Endogenous Indoctrination: Occupational Choices, the Evolution of Beliefs and the Political Economy of Reforms

Gilles Saint-Paul

Economic Journal, 2010, vol. 120, issue 544, 325-353

Abstract: I analyse a model where workers self-select in the educational occupation in a way which is correlated with their beliefs about the working of the market economy. Teachers have a disproportionate effect on the transmission of beliefs. Therefore, they generate a bias which makes it harder for the population to learn the true parameters of the economy if these are favourable to the market economy. Two parameters determine this bias. Social entropy defines how predictable one's occupation is as a function of one's beliefs. Heritability is the weight of the family's beliefs in the determination of the priors of a new generation. Both heritability and social entropy reduce the bias and make it easier to learn that the market economy is "good", under the assumption that it is. Copyright © The Author(s). Journal compilation © Royal Economic Society 2010.

Date: 2010
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Related works:
Working Paper: Endogenous Indoctrination: Occupational Choice, the Evolution of Beliefs, and the Political Economy of Reform (2009)
Working Paper: Endogenous Indoctrination: Occupational Choice, the Evolution of Beliefs, and the Political Economy of Reform (2009)
Working Paper: Endogenous Indoctrination: Occupational Choice, the Evolution of Beliefs, and the Political Economy of Reform (2009)
Working Paper: Endogenous Indoctrination: Occupational Choice, the Evolution of Beliefs, and the Political Economy of Reform (2009)
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