For 35 years, I taught economics at the college level. When teaching the theory of supply and demand, I would explain how a temporary shortage of goods would lead to higher prices in the short run. The resulting excess profits would draw new firms into the industry, eventually bringing prices back down to their long run equilibrium level. During that entire period of time, I don’t recall a single objection. No one raised their hand and told me, “That’s morally wrong, firms should not raise prices when there is a shortage of a good”.
But why not? It’s not as if students never disagreed with me on anything, I can recall a number of times when I was challenged on this or that issue.
Today, I wish that college students had challenged me much more frequently, on all sorts of points. It’s clear that they left college not really believing in the things that they were being taught. Most Americans oppose price gouging. Most Americans believe imports hurt our economy and exports help our economy. Nearly half of the public supports tariffs. On a wide range of issues, most people do not accept the “economic way of thinking.”
I believe students should challenge their professors far more often. Indeed I’d argue that if college has any purpose at all (which is becoming increasingly controversial in an age of AI), it is not in sitting at a desk taking notes, it is in challenging the professor. Why else would you wish to go to college? Anyone can sit at home and read a textbook.
Some might argue that this proposal is unrealistic. But I know it is not. Students did occasionally challenge me on one point or another. As an undergrad at Wisconsin, I occasionally challenged my professors (once successfully), and they were invariably quite respectful of my criticism.
It makes me sad to think of the millions of students who sit in college economics courses, not believing what they are being taught, but somehow feeling that they need to keep quiet. I can sort of understand how that might be the case in a sensitive area like identity politics—but supply and demand?
Today, I meet many middle-aged people with very uninformed views on issues like price gouging and international trade. If only they had challenged their professors in college, they might have avoided adopting erroneous views on these issues.
PS. Some college classes are too large to have Q&A. But the classes I taught were generally around 30 students.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas L Hutcheson
Jun 7 2025 at 12:46pm
True, but maybe they just compartmentalize, understand well enough how supply and demand work in normal times — when the signaling function of prices is in the forefront and just don’t carry that over to think about how it works in a emergency when the income transfer function is more salient.
Jose Pablo
Jun 7 2025 at 2:55pm
Nearly half of the public supports tariffs.
Certainly not the half that attended your classes.
David Seltzer
Jun 7 2025 at 7:02pm
Scott: I was an instructor at Loyola of Chicago. I would often challenge students to think about their comments. One of the more frequent comments I heard was, “buy American!” When I asked, in the Socratic manner, to defend their claim, some took umbrage. My teaching ratings from students was average to below average and class census for my courses declined. I was hired to teach Corp Fin, Investments and derivatives. Those courses required some quantitative skills on the part of students and an understanding of CAPM and MM Theory. About a third of the students taking those classes complained I demanded more than was necessary. One of the comments from a student wrestling with derivative pricing,, “This isn’t the University of Chicago, David.
David Henderson
Jun 7 2025 at 7:20pm
Good post.
About 20 years ago, my wife and I were shopping for a new table. At one local furniture store, the sales woman told me that a particular table was good because it was “made in America.”
I quite innocently asked why that made it better than foreign-made furniture. She reacted as if I had assaulted her first-born. I really wasn’t playing gotcha. I just wanted to know whether we should regard it as better-made than foreign furniture. I never did get an answer.
Matthias
Jun 7 2025 at 7:44pm
All else being equal, I’m 2005 I would have expected a table made in Switzerland to be of higher quality than a table made in PR China. (Or substitute any pair of countries you feel like where you can agree with the argument.)
I think that’s a reasonable statistical observation, and it would even be true to make for someone who happens to be born in Switzerland. I think it’s probably even true for German goods.
(See how almost anything made in Germany and exported abroad proudly announced it land of origin loudly and prominently on the box somewhere.)
Of course, that’s just your statistical prior from background rates. As soon as you can see the table in person, the evidence you can see and touch should outweigh these weak priors.
I don’t know if this is a good statistical bias to have for US produced goods? It might very well be. It’s at least plausible to me.
Of course, many people like being patriotically as an aesthetic preference in addition to any differences in quality. Looking at what’s actually happening in the markets, I suspect people are fairly rational about this preference: as far as I can tell ‘made in America’ can command a small price premium, but people eagerly buy foreign made products when the price/quality trade-off is even moderately better.
Just like people might have a favourite colour their car should come in, but most will happily pick another colour, if that’s cheaper.
No, the real problem is when people try to force their ‘buy American’ bias onto others (and to a greater extent than they themselves follow in their own buying decisions), especially when using the ballot box and thus laws and regulations.
john hare
Jun 7 2025 at 7:48pm
I remember hearing outrage about American auto workers driving Japanese cars a few decades back.
john hare
Jun 7 2025 at 7:44pm
I will buy American IF price and quality are roughly comparable. An extra few bucks for a tool from a quality manufacturer is normally money well spent. But I am seeing a lot of items with the price and quality are not comparable at all. $11.00 for a wire cutter at Harbor Freight or $50.00 for an almost identical item at Lowes. Hmmmmm
Matthias
Jun 7 2025 at 7:49pm
When studying mathematics at uni we often challenged the professors, and because of the nature of math, even a lowly first year undergrad could do that on an even footing.
Of course, most of the time the points raised were quickly resolved to mutually satisfaction and we all learned something. This is math after all, were right and wrong are comparatively easy to determine.
We had one particularly interactive professor: he would prepare all the hard parts of the lecture very thoroughly, but often leave gaps in the easy parts, trusting that he could just fill them in on the fly.
Most of the time that worked and you didn’t notice, but every so often he’d stumble on the blackboard not being able to remember a particular step in a proof.
Well, fortunately those were mostly the easier parts, so they served as good exercises for students to figure out how to complete the proof and make suggestions.
BS
Jun 8 2025 at 11:48am
As you wrote, math has right and wrong (correct and incorrect). I remember those (only very occasional) instances. There was always a spirit of cooperation between class and instructor to sort out what was on the blackboard. But in any field in which political priors can be brought to the table…
Rajat
Jun 7 2025 at 9:18pm
I can think of a few responses:
Students normally take subjects and classes on their terms. Economics isn’t about fairness or morality, so why take economics if you’re going to go to class and complain about what the subject says? Those sort of people might go to one or two classes in first year and walk out, thinking that economics is just about defending capitalism. I do vaguely recall asking my second year micro professor about the supposed ‘value-free’ precept of pareto efficiency. It was a one-on-one question at the end of the first class of the semester, and I said something like, “how is no value judgement involved if one person gets more of the value (in an exchange) and the other person gets less?” and he replied, “less of what?” I couldn’t really understand what he meant at the time, but had no follow-up and so went away. Later, he took me for other classes and I learnt a heap from him. We even became friends outside of university. But there is no way I would have had the guts to ask my question in front of 200 other students, and nor did anyone else. Later in the semester, people did ask questions, but they were on the technical aspects of graphs, not on the fundamentals.
Bryan Caplan would say that even ‘good’ students – those who perform well-enough on tests and exams – don’t tend to understand the material particularly well, and one actually needs to understand the subject matter quite well to ask decent questions. After a year or 10, their understanding is close to nil. Nowadays I work as an in-house economist at a regulatory agency where many of the ‘line area’ staff have undergraduate degrees in economics. But do they have any useful recollection of the concepts? No way, they are far more receptive to the incentives within the agency to pursue or not pursue various lines of investigation.
Bryan would of course also say that most of the reason students take classes and study is for signalling purposes. So why waste time questioning when the main thing is to score well on assessments? Accept paradigms and work within them – that helps not only with getting a decent score, but with engendering the conformity that one needs to exhibit to get a good job.
Even in a small country (Australia), understanding comparative advantage and the benefits of free trade at an intuitive – as opposed to at a mathematical/numerical – level is quite difficult. Yet we still have institutions like the ‘Anti-Dumping Commission’, which exists largely to impose punitive tariffs on imports of Asian steel. It would be even harder understanding those concepts within a large country with some ability to affect relative prices. The very human intuition of tit-for-tat for things like tariffs would be extremely hard to suppress.
Scott Sumner
Jun 8 2025 at 2:51am
“why take economics if you’re going to go to class and complain about what the subject says?”
I’m not sure if “complain” is the right term for what I’m suggesting. A student might ask whether markets are a good idea, given that prices rise sharply when there are shortages. Or they might ask if it would be better if a law prevented sharp price spikes.
Craig
Jun 7 2025 at 10:46pm
“it is in challenging the professor”
Can be socially difficult for an 18-22 year old to do with a college professor.
Fazal Majid
Jun 8 2025 at 3:50am
There is clearly self-selection at work in students who decide to pursue an Economics major.
The better approach is to show students price controls lead to rationing, whether organized or chaotic, and how different ethical preferences lead to different policy design, e.g. how should rationing be organized. A good real-world example is the triage and priority rules for organ transplant recipients.
Kevin Corcoran
Jun 8 2025 at 8:06am
Bryan Caplan touches on this in his book about education with an answer some might find cynical but certainly fits the observations – most students “wish to go to college” so they can gain a credential, and not because they want to gain knowledge they couldn’t have gotten from just reading a textbook by challenging their professors, etc. Hence, students will approach an economics class with a mindset that’s less “how can I better understand this material” and more “what words and phrases do I need to memorize long enough to reproduce on an exam to get a good grade, and then immediately forget as soon as the course ends?” The latter mindset, again, may seem cynical, but it has pretty robust predictive power for that actual behavior of the vast majority of college students, including the behavior you observe here.
Jose Pablo
Jun 9 2025 at 1:58pm
The latter mindset, again, may seem cynical,
why “cynical”? unless “cynical” here intends to mean “rational”.
Given the existing set of incentives, that’s the rational behavior to be expected from students. Akin to a “Student Choice Theory”.
And that’s why, as you mentioned, this “model” of the student mind has an excellent behavior-predicting power.
Jon Murphy
Jun 8 2025 at 10:07am
I’ve had a lot of success by encouraging students to ask challenging questions. Often, they think they only need to ask questions if they do not understand the material. But I tell them three things:
First: economics is about scarcity
Second: Scarcity implies choices
Third: Since time is scarce, I have had to make choices about what to present
Thus, there is a ton of material out there I do not cover and I encourage them to ask about it or to ask why, say, Uncle Bill said X at Thanksgiving while I am saying Y. I challenge them to challenge me when economics leads us to conclusions that are uncomfortable (like putting a price on a human life).
Last semester, I even gave students a small, not not-negligible amount of extra credit if they could get me to say “I don’t know.” I called them “Stump the Chump” points. That lit the fire under a few butts to go exploring.
My long-winded point is that we, as educators, are facing a prevailing attitude by most other educators and the public where all knowledge is the exclusive domain of a few experts. Those experts are not to be questioned. Schooling is merely the place to learn what those experts have to say (as opposed to YouTube or some other heathen source). Furthermore, the diciplines are distinct and never to be mixed. Thus, it is our job to debase students of these notions and get them to understand that questioning is not a bad thing.
David Seltzer
Jun 8 2025 at 11:35am
Jon, I think students taking your classes are quite fortunate. Many are curious and skeptical. My guess, from our conversations, you mentor them well.
Scott Sumner
Jun 8 2025 at 12:08pm
That sounds like a really good approach to teaching.
Jon Murphy
Jun 8 2025 at 7:50pm
Thank you. David Henderson actually gave me the initial idea (to talk about teaching in terms of scarcity and choices of material). I just elaborated on it
David Henderson
Jun 8 2025 at 8:47pm
Thanks for the shoutout, Jon.
Dylan
Jun 8 2025 at 10:48am
As someone who did ask a fair number of questions in class, I can say one of the things that holds a lot of people back is not anything to do with the teacher, but fear of the disapproval of their classmates. Personally, I always thought that classes with discussion in them were a lot more interesting than those without, but I’ve realized later that was not close to a unanimous position. A lot of times the people who ask questions are seen as disruptive and there’s a feeling that questions that are asked take away from the material that the teacher wants to cover, meaning more homework if you don’t cover it in class. Subtle disapproval from your peers can stifle a lot of curiosity!
Scott Sumner
Jun 8 2025 at 12:09pm
Good point.
Janet Bufton
Jun 8 2025 at 10:56am
This seems to me like the inevitable outcome of mandatory economics classes. We can’t make it mandatory that people commit themselves to deeply understanding something, let alone mandate how information shapes their beliefs. All that can be mandated is that students take a class and pass tests. Why argue, if that’s the goal?
David Seltzer
Jun 8 2025 at 11:44am
Janet: If a student chooses to earn a degree in history, part of the degree requirements are courses in economics. They choose mandatory courses in econ as well. I suspect there is significant subjective preference in their choices. One just wants to economize…get the best grade for the least study, whereas another will spend hours studying as much material as possible.
steve
Jun 8 2025 at 11:47am
I went to school a long time ago but my perspective is a bit different. In my high school questioning or arguing with a teacher could get you a detention or physical punishment, both from the vice principal and when you got home. I did 4 years in the military and worked for a year before i went to college which I think gave me some confidence and some perspective. My impression is that most kids just didnt have the confidence to argue with or question a teacher. That was mixed with kids who had been taught like me that you dont question the teacher and the usual mix of kids who didnt really give a sh&t.
Talking it over with the wife, we both took mostly science and some math courses. It wasn’t very likely that anyone in the class would know more than the teacher AND have the confidence to argue. I also dont remember many teachers encouraging students to ask questions or challenge them. I remember one very well who did that (philosophy) and that was the most active participation, including arguing, I ever saw in a classroom.
Times have changed but having taught medical students for 30 years I still think confident is a major issue along with a fear that they wont get a good grade if they disagree with the one teaching plus, certainly in the ICU, just not enough knowledge to challenge. There remains the group who dont really give a sh&t that seems to be universal in not only education but every job. Not sure that’s really higher in education.
Steve
Scott Sumner
Jun 8 2025 at 12:11pm
To be clear, students did occasionally challenge me, just not on supply and demand or tariffs.
David Seltzer
Jun 8 2025 at 12:13pm
Steve, I suspect we are close in age. My experience in high school was similar to yours. I wonder if the 80-20 rule applies. To wit. 80% will do just enough and 20% will crush it with effort and ability.
MarkW
Jun 9 2025 at 6:40am
Why else would you wish to go to college? Anyone can sit at home and read a textbook.
People go to college to get a degree and then a good job. Nobody is granted a degree for sitting at home, reading a textbook and passing a test. Does challenging professors make the path to the degree and the job easier or harder? What are the incentives? Way back when I was an undergrad, the consensus was that professors graded work more favorably when it agreed with the professors’ priors than when it didn’t. Was everybody wrong about that?