[A]ccording to Ohio State University Moritz College of Law professor Deborah Merritt, there’s no good way to determine who’s to blame for the rising cost of tuition. “It’s a chicken and egg problem because it’s the high salaries that are out there that allow the law schools to charge as much as they do,” she said.

This would be akin to my saying that because I’d prefer to live in a floor-through penthouse apartment on Central Park West that “the market” owes me an income sufficient unto those desires.  (“I have huge student debt; I need to collect an income high enough to pay it off.”)

Now, I’m not picking on the good Prof. Merritt. It’s just her luck to be quoted in the AmLaw coverage, and I’m sure she’s superbly gifted at what she teaches. I quote her comment because people attempting to draw a correlation or even to imply causation between law school tuition and associate salary scales litter the landscape whenever this topic comes up, and it’s time to shut down this confusion once and for all.

The root of the mistake is conflating two completely separate and independent markets: That of law schools’ charging students tuition and that of BigLaw setting associate compensation. Both, to state the obvious, are fundamentally driven by supply and demand.

Market #1: Schools can charge (and find willing buyers for) the tuition they do because enough prospective law students consider it nonetheless a worthwhile investment in their own human capital, and because the federal student loan program as presently constituted is basically an open checkbook.

Need I point out the obvious? Law schools do not care and for the most part do not know whether their graduates ever repay their student loans, effortlessly, with a struggle, or at all. They have collected the price they contracted with the students for and they have moved on.

Market #2: Similarly, Cravath et al. do not give a fig whether you borrowed every red cent of your undergraduate and law school tuition or cashed in your trust fund or lottery ticket; they set associate salaries at a level such that they can recruit the talent they perceive they need. Law school tuition, the cost of living in New York or London, student loan debt, or for that matter other financial commitments of the student/associate (a leased Ferrari? a weakness for Sotheby’s auctions?) are as irrelevant as can be.

It’s high time to knock this surreal notion out of the conversation once and for all.

And while we’re at it, permit me to nominate a few other canards for permanent expulsion into outer darkness:

• Your firm’s level of profitability is not your client’s problem.
• There is no correlation between the time you’ve invested in a matter and the value of your work to the client.
• Partners are not entitled to XX, YY, or ZZ% of their billings as income; they are entitled to 0.00%.

I invite readers to add to this list as you are motivated and see fit.

As one of our late unlamented US Presidents was fond of saying, “Let me be perfectly clear.”  I’m not picking on the AmLaw reporter or the good Professor.

I’m motivated to publish this column because this story strikingly reveals the systemic ignorance of basic economics which rules in Law Land.   I could have picked any of hundreds of other stories, and this is far from the first time today’s topic has struck me as worthy of public airing and discussion.

Now, this is understandable:  Until just the past few years, it has been not only possible but the socio-cultural, educational, and accrediting norm for lawyers, law professors, partners and associates in BigLaw and Small, in-house counsel, judges, government lawyers, etc., to achieve their positions without ever being exposed to the most rudimentary instruction in economics, accounting, statistics and probability, or even math beyond perhaps algebra.

At long last, and just over the past few years, it has finally dawned on a handful of  law schools and firms that innumeracy and economic illiteracy are actually maladaptive when it comes to practicing in the real world and dealing with issues as basic as causation, prudence, “reasonableness,” and damages.  I believe the value of basic facility with what economics teaches is self-evident even at this baseline level; we need not even approach the high-level and high-stakes disputes and corporate work practiced along the Sixth Avenue canyon in midtown New York and other global urban centers, where “the language of business” is finance, accounting, and market dynamics.

A final note:  The most obdurate barrier to lawyers’ being conversant with Econ 101 principles is not inadequate opportunity to be exposed to it as a discipline.  As I noted, pioneering schools and firms are introducing it and while it takes large institutions time to acquire the talent and build the procedural infrastructure to make it a regular part of their business, one has to start somewhere and starts have been made.

No, exposure simpliciter is not the key barrier:  That barrier is a psychological and cultural aversion to math, accounting, economics, and statistics on principle, which roams the landscape of Law Land widely.  “I didn’t go to law school to [be a bean-counter/sell used cars/understand samples, randomness, and probability/______.”  This kind of statement is invoked not just widely, but proudly.  That’s the problem.

The erudite and gentle C.P. Snow, a British scientist and novelist, put his finger on it in his 1959 classic  The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, where he argued that Western intellectual life was split into the sciences and the humanities and that neither wanted much to do with the other.

But he also identified a certain asymmetry:  While literary scholars, say (the hardest of the hard-core humanists) could proudly announce they knew and understood nothing of math and the physical sciences, scientists could not announce the reverse in polite society.  Imagine proclaiming that you are utterly ignorant of Shakespeare, The Bible, Mozart, Picasso, and Michaelangelo, fully plan to remain so, and that you actually don’t care to read, listen to music, or visit museums: How humiliating would that be?

We lawyers, of course, are taking precisely this attitude towards baseline numeracy and, yes, economics.  So long as we remain proud of our ignorance, so shall we remain.