South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Brad DeLong asks what went wrong with economic education in America.

Rather, the educational problems appear to be concentrated at the graduate level. They ramify: we appear to have produced a professoriate–trained in graduate school–that appears remarkably ill-equipped to survive in the wild, and remarkably ignorant of the utilitarian and emergent foundations of the discipline. Judgments of economic welfare rest on utilitarian foundations. Equilibrium methods rest on equilibrium as an emergent property growing out of individual disequilibrium transactions. Yet a lot of the time professors get these wrong–an elementary mistake of the same order as solving the first-order maximization conditions without bothering to check the second-order conditions.
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And the question is why. And the question is how to fix it.