A Commonplace Book

As students in general wind their way through four years of college, they tend to become more cooperative. But as economics students move toward graduation, [Robert] Frank and his colleagues found the trend toward cooperation to be "conspicuously absent." In short, undergraduates who went through economics training became less cooperative and more suspicious of the cooperative impulses of others. Perhaps the principle of self-interest is taught as much as it is intrinsic to human nature. The final irony is that such behavior prepares aspiring economists for the very world they are seeking to create.