Is there such a thing as “bad economics?” You bet there is, just as surely as there is good plumbing and bad plumbing. If one means by “bad economics” the promotion of false reasoning, mistaken assumptions, and shoddy intellectual merchandise, then Hazlitt’s comment ought to be enshrined as a law!
It may be an oversimplification, but I believe that the essence of”bad economics” can be distilled into the following seven fallacies. Each of them is a pitfall which the good economist will faithfully bypass.
1. The fallacy of collective terms. Examples of collective terms are “society,” “community,” “nation,” “class,” and “us.” The important thing to remember is that they are abstractions, figments of the imagination, not living, breathing, thinking, and acting entities. The fallacy involved here is presuming that a collective is, in fact, a living, breathing, thinking, and acting entity.
The good economist recognizes that the only living, breathing, thinking, and acting entity is the individual. The source of all human action is the individual. Others may acquiesce in one’s action or even participate, but everything which occurs as a consequence can be traced to particular, identifiable individuals.
Consider this: could there even be an abstraction called “society” if all individuals disappeared? Obviously not. A collective term, in other words, has no existence in reality independent of the specific persons which comprise it.
It is absolutely essential to determine origins and responsibility and even cause and effect that economists avoid the fallacy of collective terms. One who does not will bog down in horrendous generalizations. He will assign credit or blame to non-existent entities. He will ignore the very real actions (individual actions) going on in the dynamic world around him. He may even speak of “the economy” almost as if it were a big man who plays tennis and eats corn flakes for breakfast.
2. The fallacy of composition. This error also involves individuals. It holds that what is true for one individual will be true for all others.
The example has often been given of one who stands up during a football game. True, he will be able to see better, but if everyone else stands up too, the view of many individual spectators will probably worsen.
A counterfeiter who prints a million dollars will certainly benefit himself (if he doesn’t get caught) but if we all become counterfeiters and each print a million dollars, a quite different effect is rather obvious.
Many an economics textbook speaks of the farmer who is better off because he has a bumper crop but may not be better off if every farmer has one. This suggests a widespread recognition of the fallacy of composition, yet it is a fact that the error still abounds in many places.
The good economist neither sees the trees and ignores the forest nor sees the forest and ignores the trees; he is conscious of the entire “picture.”
3. The fallacy of “money is wealth.” The mercantilists of the 1600s raised this error to the pinnacle of national policy. Always bent upon heaping up hoards of gold and silver, they made war on their neighbors and looted their treasures. If England was richer than France, it was, according to the