My Interview With Dr. Wolfram: One Reason Why Millennial Americans Don’t Understand True Socialism
Yesterday I interviewed Dr. Gary Wolfram, who holds the William E. Simon Chair of Professor in Economics and Public Policy and is their Director of the Economics Program, as well as a Professor of Political Economy at Hillsdale College.
We discussed why younger Americans, specifically Millennial's do not truly understand socialism. His thoughts were that he believes they've never really learned how markets work in their K – 12 and collegiate education.
In fact a Harris Poll provided exclusively to Axios showed that 61% of Americans ages 18 to 24 have a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” while 58% responded similarly to the word “capitalism.” Conversely, only 27% of people age 65 and older had a positive reaction to the word.
Dr. Wolfram stated:
They think that somehow this stuff just magically shows up. And AOC can start providing free stuff for everybody, and it will all be there.
He also pointed us to a great piece written by Julia Mullins published at the Real Clear Politics website and titled “Why Younger Americans Misunderstand True Socialism”.
In that piece Matt Kibbe, president of the libertarian organization Free the People “emphasized that anyone who supports free market economics should take the time to understand why younger generations think in terms of values and experiences but not facts. Ocasio-Cortez made the observation that her generation has never known true prosperity. Millennials and Gen Zers, after all, grew up watching Wall Street being bailed out and are now facing more college debt than previous generations.”
Matt was then quoted saying:
Those of us that crunch numbers … by any conceivable measure, we are living in the most prosperous, most opportunistic, most beautiful times in the history of the universe, but … there’s a lot of reasons, from [Ocasio-Cortez’s] perspective, that things could suck, even though things are the best they’ve ever been
Hear directly from Dr. Wolfram about this issue:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IopeCTfCgoE
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