← All categories💰 Economics & Business
Economics sessions work best with real objects, real negotiations, and real stakes, even when the stakes are candy or chocolate. This category uses live auctions, insurance simulations, supply chain traces, and corporate structure maps to get at the concepts underneath: scarcity, inflation, risk, market power, the strange legal fiction of a corporation, the reason a bottle of water costs five times more once you're past airport security. It also runs the actual prisoner's dilemma, with real consequences on the table, so a kid feels the tension instead of just being told about it.
Thirteen sessions. Kids are good economic reasoners once you stop asking them to define terms and start asking them to make decisions. The moment a kid figures out that their money bought less after the government doubled it in the room, inflation stops being a vocabulary word and starts being something they understand in their gut.
- E&B-1Why You Cannot Have Everythingstart here~17 minWhy can't everyone just have everything they want? Scarcity: the basic condition that makes economics necessary at all.
- E&B-2Why Giving Something Away Can Make You Richerstart here~17 minHow can two people both come out ahead from the exact same trade? Value created just by swapping something you value less for something you value more.
- E&B-3The Money Inventorsstart here~26 minWhy does a slip of paper have any value at all? Barter to coins to paper to digital, and the trust holding it all together.
- E&B-4Founders of the Lemonade Empirestart here~25 minWhy do companies split ownership into shares? Incorporation and limited liability, explained through a kid-run business.
- E&B-5The Great Chocolate Auction~25 minWhere do prices actually come from? Bidding, bubbles, and why money's value depends on scarcity too.
- E&B-6Corporate Detectives~23 minDoes that 'different' brand on the shelf actually belong to a different company? Conglomerates, and how much of the market a few companies really control.
- E&B-7The Candy Insurance Company~22 minHow does insurance make money if it's paying out claims? Risk pooling: lots of small payments covering the occasional big disaster.
- E&B-8The Burger Investigators~23 minWhy is a burger cheaper some places than others? Tracing a supply chain back through every cost that built it.
- E&B-9Trapped on Price Island!~23 minWhat happens to prices when there's only one seller? Supply, demand, and what a captive market can get away with.
- E&B-10The Store Is Playing Mind Games~19 minWhy does a store offer an option nobody actually buys? Decoy pricing and anchoring, and how the first price you see rigs the rest.
- E&B-11The Price That Isn't Really $10~16 minWhy does $9.99 feel so much cheaper than $10? Charm pricing and cost framing, and how they quietly change what something feels like it costs.
- E&B-12The Bite-by-Bite Test~17 minWhy does the tenth bite of cake never taste as good as the first? Marginal utility: why extra satisfaction shrinks even as total enjoyment keeps climbing.
- E&B-13Betray or Team Up?~34 minShould you trust the other player, or protect yourself? The prisoner's dilemma, and why the smart individual choice can leave everyone worse off.
- E&B-14The Ruler No One Can Cheat~27 minWho decides how long a foot actually is? For most of history, whoever controlled the measuring stick, until a fixed standard nobody could secretly own replaced it.
- E&B-15The Cost You Do Not See on the Tag~19 minIs a free afternoon actually free? Not if there was something else worth doing instead, opportunity cost hiding where no price tag ever shows it.
- E&B-16Better at Everything, Still Better Off Trading~21 minWhy trade with someone worse at everything? Because comparative advantage, not raw skill, decides who should specialize in what.
- E&B-17Where Buyers and Sellers Meet~22 minWho actually decides a price? Nobody directly, buyers and sellers pull against each other until they land on one.
- E&B-18The Snack Bowl That Never Refills~20 minWhy does a shared resource run out even when nobody's being greedy? The tragedy of the commons, and how individually reasonable choices add up to collapse.
- E&B-19Ten People, One Step Each~20 minWhy does splitting one job into narrow steps beat doing the whole thing alone? Division of labor, and the two separate reasons it works.
- E&B-20Paid Per Dead Cobra~21 minWhat happens when you pay people per dead cobra? They start breeding cobras, and the cobra effect explains why.