Folk Economics and Economic Education

The aim of the article is to justify potential changes in the methods of teaching economics at the secondary and higher education levels that would help reduce the prevalence of zero-sum bias among students. This bias—that human interactions yield benefits to one party only at the expense of the other—constitutes a fundamental element of the naive economic beliefs’ set, or folk economics. Such beliefs are held by varying sizes segments of the population across all countries, and their manifestations have a negative impact on many spheres of life. To achieve this objective, the article analyzes the concept of folk economics, discusses existing theories regarding their origins, and proposes an explanation for how two distinct types of economic activity—distribution and exchange—have merged in the minds of some individuals into a zero-sum bias. The topic of debiasing this bias is discussed in the context of two processes that currently barely intersect: the improvement of economic education and the debiasing of cognitive biases. It is demonstrated that the developed and tested methods for debiasing can also be applied to the teaching of economics in secondary and higher education. The conclusion is drawn that successfully overcoming zero-sum bias requires collaborative methodological work between university and school educators.