Economics for 10-13 year olds?

Years ago, an economist friend made the comment that every kid should take intro micro and intro macro before graduating high school. Sure, it was his profession, but it makes sense that people should have a conscious understanding of the concepts of supply and demand, comparative vs. supplemental goods and some basic macroeconomic concepts before going out to make their way in the world.

Fast forward to now–my son will be entering high school soon. I may have a little influence in his school’s curriculum, and I’d like to suggest a unit on economics, something beyond the usual stuff required by the state. Can anyone recommend a few good books on microeconomics, especially ones that relate to a preteen-teenager’s world, and does anyone have any experiences with teaching the subject?

You may want to contact the Junior Achievement folks in your area. They sometimes go into classrooms and lead interactive activities related to business and economics. I expect the quality varies depending on who your local volunteers and staff are, but it might turn out to be a good option.

I had a unit on economics in 9th grade and don’t feel I got much out of it. If I could remember anything about it, I’d warn you away from that approach, textbook, etc. From what I can remember, it seemed very heavy on vocabulary.

What I do think was more valuable and easier to absorb at the time was a lot of personal finance. This covered things like how to balance a checkbook, how to figure out how much buying something on credit was costing you, setting up a budget, etc. We’ve had some Dope threads about how this type of stuff should be required. I was lucky enough that my school did cover it well, but from previous reports, many don’t. You may want to encourage them to cover this stuff as well.

Come back and ask me in a year: I am teaching AP Econ next year for the first time. I will know much more then. However, do have one piece of advice that comes from teaching: don’t be frustrated if what seem like very simple concepts take a great deal of time and effort for your 13 year old to master. Economics is incredibly abstract, and 12-14 is the age when kids are just beginning to really get a handle on abstraction. I am not saying this to discourage you, but to help you understand: younger students don’t just think slower or with less context than college kids–they think differently, and material has to be presented differently. Things need to be made as concrete as possible. And it will go slowly.

Thanks, folks! Manda JO, what is your text?

I agree that economics is taught in a ridiculously abstract manner. I didn’t really get it until my instructor put a graph on the board that allowed me to think about the day’s subject in math terms (total revenue vs. marginal revenue, FWIW, where total revenue reaches a peak where marginal revenue reaches zero.)

Personally, I think that real life examples would work best. Kids in their early teens may not think about budgeting their money, but they probably have a few examples that might work. I don’t know, maybe how much of a house the would clean for how much money might be used to describe supply and demand curves.

Also, I was thinking of economics as being the study of rational choice, not just monentary choice. This makes it even more abstract, but it might make it easier to find real life examples.

Mankiw’s “Principles of Macroeconomics”. No idea if it’s any good or not, it’s just the adopted text of my program. It’s a college text. Understand that for a kid this age, any chart or graph is abstract. Find a good 8th grade algebra text and look at how it’s completely different than the way you would teach College Algebra–the kids are smarter than the kids in your average college algebra class (since they are on track to be done with calculus by the time they graduate), but the book still goes insanely slowly and spends a lot more time with concrete examples. Same thing will apply to teaching economics to a kid the same age.

I found many of my classmates in university economics courses had trouble comprehending what they were being taught, especially, as Manda JO talks about, abstract concepts.

I still remember the first time “sunk costs” came up in Econ 110. Some students simply could not grasp the concept. It absolutely stumped them.

These were smart kids, kids who got high marks and were attending one of Canada’s finest schools, and the concept of “sunk costs” really threw them for a loop at first. The difference between direct and indirect costs, how prices are determined, things like that are all carefully explained in fairly simple terms but presented a huge, huge conceptual problem at every stage for a lot of students.

You can get some very good resources from the National Council on Economic Education. This is a non-profit group founded just after WWII (originally called the Joint Council on Economic Education) that aims to promote the teaching and understanding of economics, especially in schools.

They have many free lessons and lesson plans available in their Online Lessons section, and you can search for lessons by concept, grade level, and national standard. Some of the lessons are more abstract, while many use concrete examples. Some are much better than others.

There’s more stuff available on their Resources page.

The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible

Naked Economics, by Charles Wheelan.

The introduction of this book says something to the effect of “This is not economics for dummies. This is economics for intelligent people who would like to understand more about how the economy works”. I thought it was excellent. I recently took Econ 101 and 102 at a community college (and got two As, go me), so a lot of the information was not new to me, but the format - very chatty, with lots of examples from real life - made the concepts easier to understand. Well-written and enjoyable. (After my disastrous experience with high school econ, I never thought I’d be saying this, but economics is actually very interesting!)

Interesting. I’ve recently begun teaching my nine year old son about how business and economics work. This is partly because of his professed desire to be a “tycoon millionaire” when he grows up, and partially because, while he is smart, he is fairly shy, and I figured he might have trouble interviewing for more traditional jobs.

It’s helpful that we both play World of Warcraft. He was fascinated when Daddy decided to corner the market on silk cloth on our server. I did this starting with a relatively small amount of money and bought up all silk cloth under a certain amount, then reselling as the price of silk cloth rose. He soon grasped that as people needed silk that they were price elastic on small shift in the price of silk - we could buy for 20 silver and sell for about 30-40 silver for a stack of 20, but at higher prices people would begin to spend the time to find silk on their own, or the price would attract others to farm silk and dump into the market.

Real examples that he could see helped a lot. I’ve more recently gone to explain why Pringles can be the dominant global brand of potato chips but not the dominant US brand, which is mostly based on shipping and production costs, economies of scale and proximity to market.

I took AP Micro- and Macroeconomics in high school, scored 5s on the exams, and thus was able to skip out of the introductory level college courses. Quite thankful for that. Perhaps you could find out what established curricula there are for the Advanced Placement courses.