… is from one of Steve Landsburg’s Dec. 24th replies – in a comments section at Steve’s blog – to Yoram Bauman’s argument that studying economics makes people more selfiish:
[A] lot of what we teach in economics has to do with seeing all the consequences of your actions, and evaluating their desirability on the basis of all those consequences. I’ve argued elsewhere that when we teach cost-benefit analysis, what we’re really doing is teaching compassion — that is, we’re teaching our students to stop and consider *all* the people who are affected by a given action or policy before deciding whether to support it.
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