In the Wall Street Journal, Samuel Abrams writes that, after nearly two decades of teaching American politics at Sarah Lawrence, his students are arriving on campus skeptical of free markets and openly drawn to democratic socialism. They have never been taught how a modern economy works. By his account, fewer than one in four college students ever take an economics course, and barely 3% of colleges require one. By the time most students encounter formal economic reasoning, their political and moral frameworks are already set.
Abrams is right, and the stakes are as high as he says. Downstream of economic ignorance lies economic catastrophe. When voters cannot distinguish a price from a moral claim, an incentive from an injustice, or a correlation from causation, the policies they support will be disconnected from the causes those policies are meant to address. You can argue about economic policy with real disagreements, but you have to grasp the basics first. Otherwise, the argument is theater.
Abrams frames the problem primarily as a curricular failure. Schools have stopped teaching economics, and the vacuum is filled by emotionally compelling slogans on social media. That is true, and that is why FEE’s invisible college of residential experiences matters. What his diagnosis leaves out is that the slogans wouldn’t be so compelling if they didn’t land on a mind already pre-wired to accept them.
This is what cognitive scientists now call “folk economics.” In a 2018 paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Pascal Boyer and Michael Bang Petersen argued that ordinary people hold a predictable set of intuitive beliefs about the economy, beliefs that systematically conflict with what economists know. They are the outputs of cognitive systems that evolved for small-scale, face-to-face exchange and that misfire when applied to anonymous, large-scale market economies.
The folk-economic catalogue will be recognizable to anyone who has spent an evening arguing about policy. There is the zero-sum assumption that if someone gains, someone else must have lost. There is the lump of labor, the intuition that there is a fixed amount of work to go around, so immigrants take our jobs and, increasingly, so does artificial intelligence. There is the just-price intuition, the sense that prices ought to track moral desert or input cost rather than market scarcity. There is profit suspicion, the feeling that the merchant who buys low and sells high is parasitic rather than productive. There is distributional framing, the sense that the interesting question is who gets the pie rather than what makes the pie grow. And there is coalitional reasoning, the instinct to treat foreigners, big firms, and investors as an out-group whose gains are our losses.
Each of these intuitions made sense in a Pleistocene band of fifty hunter-gatherers. None of them describes how a modern economy of eight billion people, trillions of transactions, and centuries of accumulated capital actually works. But they feel right because they are how the human mind defaults when presented with a complex system it was never designed to model.
Even in an educational system entirely free of ideological bias, even in a republic of perfectly fair-minded teachers, folk economics would still be there, generating the same misunderstandings in every new generation. The problem is not only in our institutions. It is also in our intuitions.
That is the bad news. Now for the good. In a commentary on the same Boyer and Petersen paper, the cognitive scientist Alan Jern made an important point, summarized by the title of his paper: “People are intuitive economists under the right conditions.” The same evolved exchange psychology that produces broken macroeconomic intuitions, Jern argues, produces better ones in specific commercial settings. There is, as Adam Smith noted 250 years ago, a “rudimentary exchange psychology” natural to humans.
When people think about direct exchanges with incentives, prices, and effort, they’re often quite good. People who run a lemonade stand grasp quickly that if they raise the price too high, fewer customers will buy. People who shop, negotiate, save, and trade in their own daily lives reason about prices, quality, and incentives with real competence. Humans are good at the small-scale economics their psychology was built for. What trips them up is the leap from the stall to the system.
The work of economic education is too often to start with the intuitions students already use in daily life, and to extend those intuitions, carefully and explicitly, to the larger scales where folk economics breaks down.
The lemonade stand really is a small labor market. If you have to pay your cousin more than her help is worth to you, you hire her for fewer hours, or you don’t hire her at all. That is the same logic as the effect of artificially raised wages on entry-level employment. The student who already understands the lemonade case has already done a good deal of the cognitive work. What she needs is the bridge.
That task is translating evolved intuitions into accurate models of complex systems. Markets are great systems of cooperation, price discovery, and entrepreneurship. Teaching economics requires surfacing the intuitions and extending them to the large-scale domain they were not built to reach.
Most people will never learn that in a classroom. They will encounter it, if they do at all, in fragments, carried into the public square by people who know how to translate the logic of the system into the language of everyday life. In every generation, only a handful of people manage to do this well. They do not appear spontaneously. They are trained, refined, and given the tools to carry these ideas outward.
That is the second half of the task. Teaching economics in a form that can travel. For decades, that has been a central focus of FEE: building the bridge, and then developing the multipliers who can extend it.
