A Sweet Way to Introduce Economics

A great way to introduce Economics as a subject, particularly to those who have never studied it before, is to use the sweets demonstration. It goes like this...

"Now, you've all chosen to study Economics. What are you expecting to get out of this year?"

[mumbled comments about the economy, maybe about interest rates, money]

"Well, I decided that it's such a tricky subject that the blow would be softened by me giving you sweets. Not just any sweets, mind you, but Haribo. Hands up who'd like some Haribo. Ah, excellent, most people would. Well, I went to the school tuck shop and I asked for the biggest bag of Haribo they could sell me. And here's what they gave me [produce tiny fun-sized packet from pocket]. After all, I am a teacher earning 20p per year, so this bag does represent half my annual salary. Never mind, it'll be worth it if you understand about Economics at the end of it. Right, let's share them out..."

[some bright spark will, by now, have realised that there are far fewer sweets in the bag than pupils in the class - ask them to verbalise the problem]

You can then link this to the basic economic problem - we have scarce resources (sweets) and unlimited wants (well, more people wanting to eat than we can feed with one small bag of haribo).

You can then ask for suggestions of ways to allocate the sweets - my groups have been good at coming up with ways like shared equally, 1st come 1st served, based on need (although this prompted good discussion about how we define 'need'), competition, lottery, fight; relatively few suggest selling them off, although auctions did feature eventually on the list.

You can discuss merits of each allocation system and maybe make links to different types of economies/resources/products that use each system.