In 1990, Mark Skousen's book appeared: Economics on Trial. It had a great subtitle: Lies, Myths, and Realities.
In the book, he took the 10 best-selling college-level economics textbooks, and he analyzed them in terms of their commitment to free market principles. This was a major task. To write the book, he had to read something in the range of 12,000 pages. After reading a couple of them, the rest of them would not have been formidable. You get used to what's the same in all the textbooks. What you're looking for then is what distinguishes a textbook. What makes it different? What makes it better? What makes it worse?
In his book, he made it clear that the prevailing level of economic analysis in the textbooks was not up to the standards of Austrian economic analysis. They all fell short. Of course, he knew that before he started, and I suspect that most of his readers knew that. But it's one thing to know it; it's another thing to prove it. His book proved it.
The book did not sell well. That's the problem with a book like this. Nobody is interested in textbooks except college students, and college students don't buy books that analyze textbooks. There are no such books. They read their textbooks. They memorize as much as possible. They regurgitate it on the exams, and then they throw the textbook away or sell it for a couple of dollars.
The general rule is this: nobody ever goes back to a lower-division college textbook to read it again. It wasn't worth reading in the first place, and surely is not worth reading again.
Textbooks offer a tremendous advantage to anybody who is trying to study the basics of any academic discipline. Textbooks are written for committees. Committees in departments have to approve a particular textbook. This means that the publisher has to make certain that a textbook is going to get by departmental screening committees. Therefore, textbook publishers turn over the manuscripts to committees that specialize in getting textbooks past committees. This makes economic sense. It also leads to deadly dull writing. It leads to all kinds of intellectual compromise. It leads, in short, to a kind of intellectual mush. The textbooks sell from $150 to $250 apiece, and they are incredibly profitable if they catch on. Of course, only a handful of them ever catch on.
There is nothing deader than an old economics textbook. Nobody pays any attention to it. Nobody should pay any attention to it. Nobody except an historian of academia.
THE MEMORY HOLE
Old textbooks are not kept by libraries. If you want to study the history of what the public schools have taught, or what universities have taught, or what communities of scholars generally believed, you have to have access to the older textbooks. You have to compare older textbooks with newer textbooks. But in my entire academic career, I have only seen one book that did this: Frances Fitzgerald's book, America Revised. It is a history of public school textbooks on American history. Nobody else had attempted this before. It was not easy to do, since research libraries don't keep old textbooks, especially high school textbooks. The public schools don't keep them, either. They are tossed out when they are too old to use any more.
Let me give you a comparable example. To understand American culture from the mid-1930s until today, you have to have access to one magazine: Reader's Digest. It is the greatest single source of what the common American believes in any period of time. Nothing else comes close. Yet no libraries, including research libraries, keep old copies of Reader's Digest, and you can't get them online as part of a cloud-based subscription service. In other words, the most important single primary source document in 20th-century American culture, which is itself a compilation of primary source documents, is not available to somebody studying the history of American culture. This is really self-defeating. It's not just self-defeating; it's nuts. The key resource that you have to have to make the study accurate was never considered important enough by librarians to keep on the shelves. The second most important document is The Saturday Evening Post. You can't find that on the shelves, either.
To do a study of what American academia has taught students over the past century, you would have to study the textbooks. There are hundreds of them. What academia believes and has believed is a crucial topic. Textbooks are where the rubber meets the road. Textbooks are where the academic establishment presents the latest and greatest fads. Textbooks are the tools by which academia screens future members of the guilds. Textbooks, in short, are crucial for studying the opinions of the opinion makers in American academic life. But because textbooks are so difficult to locate, and because they are so large, and because reading two or three of them in a particular field in one decade, followed by reading two or three more in the next decade, is such excruciatingly boring work, that nobody ever attempts it.
HELPING STUDENTS
Students go through the collegiate meat grinder today. Conservative parents make the foolish decision to send their children off to college, rather than keeping them home, having them take CLEP exams, and having them get their degrees by distance learning, for about $15,000, total. Parents prefer to send their kids off to college for $50,000-$250,000, where the children are indoctrinated by the mortal ideological enemies of the parents. They have been doing this since the times of ancient Greece. If you have any doubts about this, read Aristophanes' play, The Clouds. It is about a father who unwisely sends his son to be trained at Socrates' academy, and it ruins the kid.
Some conservative organization or libertarian organization should hire conservative or libertarian college professors every year to produce analyses of the three major textbooks in the particular scholar's discipline. These are textbooks that are given to lower-division students: freshmen and sophomores. The scholars should analyze each of these textbooks on a systematic basis, showing how the content of these textbooks undermines truth, justice, and the American way.
The organization should put up a website that offers these lengthy analyses, discipline by discipline. Access to the site should be free. Any college student who is taking a lower-division class in one of the social sciences or humanities ought to be able to go to this site and find a comprehensive analysis refuting the indoctrination that he is getting in his textbook. Skousen analyzed 10 textbooks. This was overkill. What is needed is an analysis of the three leading textbooks in terms of sales. Also, what is needed is an analysis of the textbooks that are assigned at the Ivy League schools, Stanford, and Berkeley. The reason here is obvious: we need to see what the best universities regard as the latest and greatest.
There should be a systematic analysis of each of the textbooks, one by one. There should also be an overall assessment of the political and economic slant of the textbooks as a whole. A student should be able to go to this site and get a detailed analysis of the nonsense that he is getting in the textbook, chapter by chapter. He should also be able to read materials, or listen to some lectures, on how the academic discipline as a whole is trying to convince him of nonsense.
This should be updated every time one of the textbooks is replaced by a new edition. The old analysis should be kept in the archives, but there should be a fresh analysis of anything that is new and improved, meaning new and much worse.
The nonprofit conservative or libertarian organization could hire this to be done over summers. It could pay a scholar $2,500 per textbook. The scholar should easily be able to do one textbook a month. Every summer, he does it again: new editions. The organization could then have other conservative scholars evaluate the work of whoever has been posting the materials, and get some feedback.
This would not take much money. It would be a tremendous service. Nothing like this has ever been done. Because of the World Wide Web, it would be easy to do. It would inflict a lot of damage on the academic establishment.
No scholar would advance his career by doing such a project. So, the obvious people to recruit would be teachers of undergraduate courses on campuses that do not have the requirement to publish or perish. These campuses tend to pay lower wages, which means there will be hungry scholars looking for summer employment.
Any outfit to put up a site like this would be making a major contribution in terms of helping students get through the system with their minds intact. But it would do more than this. There would now be a permanent record online of the prevailing opinions of the academic establishment. From this point on, scholars could gain access to information on the whole sweep of modern academia, revised edition by revised edition. This would be a tremendous benefit to future historians. They could find out what the prevailing opinion was in any academic discipline, in any decade. It is virtually impossible to do this today.
This would be cheap to do. It would be easy to do. It is an obvious thing to do. I hope some organization does it.
I will donate $2,500 to any outfit that begins such a project, once the website is online.
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