Gregory Mankiw (see here) has a piece at the New York Times today that is worth a quick read. He teaches economics at Harvard and has been an adviser to Republican administrations, though he is clearly a "mainstream" economist. Several students walked out of his Economics 10 class in protest (supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement) and Professor Mankiw's piece is something of a response. Fundamentally, he applauds their passion but laments their ignorance of basic economics. His piece contains the following (cautionary) quote from John Maynard Keynes:
“The theory of economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.”
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