here<\/a>)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mint.10yearsafterthecrash.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/confessions-2.png\")
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The point is made: people consume education for their own selfish gain, regardless of the external benefits it may have on society.\u00a0 And, with this, I have conquered the hardest part of teaching merit goods.\u00a0 The rest is easy: draw the standard sort of economics diagram of demand and supply; in this case the private demand line is less than the public demand line; then shade in the resulting little welfare loss triangle because supply is driven by private benefit not social benefit and hence we have under supply. Then we brainstorm some ideas on the costs and benefits of possible solutions.\u00a0 Merit goods are done.\u00a0 My lesson is over.<\/p>\n
\u200b<\/span>In fact, there isn\u2019t really any need to discuss education again for the remainder of the two-year course \u2013 only perhaps as an example of a supply-side policy that can shift long-term supply to the right.<\/p>\nBut that neglects the fact that education, and merit goods in general, offer much more than a welfare loss triangle.\u00a0 They are a great jump off point for pluralist economic discussions for one thing. So I could have asked: what would a Marxist economist think?\u00a0 Perhaps then my students would have come up with the redistributive theory of merit goods; that people tolerate the inequalities of wealth generated by capitalism when there are some elements of redistribution.\u00a0 The more cynical of them might have even argued that the government simply provides merit goods to pacify the workers\u2019 revolution. That would have been an exciting context in which to consider Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s electoral pledge to scrap tuition fees and increase income taxes.<\/p>\n
\u200b<\/span>In truth, Marx doesn\u2019t get much of a look in with A-Level economics these days.\u00a0 In fact, only one exam board (Edexcel) refers to him at all \u2013 although, in truth, the reference is almost throwaway in nature (see box).\u00a0 It merely forces students to conclude that Marx is the only economist that should be associated with command economies. There is no reason to understand why or what his arguments were.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mint.10yearsafterthecrash.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/confessions-3.png\")
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Had I taken a behavioural economist\u2019s tack I could have focused on the question of whether people can truly make wise choices in their own interests.\u00a0 A nice activity might have been to ask students to create their own choice interventions \u2013 or \u201cnudges\u201d \u2013 to steer people towards decisions that better promote their interests.\u00a0\u200b<\/span><\/p>\nTaking a feminist economist\u2019s view, by contrast, might have led to a look at the impact of the recent austerity cuts on the provision of merit good with the observation that reduction in the positive spill over would be felt most acutely in the household economy. And, since much of what takes place inside the household is invisible to market-based indicators such as output level, price levels and public expenditure (things that every A-level student has to study) there is no practical means for measuring those effects. What a great introduction to the limits of current economic thinking that would have been.<\/p>\n
Alas, I did not take any of those avenues. None of those discussions are on the \u201cspec\u201d and, as a time-constrained teacher, I let the opportunity for a more expansive view of economics pass this time.\u00a0 My students can identify a welfare loss triangle but sadly their understanding of merit goods has been formed under a narrow classical paradigm of self-interested agents and marginal social benefits and marginal private benefits.\u00a0 I accept that my end-of-term report should probably read: must do better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nigella Vigoroso-Heck confesses putting failure into teaching market failure and laments the scope available in A level economics courses. Market failure is one of my favourite concepts to teach. Nestled … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":402,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,103,45],"tags":[110,132,133,166,162],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-education","category-uk-ireland","tag-confessions","tag-economics","tag-education","tag-mar-2018","tag-nigella-vigoroso-heck"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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