Learning Economics: Breaking Through Plateaus and Confusion

As a beginner it is perfectly normal to feel stuck, frustrated, and confused at times because economics is a rigorous science that can’t be learned overnight. In fact, you can read Man, Economy, and State by Murray Rothbard cover-to-cover and still feel unconfident. Fortunately, with time, effort, and guidance, any student can learn economics and the wonders it holds. Because of trade-offs, differences in people’s learning ability, and sheer volume of material, there is no single book, article, or lecture that can teach everything to everybody. Moreover, the same person may require different concepts to be delivered by varying approaches. For example, they may grasp opportunity cost by reading but require a visual aid for the Law of Association. Thus, it would be wise to survey multiple authors and approaches of the same concept. This is a part of marinating in the sauce, which will help you break through plateaus and frustrations during the learning process.  

Marinating in the sauce is studiously engaging all the books, articles, videos, book clubs, classes, discussions, and debates available to you over a long period of time, while allowing each interaction to influence the development of your knowledge. For example, you may read Mises’ article Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth and watch Joseph T. Salerno’s lecture Calculation and Socialism and still not grasp what the economic calculation problem (ECP) is and its importance. Afterwards. You may read Mises’ Human Action and Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State. Although, now despite knowing the ECP concerns the problem of imputing the value of consumer goods to non-specific capital goods; you are still fuzzy on the details and ramifications for the science and public policy. Sticking with it, you read Salerno’s Mises and Hayek Dehomgenized and learn about social appraisement and entrepreneurship being vital to solving the ECP. Book by book, video by video, the picture becomes clearer. Until one day, you lazily decide to watch a video, which makes a passing remark about economic calculation and something clicks. The knowledge and its significance hit you and you see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. But understand, that knowledge did not come by way of accident. It came by putting in the necessary ground work. That is marinating in the sauce. It’s about working the material over and over again and putting in the repetitions until it works.

Not marinating in the sauce forgoes necessary context and perspective to reach a deeper understanding and causes confusion. For instance, there are many cases when one scholar builds a strawman to attack simply because they only read a journal article or two on a concept. They have a passing familiarity as opposed to intimate knowledge. Even if the scholar is only a few degrees off, this can have major intergenerational effects because of the cantillon effects of knowledge. A perfect example of such effects would be Keynes’ General Theory and his attack on Say’s Law of Markets. Keynes did not understand the classical economist’s insight and incorrectly interpreted Say’s argument and radically changed the economics profession as a result.

Journal articles and individual studies are particularly vulnerable to misunderstanding because they can be consumed al a carte. Because all the context and perspective in which a single article is created and responding to can be ignored or lost on the reader. For example, imagine an article being a contribution to a conversation that has lasted decades. At the time the article is published, many confusions and definitions have, in a sense, been ironed out, or at least seriously considered and accounted for among its participants. Moreover, each sentence in the article is deliberate and their meaning is contingent on the context and perspectives nurtured by the broader conversation. Meaning which is lost, when a dabbler of that topic, plucks the article al la carte and consumes it. The meaning is lost because the dabbler is unaware of the context and perspective, in which the article is written. The only way to avoid such confusion is to marinate and learn all the relevant conversations leading up to the article of interest. Doesn’t that take a great deal of time, effort, and investment to learn—simply to read an article? Yes. Yes, it does. But that’s the road one must travel when taking seriously an adventure through the world of ideas. This is the task of the student.   

Another important factor in marinating in the sauce is trusting the authors who have come before you. Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe, Salerno, Hulsmann, Herbner, and all the rest, have dedicated their lives to the subject and have figured out what is true and what is false. Meaning, the material has been vetted through many generations ensuring that you are not wasting your time and can focus on learning. Also, this is not to say, to approach the material uncritically. That is part of the learning process as well. After all, you should always “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Because if you don’t understand something you can’t critique it. Additionally, being ultimately skeptic will only stunt your growth. Just know it takes time for the meaning and significance of the concepts to hit you with clarity. And its the easiness of acquiring definitions and difficulty in obtaining knowledge that makes economics a dangerous subject.