Economic understanding, so understood, can be imparted to college students and, through those who go on to teach in the schools, to students in the schools. Our story can be told and it can be understood. To what purpose? A person who possesses economic understanding will relate his consideration of public economic issues, easily and purposively, to the central core—to the starting point, to home base. He will have a sense of the interrelationship of economic phenomena and problems—the "oneness" of the economy—the tie-in between each sector of the economy and the whole, and between the economy and himself.
He will know his "way around" and his "way home" in the economy. He will face such choices as those between alternative satisfactions, between present and future goods, between alternative methods of production, between production and leisure, between stability and security and innovation and progress, and between economizing by the market and economizing by government, under whatever conditions and guises these choices may appear, with awareness and a balanced sense of consequences.
He will know that products come from production, and will have an appreciation of the contribution made by diverse groups to the totality of production.
Familiarity with the mechanics of economics will not blind him to the reality that the operating forces in any political economy are human. He will know that economic life involves, essentially, the rational living together of human beings—a constant adjustment and readjustment in economic matters comparable to, indeed a part of, the constant adjustment and readjustment that characterize the total business of living together. He will realize that these adjustments frequently bring discomfort, even pain, to those established (vested) interests that are required to adjust, but that failure of one group to adjust may mean privation for other groups and stagnation for the economy as a whole. And he will relate this to situations in which his own interest lies in resistance to change (tariff, price supports, "fair trade," "featherbedding") as well as to those in which his own interest would be served by the adjustment of others.
He will distinguish between areas where "scientific" economic answers are possible, areas where such answers are impossible because necessary information or data are absent, and areas where only value judgments are called for and possible. He will realize that it is not the function of economics to provide answers to ethical or value problems, but, rather, to help to define and identify such problems and to place them in sharper focus.
Finally, his realization that, in the very nature of the case, economic problems permit of very few "right" answers will be one measure of the depth of his economic understanding—and the realization will fill him with a sense not of futility but of purpose. It will point up for him his personal role in the political economy in which he lives.
This is what economic understanding can mean. This is what we would like to have for all of our people as members of a free, democratic society. We will never have all of it for everyone, but we cannot afford to seek and work for less.