Table of Contents

• Front Material
  
• Lesson 1 - Decision Making: Scarcity, Opportunity Cost, and You
  Students participate in a group activity that illustrates the concepts of scarcity, opportunity cost, trade-offs, and consequences.
• Lesson 2 - Applying a Decision-Making Model: You and Your Future
  Students participate in a group activity using the decision-making grid. They learn why two individuals may reach different decisions even when they use an identical decision-making model. This lesson helps students appreciate different points of view.
• Lesson 3 - Planning and Goal Setting: Can You Get There From Here?
  This lesson is in two parts. Part I focuses on how to set goals. Part II focuses on the influence goal setting has on exploring careers. Each part of the lesson can stand alone or can be used with Lesson 4, A Student's Potential for the Labor Market or Lesson 6, Financial Planning: Budgeting Your Financial Resources.
• Lesson 4 - A Student's Potential in the Labor Market: It's a Matter of Supply and Demand
  Students engage in two labor market simulations. One market is characterized by high wages and specific skill requirements; the other is characterized by low wages and low skill requirements. Students evaluate their own skills and plan ways to improve the skills in which they are weak.
• Lesson 5 - Price As A Rationing Method: How Does A Market Work?
  Students use the price mechanism to allocate scarce goods and one good which may not be scarce.
• Lesson 6 - Financial Planning: Budgeting Your Financial Resources
  Students participate in a motivational activity in which they evaluate the costs and benefits of impulse buying and its effect on living on a limited income. After they analyze a sample budget, students develop their own budget that might be appropriate upon leaving school.
• Lesson 7 - Business Decision Making: Are They Out to Get You?
  This lesson helps students understand that businesses must consider the cost of producing their products and how those costs affect their profits. Many teachers form elaborate classroom corporations in order to help their students gain an understanding of and appreciation for the business person's perspective. The class is involved in market research, product pricing, production, marketing, and distribution. Such corporations often require significant resources, planning, and production efforts. This lesson is designed for the teacher who wants to incorporate this information into the classroom without going through the lengthy and formal process of setting up a classroom corporation. Students play a role of a business manager of a cookie company. They go through the kinds of decisions business managers must make (can revise price, profit, service, quality, etc.). The lesson requires several days for students to do investigative work.
• Lesson 8 - The Role of Government: Who Needs It?
  Students view transparencies showing (1) a comic strip featuring a teenage taxpayer and (2) data on sources of federal government receipts. They participate in a group activity where they decide where the federal government should spend its money, and contrast their decisions with actual federal spending data. They evaluate local government services using information from a local phone book. They take part in a simulation where they analyze a problem of scarce resources facing local government under two scenarios: first, with the goal of "doing what is best" for constituents, and second, with the goal of seeking reelection.
• Lesson 9 - Collective Bargaining: A Negotiation Simulation
  Students will form labor and management teams to negotiate a contract. Two bargaining sessions take place, at the end of which a contract is negotiated or a strike or a lockout occurs.
• Lesson 10 - Consumer Credit: Buy Now, Pay Later, and More
  Through group activity, students analyze the costs and benefits of using credit cards to purchase goods and services.
• Lesson 11 - Housing: Deciding to Rent or Buy
  Students begin by learning to apply the decision-making process to a major purchasing decision, and they become acquainted with how to use a decision making grid. Next, students will participate in a simulation in which they are buyers and sellers of housing services. Some students will be buyers who must decide whether to rent or buy. Other students will be sellers who have houses or apartments to offer. Students must go to the marketplace to make their purchases.
• Lesson 12 - Advertising: Is Consumer Sovereignty Dead?
  Students are introduced to different types of advertising as well as the role advertising plays in a modern economy. They participate in a simulation that confronts the influence that advertising has on their behavior as consumers. Finally, they are asked to consider John Kenneth Galbraith's opinion on the degree of consumer sovereignty in the marketplace.
• Lesson 13 - The Basic Questions of Health Care: What? Why? How?
  In a group activity, students use the decision-making process to analyze the costs and benefits of purchasing health care.
• Lesson 14 - Savings and Personal Investments: If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?
  Students view a transparency showing the difference between economics definitions and personal finance definitions of the terms capital and investment. They read and discuss a handout listing four basic rules for wise investment decisions.
• Lesson 15 - International Economics: Why Should You Care?
  Students study an exchange rate table found in a local newspaper, and answer questions about exchange rates and their fluctuation. They read a short article on how a depreciation of the dollar could affect American consumers, and answer questions extending this concept. Students participate in a group activity where they analyze effects of a restrictive tariff on different groups of Americans, and draw conclusions about winners and losers from restrictions on free trade.