Readers React: The value of economics

Miles Corwin provides a valuable reminder that economics does not address people’s ultimate ends. (“How an economics professor taught me a life-changing lesson -- in literature,” Opinion, May 17)

However, economics does address the means that advance our ability to progress toward them, whatever they are. It demonstrates that economic freedom offers individuals the most effective means of overcoming scarcity’s impediments, expanding their ability to grow in moral, ethical, humanitarian and creative ways.

Economics and literature are alternatives when it comes to individual specialization, as in Corwin’s illustration, but good economics is a complement to human advance in virtually all areas, while politically driven bad economics is an impediment to it.

Gary M. Galles

Malibu

The writer is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University.

Corwin’s community college economics professor, David Kaplan, who spotted Corwin reading in his class and spoke reverently of studying literature instead of scolding him, knew the difference between education and training. Today, we have trained professionals in many fields but few people who are genuinely educated.

Thomas Jefferson held that the ultimate purpose of schooling was to impart the broad base of knowledge required for our republic to function properly. Today, many schools instead produce people who can contribute to that god called The Economy.

The chief tool we use in business and science to understand the present and to make forecasts is regression analysis, which is based on knowledge of the past. But history isn’t emphasized much in school these days.

History books and the works of literature reveal to us the intricacies of human nature; they hold the key to comprehending today’s complexities and to peering into the future.

John F. Rossmann

Tustin