CHAPTER 9: An “Economic Way of Thinking”: Approaches and Curricula for Teaching about Social Issues Through Economics

After reading this passage, one might be tempted to think it comes as a prediction of headlines in the year 2011. Instead, it is a quote from Economic Education for Citizenship written by Steven L. Miller in 1988. What is interesting to note, however, is not that Miller’s fictitious scenario so closely mirrors current events in 2011—as well as the issues of public policy underlying them—but that these issues have remained so remarkably similar in the intervening two decades. Indeed, issues such as globalization, oil prices, the debate over the minimum wage, tax policy, the crisis in Africa, prescription drug policy, poverty, military spending, and so on and so forth, remain as pertinent today as they were in 1988.