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‘[T]he teaching of economics does have an effect on students’ behavior: It makes them more selfish and less concerned about the common good.’

AWKward.

A former student of [University of Chicago Business School professor Gary] Becker’s told me that he found many of his classmates to be remarkably amoral… They perceived any failure to commit a high-benefit crime with a low expected cost as a failure to act rationally, almost a proof of stupidity. The student’s experience is consistent with the experimental findings I mentioned above [See this post’s headline.].

AWKward.

Yes, UD‘s back in one of her most-used categories: Beware the B-School Boys. Click on it at the bottom of this post for years of stories about guys who went directly from America’s very best business schools (Wharton does our financial criminals proudest, but Harvard’s in there trying) to a life of global money mayhem. The swath of destruction they leave suggests that remarkable amorality is only Part One. There’s also a brilliant nihilistic malice in play.

Since the deeper they get into their business school curriculum, the more some students seek to reduce the earth to cinders, one might ask, as Luigi Zingales does in the pages of Bloomberg’s (whose founder makes anyone who doesn’t flaunt his rule-breaking, anti-social, privileges look stupid), whether, as he puts it, business schools “incubate” criminals.

UD wouldn’t use the word incubate. B-schools refine criminals; they take naive inchoate rapacious instincts and educate them. They also – as the Rajaratnam case confirms – bring criminals together. They provide the critical mass without which conspiracies cannot flourish.

Margaret Soltan, July 25, 2012 12:32PM
Posted in: beware the b-school boys

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3 Responses to “‘[T]he teaching of economics does have an effect on students’ behavior: It makes them more selfish and less concerned about the common good.’”

  1. Sean O Says:
    July 25th, 2012 at 5:11PM

    Thank God so many folks read Ayn Rand to keep them right. In the name of the dollar, and to the libertarians, and to the corporatist Republicans, Amen.

  2. Shane Street Says:
    July 26th, 2012 at 8:17AM

    In light of several recent mass shootings, it appears the people we really need to watch out for are the educated bio/neuro types:
    Maj. (Dr.) N. Hasan, Ft. Hood massacre: BS Biochemistry, psychiatrist
    Prof. A. Bishop, UAH shootings: PhD Genetics, professor of biology (taught neuroscience)
    J. Holmes, Aurora CO movie theatre massacre: BS (with honors) Neuroscience, graduate student in neuroscience PhD program

    Of course those English majors can be pretty scary too http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:
    July 26th, 2012 at 8:43AM

    Shane: Yes – creepy pattern. As for the Va Tech guy: I think he was Creative Writing. A whole other thing.

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