Mythbusting Conservative Economic Fairy Tales

A friend recently asked my wife to help come up with conservative myths about the economy. She came up with excellent suggestions. Any to add?

That there's necessarily a tradeoff between economic growth and
economic equality. Many European countries enjoy both high levels of
growth and high levels of economic equality. As did the U.S. in the
postwar period.

That unions reduce productivity. Econometric studies of this subject
are mixed, and overall results indicate that unions have little effect
on productivity.

That in the War on Poverty, "poverty won." Actually, many of the Great
Society programs were successful in reducing poverty.

That Head Start and other early childhood education programs "don't
work." While it's true that few if any of those programs permanently
raise IQs or test scores, many early childhood education programs have
been shown to reduce crime, teenage pregnancy, and reliance on
welfare, and to increase educational attainment.

That wage inequality between men and women occurs primarily because
women have less experience, or because women tend to enter lower-
paying fields. The well-known economic expert John McCain, for
example, recently opined that the solution to the gender gap in wages
is for women to get "more training." But the fact is, studies that
control for experience, occupation, education, and the like still show
a substantial unexplained gap that most likely is due to
discrimination.

That compared to the U.S.. Europe has staggeringly high levels of
unemployment. Actually, average unemployment levels between the U.S.
and Europe have been comparable over the past two decades or so (can't
remember the exact time frame for this, but I remember a Krugman
column about it).

That America is "the greatest country in the world" because we have
lots of social mobility here. Actually, many (perhaps most) European
countries, and, I believe, Canada, have more social mobility than we
do.

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