Why do so many people who are smart enough to be doctors or software engineers believe in stupid things such as socialism? Because most of them cannot believe in anything better.
Specialization is a critical economic force for prosperity. You specialize in the most productive effort you can deliver and trade your output with other people in the society who specialize in other things. Say you are a tax accountant, you specialize in handling people’s taxes; and you exchange that for money. You use that money to buy the products and services of other productive actors such as farmers, car manufacturers, housebuilders, and so on.
If you are productive enough, you don’t need to spend all of your time producing. You can afford to have limited working hours. The rest of your time you spend in leisure activities. You don’t have an economic need to build knowledge or human capital in other fields. Unfortunately, we live in a democracy, which means that you need to have opinions about issues outside of your specialty.
You can take several approaches to form these opinions. You can spend some of your leisure time learning about other fields, mainly economics. You can rely on your intuition which depends on your family and early age education. You can also outsource this process to your favorite influencers in the media.
Neither the media nor the school systems will influence you to be an independent thinker. So unless you spend some of your leisure time on learning economics or you were lucky enough to grow up in an environment that mitigated the impact of the school systems. You will have to believe all the standard lines.
