Originally Posted by
CitizenBBN
Lord I knew this would take a while. Going to have to break this up in parts for time reasons but I promise I'll keep going till I get to your condescending insults about those who live in red states. Can't wait for that one.
First things first, this comment:
If you have no formal economic education, you cannot pretend to understand how the political economy works. Reading articles from the Cato Institute doesn't make you a competent economist. Understanding how and why systems are connected and how they work to create a modern world economy does.
Given your other reference to the Cato institute and me below I think this is directed at me and not the royal "you". I've tried to avoid listing my specific qualifications in large part b/c I don't think they are significant to the discussion (ad hominem fallacy) and it sounds horribly egotistical even though I don't hold paper degrees in terribly high regard. To be clear I have a Bachelors and MBA from a top 20 university including dual masters concentrations in finance and operations and minors in American history and economics. Numerous grad level classes in both history and economics in addition to the undergraduate minor. So I have more than a "read Cato Institute" level of education in the subject.
That said, I love the notion that unless you've been taught something you can't know it. It's nonsense. I once had a discussion with the Dean about this subject, whether a college diploma meant you knew the subject or if it meant simply you'd taken X classes in the subject. He lamented that while it would be nice to be the former, the truth is all they can certify is the latter. That is to say they can prove they led you to the water, they can't prove you drank it in sufficient quantity to be hydrated.
Many of the great minds had no formal education in their field of excellence. Anecdotally we can list
Henry Knox, a book store owner who became one of the finest artillery and logistical officers in US history, Thomas Edison who had a whopping 3 months total of formal schooling his whole life, Benjamin Franklin who had 2 years of education before he was 10, THomas Paine, a staymaker who stopped school at age 13, this is a long list. Two of the great minds on which American political economy is based.
But let's continue on how education is so key to political economy understanding. 25 of the 55 Delegates did not have college degrees. 30 did and that's a super high number, but remember at that time education prior to college was often not structured but a classical version of "reading of the law",which is how one became an attorney. It was far from "formal" with grades and courses but was a matter of reading a lot. Being well read and able to read in Latin, Greek etc. was considered high education and in fact was the entrance requirement to schools like Harvard. There was no standard education at all.
So in essence what these men did was, to borrow your description, read a lot of Cato Institute papers. They educated themselves through reading, something you dismiss as a preposterous basis for claiming to know a subject. As if learning requires buildings and test scores.
Of course of those 25 we have George Washington, a man who understood this nation perhaps more than any other who had almost no "formal" education. Roger sherman had no formal education beyond grammar school. Alexander Hamilton dropped out of King's College to serve in the Revolutionary Army. Anyway, it's a long list of brilliant men.
Then there's the great industrialists. Andrew Carnegie had no education whatsoever and was a child laborer. John Astor didn't have any. Vanderbilt quit school at age 11. John Gates (who did graduate college but had no education in oil or business or certainly not barbed wire). Jay Gould didn't go to college. JP Morgan's education was formal but bizarre thanks to his father, which included a degree in art history and a near obsessive focus on languages. Certainly no education in the many fields which he would manage as a financier. Rockefeller's "higher education" was a 10 week course in bookkeeping, the equivalent of a vocational school today.
Then some more modern examples, from the computer revolution, America's 2nd great economic step forward after industrialization. Notice how I picked the key economic occurrences in America? Gates, who while educated still dropped out of Harvard without a degree and without much of any formal computer training, or Steve Jobs who dropped out of college after 6 months, Steve Wozniak who dropped out of Berkeley after a year to design the Apple I. The entire computer revolution was mostly driven by college dropouts who had no high and mighty formal education in computers or engineering at all. They were just smart.
So the nation was founded by men with no "formal education", was run by men with no formal education, and the great industrial revolution that made us the most powerful nation on earth was driven by men with no formal education, and the most technologically advanced economic event was driven by men with little or no "formal education".
I could do this all day, but suffice to say there is a huge body of anecdotal evidence to disprove your position. So much so in fact it's hard to maintain your hypothesis that if you "have no formal education in XXXXX you cannot pretend to understand how XXXXX works."
I have shown how specifically in the field of political economy some of the greatest thinkers on the subject had little or no formal education in it, as well as how many of those who most impacted the economic structure of modern America had little formal education.
What this shows is that your inverted hypothesis is false. It is true a formal education can show an understanding of a subject such as economics, but that affirmative cannot be reversed to then say formal education is what defines an understanding of economics and lack of such means you don't understand.
It has to do with the notion of learning versus the notion of sitting in class. You can sit in class and pass them till the end of days and still not have learned what someone with a thirst for learning could learn by spending time in the library without teachers and clocks and core course requirements. For literally 1,000s of years the greatest minds in history learned just that way.
So yes you can teach yourself political economy if you are an honest and dedicated student.
In fact I'll let you in on a secret -- those who have to be fed knowledge and cannot learn on their own and teach themselves as they need are the ones who are at a disadvantage in understanding. If you can go learn to weld b/c you need to weld something you are developing a mind that can grasp new concepts and apply critical thinking and reason and draw from other fields instead of just memorizing.
Formal school is largely memorizing. Doing that makes you no smarter than my computer, and with political economy in academia it's a severe case of garbage in garbage out.
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