Weekend Economists Rise Again August 10-12, 2012

[Tobin S.]

8. Hi Demeter

I just started following this group. I'm starting to get an educated perspective on the economy now days. I've been a trucker for many years and you can learn a lot about the economy from that perspective believe it or not, but that's pretty much street wisdom (sorry about the pun). So I decided to get some book learnin. I am now a 39 year old junior at Indiana University majoring in business administration.

I just took two economics courses over the summer; microeconomics and macroeconomics. I aced both of them, but I'm kind of troubled. The texts were written by a fellow named Michael Parkin from the University of Western Ontario. I detected what seemed to me to be a somewhat conservative slant. These were basic economics texts and they were effective at teaching the basics, but as things progressed into the later chapters we started getting stuff about Reagan being good for the economy, school vouchers being the way to go, and the Affordable Care Act being detrimental to sustained economic growth.

I know that there are probably a lot more conservative business people than liberals. I'm kind of wondering if it might have something to do with conservatively biased professors writing the college text books. Is there room in today's economy for liberal business people?