A little bit of economics can be a dangerous thing.

You have to get fairly deep into the subject, or you wind up believing crazy shit because your Macro 101 textbook had a pretty graph and your professor was more interested in writing papers than teaching properly.  You get people believing that RATEX is actually true rather than simply a tool for isolating other variables, which leads to all kinds of other absurdities.

If you only take a first-year physics course you may end up believing in a clockwork universe, but at least planets and billiard balls and boxes on slopes will behave as advertised in your textbook... And any misconceptions you may take away don't have toxic sociopolitical consequences.

By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan