This would be a little easier to take seriously if he hadn't made the big point about being forced to read the Venerable Bede in Middle English, a language that didn't exist until 300 years after Bede left us. Bede wrote in Latin, and there exists a translation into contemporary Old English, better called Anglo-Saxon. I've read just enough of the Anglo-Saxon Bede to have found it very beautiful.

I'm enormously curious where in this world of ours anyone is "forced" to read it, in whatever putative original language.

Gene O'Grady

RE: what they "should" teach...

These are the kinds of things newly commissioned US military chaplains are drilled in by their commanders and NCOs.
Although the "yoga" might be supplemented, or even replaced, by vigorous daily calesthenics.

All fields that are in competition for human capital will have such a gap between what they teach their students and what their students actually need to know for their professional work. This is necessary because a truly realistic teaching curriculum might scare away many students.

At the risk of being labeled totally cynical (I'm not, but in rare cynical moments I make comments like this), a few skills which should be taught to would-be _economists_ include:

* Bootlicking with subtlety(for undergraduates preparing to enter graduate school).

* Networking, i.e., how to pretend you are interested in a fellow economist's work and research when in fact you only value his or her connections.

* Anti-econometrics. One entire semester on how to distinguish bullshit econometrics from the real thing-- essential for the people running refereed journals.

* Insomnia for Tenure. i.e., how to be a good teacher, consciencious researcher, prolific publisher, good husband and father given a specific time allotment.

* Politics 101: How to tell when an elected official wants you only for your name recognition in order to back up his policies, regardless of what you yourself think.

* Politics 1001: How to tell when an academic economist has tailored the assumptions in his model/analysis so that its conclusions fit his political preconceptions.

* Mathematical Economics 101: How to understand that _all_ mathematical models are potentially misleading, and how more is learned from criticizing them than from understanding them (though the latter is a necessary first step).

No, I do not think this way all the time and I like economics, I really do. But I still think that the above is a small slice of reality. As it is, starting students in all fields have to deal with this adverse selection problem.