Start with civics, because the numbers are starker and less discussed. On the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 22% of eighth graders performed at or above proficiency in civics, and nearly a third scored below NAEP Basic. Adult knowledge is no better. The 2025 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey found that while 70% of people can name the three branches of government, fewer than half can name more than two of the five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, and only 9% can name all five. Higher education does little to repair the gap. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni reports that only 18.4% of U.S. colleges and universities require a foundational course in U.S. government or history.

Economics tells the same story. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, summarizing research in the Journal of Economic Education, noted that 60%-75% of college students never take an economics course. The ACTA found that only 3.1% of U.S. colleges and universities require one. The curricular case for requiring economics I made this month in the Wall Street Journal. The broader argument is that economics and civics are not two separate deficits. They are halves of a single missing grammar.

Economics teaches incentives and trade-offs. Civics teaches structure and constraint. Together they are the grammar of self-government, the vocabulary by which a citizen evaluates what a policy will actually do and what a government is actually empowered to do. Without the first, voters cannot assess whether a proposal will deliver what it promises. Without the second, they cannot assess whether the person promising it has the authority to deliver it at all. A citizenry fluent in neither will reliably elect candidates whose programs are analytically incoherent and constitutionally unbounded. That is, increasingly, what we are doing.

I have taught politics at Sarah Lawrence College for nearly two decades and have visited scores of campuses nationwide. The pattern I see in my seminars and among the scores of students elsewhere that I meet is consistent with what the surveys describe. Ask students about housing, inequality, or wages, and the answers come fast. Rent control is necessary. Housing is a human right. Markets have failed. Billionaires shouldn’t exist. Ask a follow-up — how does housing actually get built if returns are capped? What happens to supply when prices are fixed? What can a mayor constitutionally do on his own, and what requires the state legislature? — and the students who a moment ago were confident go quiet. They are not unintelligent. They are unexposed. The grammar is missing, and the silence is what a missing grammar sounds like.

Into that silence flows something else: moral certainty without mechanism. The system is rigged. Markets exploit. Wealth is unjust. Outcomes can be redesigned by policy. These claims feel complete because they attach to real frustrations — housing costs have surged, student debt is real, mobility feels uncertain — and because they do not require any particular knowledge of how a market clears or how a bill becomes a law.

A 2025 Cato Institute-YouGov survey found that 62% of people 18-29 hold a favorable view of socialism. The poll did not define the term. It did not need to. Socialism in that survey is less a set of policy commitments than a moral posture toward a system the respondent does not understand and therefore feels free to reject.

The remarkable finding of the empirical literature is how modest an intervention it takes to change this. William Walstad and colleagues, working with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the Council for Economic Education, have shown repeatedly that a single economics course produces measurable gains in economic understanding, controlling for age, gender, and general educational attainment — and the gains hold across ideological starting points. Students do not become free-market ideologues. They do not abandon their concerns about fairness. What changes is how they argue. They ask what policies cost, not just what they promise. They think in terms of behavior rather than aspiration. Civics instruction does parallel work. It teaches students what powers government actually has, what limits it faces, and why compromise and constraint are features of the Madisonian system rather than obstacles to it.

Rent control, a signature policy of the current urban progressive agenda and a cornerstone of Mamdani’s housing platform, is the kind of case this grammar is designed to illuminate. Stanford economists Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian, in a much-cited study of San Francisco’s 1994 rent control expansion, found that covered landlords reduced rental housing supply by 15%, which the authors estimate contributed to a roughly 5% increase in citywide rents over the long run.

Economists disagree about whether, on balance, these costs are worth bearing. They do not disagree that supply responses are real. That is what economics education delivers — not a verdict, but a debate that is actually coherent. Civics instruction does the parallel work: It explains why a mayor cannot unilaterally freeze rents, why state legislatures matter, and why courts intervene. Together, the two disciplines turn a slogan into a policy question.

The remedy here is not complicated: Require every undergraduate to take at least one course in economics or statistics and ensure meaningful exposure to basic civics. Not advanced theory, not ideological training, just sound foundational literacy.

I will not pretend this is as simple as issuing a memo. The absence of such requirements reflects real structural forces: the collapse of general education as a coherent concept and economics departments that design their introductory courses for future majors rather than future citizens. Any serious fix has to contend with both.

Fortunately, there is also considerable intellectual room in how these ideas are taught. Students can engage Keynes alongside Friedman and behavioral insights from Kahneman alongside institutional critiques that emphasize market failure. Non-economists, such as those who are scholars of economic history, political economy, or economic sociology, can help fill the current void. Economic thinking is understood and employed by many departments and scholars whose expertise and ideas can radically improve our civic capacity and civil sphere. The goal is analytical competence, not ideological conformity.

TOM STEYER: THE ANTI-BILLIONAIRE MOVEMENT’S FAVORITE BILLIONAIRE

A politics that promises outcomes without explaining mechanisms cannot deliver what it promises. That politics is no longer hypothetical. It is running New York and Seattle. It will run other cities soon. We can keep graduating students armed primarily with moral conviction and inherited narratives, or we can insist that every graduate leave with the tools to think through incentives, trade-offs, and constitutional constraint.

Teach economics and civics together, the grammar of self-government, because incentives do not disappear when we ignore them, and neither do constitutions. The quiet in my classroom when I ask the follow-up is not confusion. It is the sound of what we failed to teach. We are hearing it now, dangerously, at city hall.