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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!
1/
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.”
2/
“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. Maybe even dictatorship, since he just decided this himself.
3/
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.
4/
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.
Secure in an unearned position of power, I made it so that effectively none of the market’s rules applied to me.
So in the end, I think maybe I learned something about real-world capitalism after all.
/end
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
@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.
1/
@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
@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.
@drgroftehauge @inthehands It's also the way to lose, of course.
@fuzzychef @inthehands There's no difference between coming second and dead last in these games.
Maybe life is the same.
@drgroftehauge @inthehands In real life, there's a huge difference between losing half your money and all of it.
However, it is another real-world lesson: the rich can make huge gains because they can afford to take huge risks.
@fuzzychef @inthehands Oh, I meant other people's money. Professional trading.
@drgroftehauge @inthehands The thing I took away from my experience was two-fold:
1. Any smart, ration-acting person who can spend a lot of their time on following the market can make money at it.
2. But that person needs to be an insider if they want to keep that money.
So, the lesson for professional trading is: be an insider.
@fuzzychef @inthehands Funny thing though, I remember some of my classmates talking about how we should invest in companies that had upwards trajectory. Which to me shows that most adults have the trading prowess of 13 year old boys from the wrong side of town.
@inthehands @fuzzychef my intro to classroom economics was in 4th grade in the early 90s. I managed to start a bank, then promptly abused my access to deposited funds to buy all the real estate.
That made it difficult for other students to open shops, and also impossible for me to cover when they came to withdraw their money.
Long story short, I got a government (teacher) bailout and a lecture about the then-recent Savings and Loan crisis.
@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.
@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
@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.
@inthehands
* Privatizing air, next step after privatizing water
* If capitalists could figure out how to put a meter between people and the sun, global heating would have stopped 50 years ago because the world would have long since been run on 100% solar power.
* After the coup in Chile, Pinochet abolished the socialized medicine system — for everyone but the military and police.
@inthehands waiting with bated breath