Obviously textbook problems are not of a world shaking scale. But, this is so obviously a case of market gone badly. Reshuffling chapters in in order to make bo

Obviously textbook problems are not of a world shaking scale. But, this is so obviously a case of market gone badly. Reshuffling chapters in in order to make books unusable is not an economically useful (in the abstract sense) activity. Price systems are known to do weird things when the person doing the buying is prescribed a shopping list by another person, whether in a bookstore, pharmacy or prison. Where the hell are all the universities' economists?! If a university's compost was horribly buggy in some way, there would be overqualified ganderers all over it, out of curiosity if nothing else. The bookstore problem is even an interesting one, and a useful one to solve. It may be more insidious than it seems too. Universities are (I assume) going to be changing the way they teach in the coming years of decades. The way schools use technology to teach is important, and doing a decent job at this is important. One approach to figuring it out (that I hear is well underway) is letting individual lecturers use stuff from the open market. Ie, prescribing to students. Ie, the same problem. I actually think it's not a bad idea letting students buys stuff a la carte^, even bid for lab tutor time or pay for weekly exams. Universities do too much prescribing anyway, but at least if they prescribe they should pay. I think if economists need to prove their salt. Fix this and then we'll have a little more confidence in your idea about global insurance reform or whatnot. ^Obviously not in a way that just means students pay more or leverage wealth competitively.