Conservative Cabal

Am in the midst of reading Tim Harford’s “The Undercover Economist” (Little, Brown, 2006), and was struck by my extreme lack of knowledge in this area. The author, a columnist for the Financial Times and occasional Slate.com contributor, breaks down the beautiful science to make it accessible and fascinating for dunderheads like me. Gem chapters include “Beer, Chips and Globalization.”

The product of a fairly good secondary school and university, I was never required to take an economics course. My post-college education primarily consists of books such as “Freakonomics” and the movie “A Dangerous Mind.”

Barack Obama believes that requiring students to take a second language is the answer to making America more aware of the world and make U.S. tourists more palatable to the Frogs, but wouldn’t making economics a required course in high school be more advantageous?

It would be easy enough to get rid of filler classes such as Yearbook and Basketweaving and teach students how to actually think. A semester devoted to why poor countries are poor may do the little pampered darlings a world of good and cut down on traffic stoppages due to student-filled protests. See, everyone wins.