Paul Cantrell
This post from @MissingThePt brought me back to my 9th grade Civics class:
https://mastodon.social/@MissingThePt/112649562587904467
Our teacher decided that we needed to learn about the virtues of the Free Market, so he devised a special plan: students would own resources in the classroom, and rent them out to other students. Educational!
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Paul Cantrell
He assigned classroom resources at the start of the year by giving us each a fixed budget of imaginary money and holding a single-round silent auction. Each of us could write down a bid on anything in the room, and the winner would get to charge the other students imaginary class money to use it. No pay, no use! Anything in the classroom. Things like chairs or the pencil sharpener, he said.
I wrote down “air.”
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Paul Cantrell
“Oh, no, you can’t do that,” he said. And he invalidated my bid.
I decided that if I couldn’t make people pay me money to stay alive, then this wasn’t really the free market. The teacher was not particularly receptive to this thought, or my suggestion that destroying private wealth just to keep everyone alive was really strong-government regulation, maybe even socialism.
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Paul Cantrell
Deciding that the whole “experiment” was bunk and had a pre-ordained trajectory, I decided to work the system. I got myself appointed Treasurer of our little class government. This job involved two tasks:
1. Some light bookkeeping.
2. Designing and printing our class money.
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Paul Cantrell
I printed unlimited money for myself, a fact that nobody seemed to notice or care about, and thus effectively excused myself from the entire experiment.
So in the end, I think maybe I learned something about real-world capitalism after all.
/end
Paul Cantrell
A consistent result of classroom attempts to simulate free markets seems to be “it’s all about who has power:”
https://m6n.io/@fuzzychef/112650119052080465
Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:
@inthehands This reminds me of something that happened in one of my classes. We had a statement of account, from which we received "money" as reward for certain things, and could spend on "prizes". It operated like a checkbook. The teacher signed off on each entry adding or removing money.
I gradually adjusted the shape of one of the digits from one to another over a month long period - critically over a page boundary. I think it was something like slowly turning a 1 into a 7. My handwriting always was terrible...
Eventually, I started spending this money I had granted myself out of nowhere. One of the other students asked "How did Ryan get all that money?", and the teacher said "they've been saving up for a long time". Lol. Rofl. Lamo.
Paul Cantrell
@wordshaper
More than their creators intended, I think, and certainly not in the way they intended
Dan Sugalski
@inthehands So, accurate simulations then?
Paul Cantrell
@lonespelunker
Oh, I’ll give you one guess
Lone Spelunker
Wow. So did the teacher exempt himself from having to pay for stuff, or was he willing to subject HIMSELF to the free market forces at play, too?
Paul Cantrell
@markgritter
I’m honestly not sure what he was thinking, only that it wasn’t really thought out much at all. My best guess is that the lesson was supposed to be “in this country we pay for things with money, and the kids need to learn about budgeting or something.”
The fact that my unlimited money-printing did not and could not have caused inflation sort of tells the story right there.
Mark Gritter
@inthehands So capitalism, but only on existing resources, and without any competition? Like, was he _trying_ to make the point that rent-seeking is bad? Capitalism But Everything is A Monopoly?
Maybe I'm making the unfair assumption that nobody could bring in extra chairs to compete and actually establish some sort of market, but I kind of doubt it.
James Umbanhowar
@inthehands my father taught a class where the students played a version of Monopoly where they were able to change the rules however they wanted, with the exception that no one could leave the game.
He was a political scientist, so the class was really about political economy, i.e. power.
Paul Cantrell
@jumbanho
Ha, chaotic evil at its best
Paul Cantrell
@jason
I mean, I can’t imagine a world where “a money-printing individual can enrich themselves without limit and without accountability” is a good idea. But there is some kind of good principle lurking in there somewhere.
Jason Petersen (he)
@inthehands hot take: it’s good none of the rules apply to sovereigns that print money and they should stop pretending like they do.
But otherwise, yeah, this all sounds Very Education System
Jenniferplusplus
@inthehands omg this thread, I love it so much
Paul Cantrell
@drgroftehauge @fuzzychef
Poetry.
Morten Grøftehauge
@fuzzychef @inthehands We had a similar game in 7th (?) grade but not local, just the 20 most traded stocks in the country. There was a prize for gaining the most fictional money. Of course the winners had a single company in their portfolio - teaching us that the way to win is to maximise risk.
Berkubernetus
@inthehands I should have won the game by like $1m. But, given the win, the admins of the game decided that I must have had inside information and disqualified me. There was no appeal.
Coincidentally, the "winner" was the grandson of the president of the school board.
This was also a great education into how US Capitalism and the stock market actually works.
2/fin
Berkubernetus
@inthehands In my (really good) HS economics class, we got to play a citywide stock market game, where econ students pretended to be traders and followed the stock market (this was sponsored by a local newspaper). In deciding positions, I looked at local company Digital Computing and decided that it was tremendously overvalued. So I put all my money into short-selling it.
This was November 1987.
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