NSHE Textbooks Advocate Socialism

Originally posted in a LVRJ Forum

Academic texts are usually writen by BIG government advocates -- especially in the social "sciences". For an illustration of what's wrong with college textbooks, here is Rothbard on Samuelson's Economics:

It is no accident that, in every succeeding edition, the colors get gaudier and, more important, the size gets bigger (868 pages in the eighth edition, 917 in the new ninth). For what the hapless undergraduate discovers in Samuelson and his flock of imitators is a vast potpourri (or kitchen midden, depending on one's point of view) of bits and smidgens of technique and of data, none of them integrated into any sort of digestible or comprehensible whole. Samuelson concluded the preface to his new edition by asserting, in his typically breezy style: "My envy goes out to the reader, setting out to explore the exciting world of economics for the first time. . . may I only say, bon appetit!" (p. xii). In contrast, my heart goes out to the poor bewildered undergraduate, confronted with this gigantic stew, ranging from opinionated wisecracks to the Giffen Paradox to marginal productivity analysis to Harrod-Domar-Modigliani growth models to notes on economists past and present to the latest ultrasophistication in reswitching analysis. What in the world can he make of all this? It is no wonder that economics is almost universally the most disliked subject in the college curriculum. ..

Samuelson and most other texts get larger each edition because they are written as compendia of received economic opinion at the time of publication. And so very little gets dropped; as new economic problems are faced in the society, more chapters—more problem areas—get added [permanently] to the [stew], whether the new fashion be underdevelopment or unemployment or inflation or the New Left or ecology.