Did you take economics?

If you think free markets never work, you need to take an economics class. If you think free markets always work, you need to take another economics class. — Yoram Bauman, “The Cartoon Introduction to Economics”

A lot of the articles we have here deal with using economic incentives to deal with various market failures, like congestion, overuse of common space, or pollution.

For example, the argument for performance parking, congestion charging or HOT lanes is essentially an argument that allocating scarce resources using price is preferable to having congestion dictate who can use them, which is an argument you would get in a basic economics class.

Similarly, the imposition of taxes on economic bads like disposable plastic bags, carbon emissions, or sugary soda consumption could be argued from the standpoint that the socially optimal level of consumption is lower than the free market level, or equivalently that the marginal societal cost is higher than the personal cost. This is also an argument you’d hear in an introductory economics treatment.

So here’s a basic question: Were you required in either high school or college to take an economics course? How did that course affect your thinking? I took economics in high school, loved it, then I took two more courses in college. Now I keep up by reading papers in public finance and tax policy, as well as economics-related subjects in planning, urban development and environmental policy.