What economics would you teach kids?

by jsalvati

What economics would you teach kids?

Rdan points to a ‘National Budget Simulation’ program that is apparently part of Massachusetts economics education for grades 4-12. I was surprised when I clicked on the link because the federal budget seems like a really strange place to start economics education.

It seems important to start economics education with the economics concepts that kids can actually use in their lives. If I had control over what economics some kids learned in school, I think this would be my list:

Opportunity cost
Gains from trade
Incentives
Importance of trade offs
Emphasis on the idea that everything has value (time, money, lack of garbage, etc.)
At a more advanced level

Marginal thinking
Efficiency of markets
Interest rates, Net Present Value
Consumption smoothing
I also think it would be useful to teach Utility and Expected Utility, but I don’t think it is possible to get to those topics.

Arnold Kling had post on a similar topic a while back.

As a side note, I think I would like to replace most of pre-calculus with basic probability theory from a Bayesian perspective with some heuristics and biases thrown in. Probability theory is a useful abrstraction for all sorts of problems, and it would also make that optional statistics class a lot less difficult if you could teach it from a bayesian perspective.

I was a little surprised myself to see the link, and pleased. I was planning to write a post on kids and must have left the link on 'scheduled' and jsalvati delightfully picked it up. He and a friend are undergraduates who started Good Morning Economics.

As jsalvati noted, Arnold Kling at EconLog wrote that after eliminating things from the high school curriculum:

With all that said, here is what I wish every high school student would learn about economics:

--the concept of opportunity cost
--how economic incentives affect behavior
--the gains from trade
--how prices allocate resources
--how entrepreneurs introduce innovation

If every citizen understood those things, the level of debate over economic policy could be much higher.

The link is to a section of Thinkfinity MA series sponsored by Verizon. I will be a part of of a state based team that provides an opportunity to develop curriculum materials for kids elementary to high school.

I am on a "validation of resources team" scheduled for this Aug. 7 to find out what is expected and to meet both state educators (curriculum and technology sectors) and those doing the validating.

As I gather information I will update and link to other sites that are interesting.