You can apply it to anything: the choice a Harvard student makes between eating at Dunkin' Donuts or Au Bon Pain, or the choice a local resident makes between unemployment or a low-wage, dead-end job at either franchise. Ec 10 encourages students to ignore the glaring fact that different members of this society inherit different levels of opportunity and access to privilege, differences which have nothing to do with the "free" market mechanism.

Adherence to the Ec 10 model led Johnson to believe that protesters of Starbucks must be (inappropriately) expressing their "preference" for a different kind of coffee store. If he had bothered to ask the people outside the Starbucks in Central Square last weekend why they were protesting--something economists are usually too busy graphing abstractions to think of doing--he would have learned that not only were they denied an opportunity to express their preference for the affordable coffee shops that used to be there, but that Starbucks's arrival along with other up-scale retail developments, has raised rents in the area so much that many residents are now faced with the perfectly rational choice between scrambling to find poorly-serviced, less safe housing and homelessness.

They don't teach us to spell that one out in Ec 10, although they do find the time to go over the (ostensibly "value-free") distortionary evils of rent control, the recent elimination of which preceded an increase in Boston/Cambridge homelessness of crisis proportions.

I am deeply troubled by the idea that analysis at this ridiculously low level of sophistication is informing our country's social and economic policy. If today's economics concentrators don't take their heads out of their spelling books and learn a thing or two about what their models are missing, the rest of us are going to have to demonstrate to them the limitations of their thinking when the stakes are much higher in terms of human suffering. STEPHANIE GREENWOOD '99   March 11, 1998