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Comment by gregimba | Hacker News Reader

I noticed this too, a bit bizarre and out of place

Yes truly. Especially since most classically trained economists don't tend to believe that income inequality actually matters, and those that do, tend to argue it only matters because people think it matters.

My bigger concern about the first chapter is that income inequality is actually a very advanced topic. That requires a lot of technical analysis. At the very least you have to discuss the concept of power laws which income distributions fit quite well, and is exactly what I would expect without direct government intervention. Making it the first section of the first chapter, really trivializes the topic.

Yeah, I guess the Head of the Department of Economics at Oxford must have missed out on that classical training somehow.

Quite a few classically trained economists then go on to become neo-Ricardians or Marxists, as the content of classical political economy is often ignored or dismissed out of hand - but the idea of the classically trained economist as someone who ironically dosen't have much training in classical economics seems too real to me.

No true Scotsman fallacy at work here.

1) There's no economic consensus that inequality doesn't matter.

2) I'm sure plenty of people who do not understand power laws are able to comprehend economic concepts around inequality.

> 2) I'm sure plenty of people who do not understand power laws are able to comprehend economic concepts around inequality.

Well, sure. But wherever a power distribution pops up, there's a chance that a complex system (small-worlds network) might be hiding in the gutty works. Which means that obvious "fixes", which might occur to the novice taking the class, to even out the distribution, could well have unpleasant side-effects. Up to and including complete/utter collapse.

Now - if the final chapter were something like: "Now, here's why everything we came up with in Chapter 1 was wrong.", that might be an interesting bookend.

Classically trained economists are also more likely to be:

* Less charitable

* More likely to engage in deception for personal gain

* More likely to rate greed as 'moral'

* Will keep an average of 13% more money for themselves in a game of 'fairness'* *

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201310/do...

* * Students were given $10 and had to make a proposal about how to divide the money with a peer. If the peer accepted, they had a deal, but if the peer declined, both sides got nothing.

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