Mutton-headed princesses.

I've worked on a few books for young readers over the years, most of which are targeted toward girls. Publishers will tell you that they barely bother with books for boys above grammar school age because boys don't read for fun. So they neglect boys' books and the spiral continues. 

I mention this because I don't want someone to think I'm just picking on fictional princesses today. No doubt there'd be plenty of fictional princes to pick on too, if boys were reading, and if boys were encouraged to believe in themselves beyond all reason the way girls are. 

That's the rub, right there. In almost every girls' book these days, there comes a time when the girl hero (we don't call them heroines anymore because that's a diminutive), who has been shoved aside by her oppressors, has a chance to sound off and show everyone how wrong they are. She doesn't have to know anything, as long as she believes in herself. Of course, the young lady's brilliance and goodness and courage dazzles everyone, and the bad guys are eschewed while the princess is tiara-cized. 

you go girl

We call this the Greta move, after Greta Thunberg, who may not be aware that the only reason she was able to tell off the UN when she was a child was because she was doing the bidding of the very adults she was telling off. But that's a longer, larger, more lousy story. 

What really bothers me, though, is that as bright as the young princess is, she can't be any smarter than the writer, and that's a problem. I remember one book where the princess discovers how poor the peasantry in town is, and resolves to fix this by looting the royal treasury and throwing gold out to everyone higgledy piggledy. 

No one in the book is smart enough to explain the concept of devaluation, how if you give every peasant five pounds of gold, two gold coins will no longer be enough to buy a fine horse. Sure, the princessdom will look nicer, with everyone making gold utensils and things, but the value of gold will plummet. Whatever's left in the treasury will lose value as well. Of course, brigands from elsewhere will be happy to come rob from the easy-pickin' peasants and take the loot back home where gold still has value. 

These things are simple economics, not hard to understand, but they are not as obvious as knowing that if you let go of an object it will drop. Many things in life are like that. If you're in a sealed room and you turn off the light, why does it get dark? The room is sealed; where did the light go? Guess what: It won't stay bright just because you think it should and really want it to. Neither will the peasants be prosperous because you give away the store.

Sadly, the princesses in these books are also a model for political figures who cannot understand why people stay poor when you print so much money for them. 

It makes me sad, it truly does, that the basics of economics are not taught in schools, or at least not taught well enough to act as a counter to this kind of magical thinking. Prosperity is difficult. Poverty is easy. How people get through high school without understanding even that is beyond me.