How do you explain inflation to a student who is working two jobs and raising kids? Brian Lynch hands them a cup of water with holes in it.

This week I sit down with Brian Lynch and Meena Beri, co-editors of TRECC (Teaching Resources for Economics at Community Colleges). The newsletter reaches about 3,000 economics instructors, many of whom are the only economist at their college.

We talk about:

• Brian’s leaky cup activity for inflation and purchasing power, and building supply and demand out of pool noodles, string, and painter’s tape
• Meena’s online students graphing equilibrium with crochet hooks and pipe cleaners
• The props that flopped, including a tricycle and a karaoke session
• Why today’s students seem less resilient, and what to do about it. Meena explains her procrastinator-type exercise and how it showed her that students weren’t lazy, they were anxious.
• Trauma-informed teaching, and why a $90 textbook can push a student out of college
• The hierarchy in our profession between two-year and four-year faculty, and why it needs to go

Meena put it best: relevance and rigor are not enemies. If you teach the only economics course most of your students will ever take, this episode is for you.

https://www.decodeecon.com/articles/brian-meena

After eight years of apps, podcasts, finance influencers, and new high school requirements, the average American adult still gets about half of basic personal finance questions right. Gen Z, the generation that grew up with a budgeting app on every phone, scores 38%. Adults with the lowest scores are twice as likely to be stuck in debt and three times as likely to be financially fragile. One car repair or one missed shift, and everything wobbles.

Teaching more does help. Across 76 randomized experiments with more than 160,000 people, those who got financial education knew more and made better money decisions. When Georgia, Idaho and Texas required personal finance in high school, young adults there ended up with higher credit scores and fewer missed payments. So why hasn't the overall number moved? Because knowledge fades. What doesn't fade is habit.

I think we've been asking the wrong question. We keep asking what kids should know about money. The better question is when they start practicing money decisions. You don't learn to ride a bike by reading about balance, but learning about money by trial and error gets expensive. So how do kids practice somewhere safe?

Dr. Stephen Day has been answering that at his own kitchen table. He and his four kids run a mini economy with real jobs, play money, a household store and, yes, taxes. In this conversation, he walks through how to set one up in an hour on a Saturday, why parents should do chores and get paid too, and what his family says instead of "opportunity cost." We also talk about how he went from academic journals to a book deal with a major publisher.

More resources at www.decodeecon.com

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Brandon Sheridan is back on the show. In August, he told us the economy was moving sideways. A month and a half later, I asked him if anything had changed. Short answer: not much.

Then we got into the conversation I've wanted to have with him for a while: his new paper, with 25 coauthors, on what students bring to the first day of an economics class. If you teach economics, this one is for you.