The growing popularity of the Democratic Socialists of America reflects the continuing decline in patriotism among young Americans. A variety of polls illustrate this. Most recently, a CNBC/Generation Lab poll shows that young American adults are more likely than ever to favor socialism, with 46 percent having a favorable view of democratic socialism while only 23 percent had an unfavorable view.
Much of this disaffection stems from the American economy. Younger Millennials and Gen Z often complain, for example, that the cost of housing is cheating them out of the American dream. To them, America’s free market economy is becoming an unconscionable obstacle to the good life. This should be alarming. Younger Americans are increasingly in favor of changing America’s most unique feature – its free market economic system.
At first, America inherited most of its culture, religions, and institutions from Europe. But over time, a growing gulf emerged between America’s free-market economic system and the economic systems of countries in the rest of the West. More than anywhere else, America’s free market economic system was fueled by, and contributed to, unprecedented creativity and freedom. These two hallmarks of America made unprecedented mass flourishing possible.
Young Americans are increasingly rejecting the very system that largely defines America. To stem this tide, we need to integrate economics into the civics curriculum as never before. No greater threat to our way of life exists than our own citizens turning against our economic system because they don’t understand it.
Economics: An Increasingly Important Tool for Civic Duty
America is a democracy, so its voters can change everything about our government, even the Constitution itself. As a result, the less capable American voters are of wisely evaluating the merits of candidates, policies, laws, and constitutional amendments, the more likely America will fail as a nation.
This is the primary problem that traditional civics education began addressing in the early 19th century. It did so by providing future voters with knowledge of America’s history, its founding documents, its leaders, and how its government institutions function. All of this was, and remains, essential to enable voters to make wise decisions.
But it is no longer enough.
Over the 19th and early 20th centuries, technological advances pushed Americans off family farms and into cities, where many began working in factories. The common sense economic wisdom they learned on the farm was cut off. Over subsequent generations, the oral traditions that sustained that wisdom have decayed. What once produced a good deal of sound judgment in the voting booth has disappeared, and nothing has replaced it.
At the same time, the American economy became much more complex. The government also became more integrated into our increasingly complex economic system, so the issues that voters had to evaluate became more complex. Over the last century, voters have therefore been increasingly called upon to make decisions about things they cannot possibly understand without a basic knowledge of economics.
Before the 20th century, for example, the federal government never even considered anything as complex as the Affordable Care Act. But evaluating the rationale for, and the construction of, the healthcare system under the ACA required more than common sense economics. It required more rigorously cultivated economic concepts, tools, and theories that, while not terribly difficult to learn, most can only learn through systematic classroom instruction.
Just think of any government policy, program, or law in America that you think is clearly foolish. In many cases, voters’ poor understanding of economics made its adoption possible. So it is in every citizen’s interest to ensure that as many citizens as possible know enough economics to vote wisely given our present level of economic complexity.
Economics: A Tool for Understanding Why America is Good
If you were asked to create a civics curriculum for a communist nation, you would explore that nation’s history, how its governing institutions work, and what a communist system is and how it works. You would teach Marxist economic theory so you could explain why the communist economic system is better than the free market economic system. You would do that because it’s obvious that the communist economic system is the crux of a communist society.
But while those who teach American civics today also talk about our nation’s history and how our governing institutions work, they spend very little, if any, time teaching what a free market economic system is and how it works. Therefore, there is no reason to teach the free-market economic theory needed to explain why free-market economies are better than socialist or communist economies. But isn’t a free market economy the crux of a free market society? Moreover, understanding the economic concepts that underpin it easily calls into question much of what passes for domestic policy.
America’s free market economic system, supercharged by a highly cooperative culture and institutions, is a defining characteristic of America. It is something to be awed by, grateful for, and proud of. But to understand why our free market economic system is actually a multilayered cooperative system, one must first learn the economic theory of cooperation. This begins with learning some basic economics.
With the necessary concepts, tools, and theory from economics, voters can see why America is good: the high-powered cooperation made possible by its free market economic system has made the greatest mass flourishing in history possible. This flourishing did not come at the expense of any group within America or any other nation.
If one doesn’t understand why a free market economic system is self-regulating in a way that best promotes the common good, it seems irresponsible not to try to meticulously guide every economic flow in society to ensure good outcomes. The irony is that the impossibility of doing so is itself impossible to understand if one doesn’t already understand how free market systems actually work.
Understanding how economic activity is best ordered requires theory that organizes thinking in a way that virtually no one can attain through direct experience or informal teaching by those with no more than direct experience. It requires systematic classroom instruction, just like fields such as chemistry.
Just as chemistry is hard to learn, so is economics. Luckily, voters need to master only a little more than basic economics to recognize economic alchemy when they see it.
But systematic classroom instruction in key economic concepts, tools, and theory still has no substitute. As Adam Smith explained 250 years ago, ever greater specialization is the key to reaching ever higher levels of productivity and therefore prosperity. But that specialization makes it harder for citizens to think of economic activity from a “big picture” perspective. The American economy today is largely mysterious to the average citizen, which has opened the door to false narratives about our economic system.
It should be stressed that traditional civics education is not the problem. It still does an excellent job answering the Who, What, When, Where, and How questions of civics. The problem is that circumstances have changed, so we need to complement traditional civics with content that addresses a different kind of question—this one in particular: Why is America a good country?
Not so long ago, answering this question was unnecessary because almost no one in America was trying to explain why America is not a good country. But now that explanation is being made in classrooms and in the media in increasingly strident ways. Now most young adults can explain why America is not a good country, but even those who believe it is a good country struggle to explain why.
Economics matters because it helps explain why America is indeed a good country. It is hard to regard a civics education that fails to do this as a success. Evidence of our failure is all around us now, and poll results show it is worsening over time. We cannot keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. What can possibly be more urgent for us to do to save our way of life?
Five Critical Economics Lessons for Civics
There are well-known lists of economic basics that every adult should know. They include things like opportunity cost, trade-offs, and supply and demand. All of this is vital for future voters to do their duty as good citizens in today’s America.
But some of the most important lessons voters need to do their civic duty and to understand why America is worth preserving are rarely, if ever, mentioned. They include explaining WHY…
- Cooperation, not oppression, is what drives economic activity in our free market economy.
- Cooperation depends upon, and contributes to, creativity, freedom, and honest competition.
- Market prices normally guide cooperation into patterns that best promote the common good.
- Market systems automatically produce prices that are free of shortages and surpluses across all markets at the same time.
- This naturally occurring list of market prices normally best promotes the common good.
A proper list would be longer. And each item on the list above is more complicated than it first appears. But that’s the point. Very few Americans understand why the list above matters if they are to vote wisely enough to preserve our way of life.
Today’s voters learn less about basic economics from personal experience than ever before, but to vote wisely, they need more economic understanding than ever before. The process that automatically cultivated economically competent citizens on the farm no longer exists, and nothing has replaced it. This is a recipe for disaster. That is why civics needs economics more than ever.
David C. Rose (@DCRose1776) is CEO of The American Civics Academy, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, author of The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior and Why Culture Matters Most, both from Oxford University Press.
