Planet Money - The economics lessons in kids' books

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

All sorts of lessons (even about economics) can be learned from kids' books. On today's show, we visit an elementary school to try to teach third graders econ using some beloved childrens' classics. And, along the way, we learn a few things ourselves.Subscribe to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoneyLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. It's story time in Mandy Robeck's third grade class. Alrighty readers, here we go. The kids' little faces light up. So we're going to read today and just see what do we think and discover about this story. Pancakes, Pancakes by Eric Carle. In the story, there's this little boy, Jack, who wants pancakes, but his mom is busy, so he's got to do some of the work.

How can I help? asked Jack. We'll need some flour, she replied. Take a sickle and cut as much wheat as the donkey can carry. Then take it to the mill. The miller will grind it into flour. As Mrs. Robeck's reading, it becomes pretty clear, at least to this economics reporter, this isn't just a book about a boy making pancakes. It's a story about taste and preferences, about specialization and trade. Mrs. Robeck's been weaving econ into her lessons, so the kids get it too. Ariman, what are you thinking? He was asking him to do it. Can you please grind the sweet into flour because I need it for a big pancake. He didn't just go and make it himself. He asked someone to do it for him. I think you're

right, Ariman. So who is he asking? The miller. The miller, yes. So the miller is the producer and Jack is the consumer. And at its core, this book is about land, labor, capital, entrepreneurship. So friends, do you know, have you ever heard the words four factors of production? Yeah, it's kind of a really big, I think of it as like a grown-up, older idea a little bit, right? The four factors of production. You know, the resources people use to create goods. So the wheat that Jack is cutting with that sickle, that wheat is the land. When he goes to the miller and they beat the wheat with a flail, that action is labor. And labor means work. Did Jack have to do any work in this story?

He did all the hard work. By the time we get to the part of the story where Jack actually eats his pancakes, Arimond wants to add something to his earlier answer about Jack. He's a consumer figuratively and literally because he's getting it and he's also eating it. And consuming means eating. So he's figuratively and literally a consumer. He is, Ariman, you're right. Pancakes, Pancakes is an early economics lesson. That's why Mandy Roback has used it to teach economics to her third graders. To her, we are all economists, even eight and nine-year-olds. All right, one, two, three. Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

I'm Erika Barris. All kinds of real world concepts that adults struggle with are woven into kids' books, including economics. Today on the show, what happens when Planet Money tries to teach economics using children's books? We've got a frog and a toad, a spotted panther dog, and a stubborn little girl. Plus, credible commitment, exponential growth bias, and the labor market matching process. And a real-life lesson about how hard it can be to keep the messiness of the world out of economics class. messiness of the world out of economics class. I had this idea. What if I called up a bunch of economists, asked them for kids' books that have economics lessons, and then tried to teach econ

to kids? That's when I found this article Mandy Robeck had written a few years ago for an education site about how she uses storybooks to teach economics to third graders. So I came to her with a proposal. Can Planet Money take over your class for the day? Bring some books, teach, and learn economics from your kids. But first, I had to come up with a list of books. So I started making my calls. One of the first economists I

heard back from was Erin Kaplan. She studies labor markets at the University of Southern California. Erin's pick? Put Me in the Zoo by Robert Lopshire. I don't remember the first time I read it because I have the copy I had when I was a kid. I think this was one of my favorite books when I was a kid. And I honestly, I can't read it to my children without thinking about the labor market. And it's not just the labor market. It's the labor market matching process, the two-way match in which employers and employees find what they're looking for in each other. Put Me in the Zoo is about this creature, Spot. He's like a cross between a dog and a panther. He's yellow, covered in spots.

He visits the zoo, sees a zookeeper feeding a seal fish, a lion getting a haircut and a manicure, and he wants in. He wants that zoo life. is the worker and the zoo is a place that would give him, you know, what he wants, some nice fish or whatever it is that he eats, a home. He gets to be in the zoo. They take care of him. And in exchange, he offers entertainment to visitors. Spot is seeing the zoo as like his dream job, essentially. Exactly. Exactly. But the zoo doesn't want him. This boy and girl follow him out and Spot shows them all the things he can do.

He can juggle. His spots can change colors. He can project his spots on trees and balls and walls and even on the kids. It's amazing. And the kids see for him what he can't see. They point him to the circus. They say, this is a better match for you. And then in the end, he realizes that this is the best place for him and it's a good match. Do you think the labor market always works out that well? No, no, no, I don't. This sorting process, that match or mismatch between workers and employers, is one of the big things our economy hangs on. So Spot is looking at the zoo, but the zoo isn't hiring. And at the same time, the circus is hiring. They'd love someone with Spot's skills, but spot wasn't even looking at the circus.

That's the mismatch. And so remember the great resignation? Maybe that was just a whole bunch of people trying to solve their own personal mismatch, just like spot in Put Me in the Zoo. I asked Erin if she thought Robert Lobshire was thinking about the labor market when he wrote it. I mean, maybe. I don't know what he was thinking, but I imagine that he probably wasn't thinking about, you know, unemployment and all of that. Probably thinking just a little more about how we find our place in the world. But at the same time, you know,

we find our place in the world. But at the same time, you know, that's often one in the same. So with this and three other books, I headed to Mrs. Robeck's class in the Columbus, Ohio suburbs. The district gave us a few stipulations. Don't use the kids' last names and no politics. Sure. Now, Mandy Robeck's classroom is like this magical learning space. It's bright and sunny. There are a bunch of plants, a pet turtle, so many books, and everything seems so thoughtful and deliberate and centered around learning. The kids spend most of the day sitting on this blue rug,

and when Mrs. Robeck reads Put Me in the Zoo, the kids are into it. This is where I want to be. The circus is the place for me. At the start of the day, I just watched Mrs. Robeck teach her class, how she interacted with the kids. But then it was my turn to step to the front of the room. And I wanted to see what would happen if I started by going all in on the econ. Do you guys think about labor search and matching and macroeconomics? No.

Definitely not. These are some grown-up words. Do you think about the mismatch in the labor market ever? No. Yes. One little girl was willing to take a shot. One little girl was willing to take a shot. Um, well, it's, well, it's like a little bit like you're like thinking, I once did it for so long. We've all been there. You start out talking about one thing and the next thing, you know, it's just words.

It's, I don't, it's sometimes it's good to do it, but I sometimes get distracted with it. Looks pretty similar. Yeah. Yeah, seems right. But when I asked my questions in a way that made sense to them, it turned out that even in their eight and nine-year-old lives, some of them had already experienced their own version of mismatch. For a few years, I've been doing gymnastics. But when I was on the lines to do something, I've always danced. And mom watched my gymnastics, and she said maybe I would be better at a dance studio.

And then, on to the next book. So friends, Miss Erica, she asked if she could be a guest reader in her room and of course I said yes. I was going to read this time. I sat up in a little chair in front of the room and got out the book. Wait, I have that book. Me too. I have that book. My dad keeps it downstairs. Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends. Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout would not take the garbage out. She'd scour the pox. I was reading this book because of a recommendation from Damon Jones, an economist at the University of Chicago.

He studies inequality. And though her parents would scream and shout, she simply would not take the garbage out. And so it piled up to the ceiling, coffee grounds, potato peelings. He picked this poem about a girl who refuses to take the garbage out. It piles up. It drives away her friends. When she goes to take it out, it's too late. Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout doesn't see how bad the pile of trash has gotten. It has grown exponentially. Damon says she has what is called in behavioral economics an exponential growth bias. What that means is that it's easier for people to think about things that grow linearly. So every year the garbage grows by two inches.

That's a linear process. But if the garbage is growing proportionally, so say, for example, there's bacteria multiplying, you know, recreating itself and growing proportionally, then it grows at a much faster rate. And over time, it grows increasingly faster. And so people with an exponential growth bias, they underestimate how much their debt is growing or how they're not saving enough for retirement, or they don't realize what's actually happening with that pile of trash. Maybe she just thought this is not going to get out of control. You know, it's a couple pizza crust, a couple withered greens, soggy beans, tangerines. What could go wrong? And Sarah looks up and somehow the whole country is engulfed in cream of wheat.

Yes, that actually does happen. Another thing Damon says Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout suffers from in this poem, time inconsistency or present bias. That's where you know there are things you need to do, but you'd rather do something else that gives you immediate gratification. And then you just keep saying, I'll just do it tomorrow. And then tomorrow comes then you just keep saying, I'll just do it tomorrow. And then tomorrow comes and you just keep saying, I'll just do it tomorrow. Back in Mrs. Robeck's class, I kept reading. The garbage rolled on down the hall. It raised the roof. It broke the wall. Right? None of the kids identified Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout's mistake as an exponential growth bias. But at the heart of most economic theories are some pretty intuitive ideas.

Ideas that even an eight-year-old can see. Maybe because she didn't really know the consequences, like at the end, what would happen. Spot on. Now, if you're an eight-year-old economist, you can't just sit around and read books all day. Sometimes you got to get the wiggles out. Stand up. Let's do a go noodle to stretch. Our next big economic concept, credible commitment. It comes from a story called Cookies from the Frog and Toad Books by Arnold Lobel.

Recommended by Fiona Scott-Morton, Yale economist. Her specialty, competition economics. She's also a mom and a gift giver. Oh, everyone I know who has a baby, I give them this. And then for my economist friends, I'll sometimes put a little note in the first page of the first book. What does the little note that you write say? It just says, these are great stories for young economists. So Cookies the Story has two characters, a frog, a toad. Best friends. Toad bakes cookies, brings them to frog, and they start eating them. Then they realize they should probably stop.

And they agree with that. And then they have one more cookie. And then they decide, let's have one more very last cookie. And this goes on for a while. They try all these things to get themselves to stop. But frog and toad don't have the willpower. Their little short-run selves are winning out over their long-run selves. So they take the cookies outside and let the birds have them. And the reason that this is economics is it's about a credible commitment. You want to eat the cookies and you say you're not going to. But that's not a credible commitment.

Everybody knows you want to eat the cookies and that you're going to eat the cookies. And the only way you can credibly commit not to eat the cookies is to do something irreversible. And when the birds eat the cookies, that's pretty much, that's irreversible. You're not getting those cookies back. When I brought Frog and Toad and their cookie problem to the kids, I was feeling pretty confident. By now I had learned, don't try to teach them big fancy econ words. Don't ask them overly complicated questions. Just talk to them. What if they hid them in a drawer? Because then they would just open the drawer and take them out and cut the string and open the box. What if they put it on a really high shelf like they did,

but even higher than the one they put it on? They could get maybe a taller ladder. And I was thinking, instead of throwing them in the garbage or anything, I was thinking, I always do this with my M&Ms. I give them to my mom and say, don't let me eat any more of these. And then I made a rookie teacher mistake. Right, so what if you flushed them down the toilet? The toilet will be gone.

I mentioned toilets to a room full of third graders. You can go through a sewer. No. Mrs. Robeck had to rescue me. Alrighty, monarchs, monarchs. Surprise, surprise. That was kind of a shocking thought. When I spoke with Fiona Scott-Morton, she did not mention toilets as a real-world business example of credible commitment.

Instead, she offered up the car company Tesla. About a decade ago, Tesla had to figure out how to get people to buy its electric cars. But it wasn't easy. So Frog and Toad are busy eating the cookies, and that's a bit like Tesla selling the cars and giving the money to shareholders. And they say, you know, this really isn't the best for the long-run health of the business. We should be building charging stations to encourage consumers to buy more cars. But we can't help ourselves. These cookies are so delicious. These shareholder payments, dividend payments are so delicious. Let's just consume them. But to get people to buy the cars, Tesla had to say, we aren't going to take all this money as profit.

We are going to use it to build thousands of charging stations all over the U.S. But if you're a potential customer, that's just talk. And that's frog and toad wrapping their cookies in a box and hiding the box and tying the box with string, it doesn't really stop them from eating the cookies. And saying you're going to build charging stations and putting it in your plans and writing it down in your corporate strategy documents doesn't make you build the charging stations. The only thing that makes you build a charging station is actually building it. In the end, that's what Tesla did. They opened more than 1,500 stations across the country. That was a credible commitment. Reversible and irreversible choices, the games we play with ourselves to hold ourselves accountable, making decisions for the right now versus the long run, all very econ, all very real in the lives of Mandy Robeck's third

graders. Every Halloween, my parents say I can eat as much Halloween candy as I want, but I always have to say, like, Aubrey, don't eat that much. You're going to get sick. Same. After the break, we learn how hard it is to keep politics and economics completely separate. Our classroom experiment, it's about to get real. Before the Great Recession, a lot of people in the world of finance thought that they knew what was going on and understood all the risks. But risk is quantifiable. It's knowable. What if

some things in the financial world just aren't? And I get to divinity school and we're talking about Gabriel Marcel, a philosopher, and Marcel talked about a problem versus a mystery in the context of like the human spirit. And it was almost the exact same thing. One investor's path to a different view of finance. One investor's path to a different view of finance. That's in our next bonus episode for Planet Money Plus listeners. More info at plus.npr.org or find that link in our episode notes. By the time we get to our last book, I've spent about seven hours in this class near Columbus, Ohio.

They have read a bunch of books. They've had a couple math lessons, recess. I know the kids now, you know, the girl who loves horses. There's the boy who lives for video games. Oh, and there's a girl who really doesn't like gym, but she really, really loves books. She's like my new best friend. And I've met lots of other people at Shale Meadows Elementary School. The principal, the vice principal, another teacher. The whole day, a communications person from the district has been sitting in whenever we've been reading the econ books. She was the one who sent me the email requesting I avoid politics or even actually political undertones. I had sent her the list of books we were going to read. Already today, we've covered credible

commitment, exponential growth bias, job matching in the labor market. And now it was time for our final book. Friends, I can't wait to share with you another story that Miss Erica brought with her. I had specifically saved this book for last. Three different economists had recommended it to me. And they said this book is about so much. Preferences and class, open markets, entrepreneurship, discrimination and economic loss. Some game theory in there too. I had been

building to this all day. I knew how to talk to the kids, how to ask them questions, how to get them to nerd out on econ. The book? The Sneetches. It is written by Dr. Seuss. So we know if we read stories about Dr. Seuss, we can anticipate what? Rhyming. Here we go. The Sneetches. Now, the star-bellied Sneetches had bellies with stars. The plain-bellied Sneetches had none upon thars. The star-bellied Sneitches live the good life,

and the non-starred snitches do not. The star-bellied snitches don't let the plain-bellied snitches come to their Frankfurter roasts, picnics, or parties, or marshmallow toasts. They kept them away, never let them come near, and that's how they treated them year after year. Katie, what did you say say you said it felt mean um that's kind of mean because like just because their bellies are plain and they don't have stars and it doesn't mean that they're not special right doesn't mean they're not special. Noah? It's almost like what happened back then, how people were treated like disrespected. I think that book was made in that time.

Like white people disrespected black people, but then they might stand up in the book. So let's keep reading to find out if they do stand up maybe a little bit. So when you say stand up, get included? Yeah. Yeah, that's what we're hoping for, right? Yeah. There's a lot in this book. That's the beauty of kids' books.

They're so simple and complex at the same time. And this is going so well. They're making connections. And I haven't even asked a question. Mandy Robeck keeps reading the Sneetches. A non-sneech, Sylvester McMonkey McBean, he rolls into town. And he sees how much worse it is to be a sneetch without a star than to be a sneetch with a star. Then quickly, Sylvester McMonkey McBean put together a very peculiar machine.

And he said, you want stars like a star-bellied sneetch? My friends, you can have them for $3 each. He sees an opportunity to profit. Then, of course, old Sylvester McMonkey McBean invited them into his star-off machine. Then, of course, from then on, as you probably guessed, things really got into a horrible mess. At this point, Amanda Beeman, the communications person with the school district, stands up. She looks really upset. She waves her hands to get Mrs. Robeck's attention to stop reading. I don't know if I feel comfortable with this book being one of the ones featured.

I just feel like this isn't teaching anything about economics, and this is a little bit more about differences with race and everything like that. So do you mind, Mrs. Robeck, if we pause this book? I mean, we have a list here of all the things. This is about preferences, open markets, economic laws. Yeah, I just don't think it might be appropriate for the third grade class and for them to have a discussion around it.

Are you okay with that? I'm okay with that. Okay. I just, as someone, I just don't think that this is going to be the discussion that we want it to around economics. So, I'm sorry. We're going to cut this one off. For the first time all day, the kids are really quiet.

They sit still on the rug, in their chairs, just staring up at the grown-ups in the room. So, is there anything else that we can pivot to? Um, I have lots of books. Then the kids start asking how the story ends. Amanda, the press person, addresses them in kid talk. Sometimes when you don't feel comfortable about something in your belly, you've got to just speak up about it. Right?

I didn't know what happened in the story. I don't remember. You know what? I think that's one that maybe we can ask with our parents at home. And that's one that maybe we can ask, you know, with our parents at home. And that's it. Our final lesson abruptly ends. I pack up my things, say goodbye to the kids, and leave. One of the economists who recommended the Sneetches was Betsy Stevenson, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, professor at the University of Michigan.

So after I got back from Ohio, I called her up and told her what happened. Wow. I mean, gosh, there's so much there that makes me sad. I mean, as you said, many people recommended The Sneetches as having a lot of economics in it. I mean, it's just a beautiful amount of economics. Betsy says my plan to keep politics and economics completely separate was never really going to work, not in the context of a story. I think economics is political. You know, we go back to the economic founders and remember, you know, Adam Smith was a pioneer in political economy, right? So the field is about thinking about society and economy together. And that's what we were doing with the third graders in the class that day,

looking at how economics exists in the larger world and in the smaller worlds these kids inhabit. Because economics doesn't exist in a silo. Neither does education. A couple days after our trip to the class, I reached back out to Amanda Beeman at the Olentangy Local School District to thank her, but also to ask what happened. The district responded in an email saying, among other things, quote, school districts across the nation are being scrutinized for book selections in our schools on both sides of the spectrum, end quote.

This very climate, Betsy Stevenson says, can make it hard to teach and talk about these ideas at any level. I think it's indicative of the challenges we're currently facing in our economic system and how we're struggling to come together to talk about them. The school district's communication person, Amanda Beeman, wrote, quote, when the book began addressing racism, segregation, and discriminating behaviors, this was not the conversation we had prepared Mrs. Robeck, the students, or parents would take place. There may be some very important economics lessons in the Sneetches, but I did not feel that those lessons were the themes students were going to grasp at that point in the day or in the book, end quote. So final lesson

in our experiment, teaching econ to third graders. Keeping politics entirely out of economics? Really, really hard. Planet Money has a record label, Planet Money Records, and we have one song out there. The song is called Inflation. It's sung by Ernest Jackson and Sugar Daddy and the Gumbo Roo. We're trying to make it a hit. Stream it wherever you listen to music. Today's episode was produced by Emma Peasley. It was engineered by Natasha Branch. It was edited by Keith Romer and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Our acting executive producer is Jess Chang. Thanks to economists Mary Claire Peet, John Taylor, and Jamie Wagner for their book suggestions.

And many thanks to Mrs. Robeck and her third grade class. Eufidar, Ariman, Ellie, Kavish, Noah, Journey, Aubrey, Gunjan, Natila, Maverick, Zander, Arian, Anshu, Vishvaditya, Freddie, Katie, Gabe, and Nick. I'm Erika Barris. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.