A Platonic Dialogue on the Failure of Economics Education - Grasping Reality with Both Hands

A Platonic Dialogue on the Failure of Economics Education - Grasping Reality with Both Hands:

...only 4% of the American people and 10% of Washington elites believe that our current macroeconomic disorder of high unemployment is a serious but curable disease of the industrial market economy--a disease curable by strategic interventions to rebalance financial markets through appropriate monetary, fiscal, and banking policies. 96% of the American people and 90% of elites believe, by contrast, that our current macroeconomic disorder and high unemployment is--in some sense they cannot fully explain--just punishment for our sins against financial prudence, that we must take our just punishment like manly men, and that we must not attempt to evade punishment through financial trickery. Think of David Brooks: that argument, on that level, with that degree of background knowledge, and that degree of certainty....
If there are two lessons we want people to remember from the 'Intro Macro' part of Econ 1, they are (a) that government can stabilize the price level and prevent inflation by stabilizing the money stock over the long-term, and (b) that downturns--episodes of high unemployment--are usually cases of a disease that can be cured by the right strategic interventions in financial markets. Keynesians and monetarists, classicals and neoclassicals, credit-channelers and post-Keynesians--this is what we all believe: that while Say's Law can be broken, the only thing that can break it is some imbalance in financial markets that produces excess demand for some category of financial assets, and that a competent and nimble technocratic government can conduct strategic interventions that make Say's Law--even though false in theory--roughly true in practice. That is what we all think...