Some jobs link compensation directly to work effort. Piece-work systems, whichpay workers for each bit of work they perform, are one example of this approach; soare contract workers (hired to perform a specific task, and paid only when that taskis completed). This strategy has limited application, however: usually employerswant their workers to be more flexible, performing a range of hard-to-specifyfunctions (rather than simply churning out a certain number of widgets per hour).

Conventionally trained economists take it as a proven fact that free tradebetween two countries always makes both sides better off.

So you don’t need to be an economist to know a lot about economics.

Never trust an economist with your job

Even more strikingis the fact that almost everything you consume is somethingyou could not possibly produce.

Look at the list of ingredients in the cereal. Those ingre-dients had to be refined and shipped to the cereal manu-facturer. Again, those processes required many machines,which in turn had to be manufactured. The cereal grainsand other ingredients had to be grown, harvested, and pro-cessed. Machines were involved in those processes, and thosemachines had to be manufactured.

I have come to believe in the wake of the MIT trans-formation, which began soon after World War II, that econo-mists have lost the art of critical thinking.