When have you ever heard capitalists or socialists advocating mandatory accounting/finance in the schools?
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is in the public domain and can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg and searched. The printed book can cost you $15 and take a lot of effort to search. Has Smith's "Invisible Hand" been used as a propaganda tool for decades since most people would never read WoN?
Smith used the word 'invisible' six times but only once as "invisible hand". It is really curious that we hear about the 'invisible hand' so much. The capitalists slap us in the face with it if not strangling us.
Smith used the word 'education' EIGHTY(80) TIMES. We are not told about that. Search for "and account" and you will find multiple instances of "read, write, and account", not "read, write and arithmetic". Double entry accounting was more than 300 years old when Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, but 50% of Brits were illiterate and public schools did not exist in 1776.
The United States could have made accounting/finance mandatory in the schools since Sputnik. Wouldn't that have helped everyone better serve their own self interest? But we do not hear the people who propagandize us about the "invisible hand" advocating mandatory accounting because that might make their invisible rip-offs more difficult.
Adam Smith never used the word 'depreciation' in WoN. He mentioned paper money being depreciated one time. Marx wrote about 'depreciation' 35 times in Das Kapital, sometimes regarding the depreciation of machines and sometimes of money. Marx even mentioned Adam Smith 130 times though not much about education.
Consumers did not buy automobiles, air conditioners, televisions and microwave ovens before 1885.
Marx died in 1883.
What does reliability have to do with the depreciation of durable consumer goods? How many people know what bathtub curves have to do with evaluating complex technologies that did not exist in the times of Smith and Marx. How free is the market if the buyers cannot evaluate the products?
But it's OK! Our brilliant economists do not talk about the depreciation of under engineered consumer trash today. Every time you buy a replacement the purchase is added to GDP. What about NDP? Oh sorry, when do you ever hear an economist explain NDP? That's OK too, they only depreciate the Capital Goods and ignore the depreciation of consumer junk anyway.
Wealth of Nations has probably been in the public domain for a hundred years but cheap computing did not make it available in Project Gutenberg until 3/17/2001. Milton Friedman died in 2006. Was Friedman giving us the straight dope on economics or treating us like a bunch of dopes for decades?