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MAJOR CONCEPTS
 everything
has a cost
tradeoffs
incentives
matter
voluntary
trade creates value
Economics can be broadly defined as how people react when pursuing
their own interests in a situation of scarcity. This workshop shows
how teachers introduce their students to the basic building blocks
of economic thinking.
Elaine Schwartz and her
class of senior girls at Kent Place School in Summit, New Jersey,
explores how getting something of value always carries a cost, whether
it is the time, effort or money needed to obtain the thing chosen
or an opportunity foregone in making that choice. Students create
a decision-making chart illustrating how choosing is also refusing,
and how the formulation of public policy is also a process of making
choices and facing trade-offs.
Steve Reich's students at
Valhalla High School in Valhalla, New York, learn how incentives drive
behavior by exploring how privately owned goods and services receive
better care than publicly owned goods and facilities.
In the final segment, Denver, Colorado teacher Jay
Grenawalt shows his students at George Washington High School
how voluntary trade creates value through a classroom trading exercise.
"When a student comes into the
economics class at the beginning of the year she typically
is expecting a class that looks at money and looks at
the stock market and looks at all the traditional ideas
that are connected with economics. And in many ways, yes,
we'll touch that but I'd like to share with them a way
of thinking - a way of looking at the world. And more
than anything economics provides an outlook. And basic
to that outlook is, in a world that has scarcity - that
has limited quantities of things - we always have to make
choices. We always have to make tradeoffs. And the idea
of tradeoffs takes us to opportunity cost which takes
us to the idea that for every decision we have to sacrifice
an alternative."
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