I teach an undergraduate course at university where a large chunk of students are pursuing a bachelor's degree in economics. I am not an economist myself (my course covers contents typically associated to engineering) although I did take a few courses on micro and macroeconomics at university back in the time, and have done my fair share of research while falling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. I would say I'm relatively familiar with the works of Keynes and Hayek specially, although I have also read some from Mises, Friedman and Rothbart. In any case, I don't consider myself an expert by any means. Simply someone with an interest.
On the last day of the course I teach, I like to invite the students to have a drink in the bar next to the faculty building as a final farewell. Last time I did this, I decided that I would take the chance of having around 15 students who where just about to finish their economics degrees to test a bit their thoughts on the Austrian school and some of the topics that bitcoiners like to deal with (inflation, gold standard, monetary policy, banking regulations, etc).
After a few questions I was terribly disappointed. These poor men and women were stuck in a terrible mix of Keynesians ideas or simply not knowing stuff at all. I threw questions at them such as:
- Why is inflation good? Why target 2% and not 20%? Why is deflation bad?
- Why should the government handle monetary policy? How were things before that was the case?
- Why is gold valuable?
- How does a negative interest rate sustained for more than 10 years make sense?
My answers were mostly met with confused eyes, silence and some rather poor Keynesian ideas. Their arguments didn't offer much resistance to some basic and simple challenging, and after a few comeback attempts, the group eventually settled for the fact that they didn't really have clear answers for the questions they were facing. I decided to leave it there and switch to more cheerful and menial conversations because I didn't want to ruin their end of course drinks.
My mood took another step down when a bit later, one of the students shared a brief confession with me. In rough lines, he basically told me that he felt he was finishing his degree without really understanding that much. That they had spent countless hours on these abstract and obscure mathematical models for both micro and macroeconomics, but that he couldn't really tie all of his knowledge together into something that felt intuitive, solid and clear (it reminded me of some of the criticisms of Hayek, Mises and other Austrian's towards Keynes works in the 1920s that regarded his works as obscure, complicated and incoherent). He concluded by telling me that he was planning on pursuing a professional carreer in Data Science or Software Engineering, and that he felt that his degree in economics had been a pretty hefty waste of time.
At that point I felt quite sad, realising how the university was wasting these brilliant minds away, and how some of them intuitively knew about it although they couldn't really pinpoint what was wrong. I was ready to head home feeling blue when the most brilliant student I had in that course edition walked to me and resumed my question about why deflation is bad. He told me: "I think that [the idea that deflation is bad for the economy] is a big crock of shit. My Public Economics teacher told me that deflation starts a spiral where people buy nothing because they would rather wait to have more purchasing power in the future. But that's bullshit. I won't stop buying condoms today so that I can buy more next year".
Even though I still had a bitter taste when driving home, knowing that there is always some punk willing to challenge the dogma put a smile on face.