Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez likes to brag about her degree in economics from Boston University. It’s just too bad she didn’t learn much.
Wondering: How many other House Democrats have a degree in Economics like I do?
Trying to find who out here is going to be in the Gini Coefficient Appreciation Squad.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 3, 2018
She would be a member of the “appreciation squad” because the Gini Coefficient or Gini Ratio measures income inequality. You can bet she paid attention in that class.
So the diploma says she has a degree, but it’s what’s in her head that’s relevant to her job. And AOC comes up a little short in that department.
In trying to display her vast knowledge of economics when discussing a possible 4-day workweek, she sorta mixed things up a bit, making her look stupid.
The New York Democrat said that the “famed economist Milton Keynes predicted that by 2030, GDP and technology would have advanced so much that it would allow everyday people to work as little as 15 hours a week and provide for their families.”
That’s “famed economist” John Maynard Keynes…or Milton Friedman. She couldn’t have confused them because they share similar beliefs, that’s for sure. Keynes advocated for massive government spending, believing that government expenditures were the key to economic growth. Friedman was a champion of the free market and less government spending.
To mix the two up is not only comical, but ignorant.
“I was just reading today about how in 1930, famed economist Milton Keynes predicted that by 2030 GDP and technology would have advanced so much that it would allow everyday people to work as little as FIFTEEN HOURS a week and provide for their families,” Ocasio-Cortez said while discussing the benefits of a four-day workweek with her Instagram followers.
She added that Keynes’ predictions weren’t completely off-base. She said U.S. productivity per person has gone up exponentially, “the problem is that those advancements have not been enjoyed by the very people who are actually producing the goods in our society.”
Does anyone else doubt she was reading anything at all? I’m sure she reads economics books to relax.
Well, someone must have told her about the gaffe because she issued this sheepish correction.
“UGGGH TYPO,” the freshman congresswoman wrote after confusing John Maynard Keynes, an early 20th-century British economist who theorized that government spending was linked to economic growth, with Milton Friedman, a free-market American economist and 1976 Nobel Prize winner, according to The Washington Examiner.
Ocasio-Cortez mistakenly combined their names into “Milton Keynes.”
Later, she clarified even further.
“It’s John Maynard Keynes,” she clarified in a later Instagram story. “Mixed his name with Milton Friedman — a (very) different economist.”
AOC sounds like the kind of person who likes to impress people with her knowledge by faking her way through conversations. I can just imagine her as a bartender holding forth about economics, dropping names like Keynes and Friedman, without having a clue what either of them believed. The drunken bar patrons were no doubt impressed.
But the rest of us? Not so much.
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