Political Class Dismissed

Murphy’s Lessons for the Young Economist

January 31, 2010 3:42 PM by Jeffrey Tucker

I might have written this as a private memo to Robert Murphy but its contents will be interesting to everyone.

I’m in the process of reviewing his teacher manual for his forthcoming high school text on economics: Lessons for the Young Economist. I’m beyond mere excitement about this project. It is easily the best introduction to economics I’ve ever read - and I mean pure economic theory, not just a theory of how markets work (the domain of Hazlitt’s book). He has the right frame of mind. His has mastery of the subject matter. The logic is super clear. I can’t but marvel at the intellectual organization of his pedagogy - achieving a great balance between “plain old” economics and that aspect of economic thought that is considered particularly Austrian.

Just now, as I’m going through his examples on the division of labor and the advantages of indirect vs. direct exchange, something just occurred to me. Most of the attempts at such texts falter because they are either too dry and technical for the young reader or they are littered with attempts to keep the student entertained with references to pop culture or cheesy passages that attempt to “speak the child’s language” but only end up sounding patronizing.

Dr. Murphy’s text has none of this. The prose has relentless fire without needless fireworks. What drives it forward is intellectual passion born of his own love of the topic. What’s also nice is that he is nowhere self-consciously trying to sound like someone he is not. It is his real voice, explaining everything point by point. Here is the product of vast experience and daily writing. This permits the voicing of the book to achieve a remarkable integration page to page, chapter to chapter. Though he is drawing from the whole history of the development of economics, the text ends up being strikingly original. His approach is not based on anything but his own sense of how to teach this subject.

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