I think that I'd be in favor of inflicting Civ V upon any economics class in high school ; if there ANY being taught in schools today . The Game teaches economic planning, food, production, trade and commerce; allowing folks to look ahead to see how things come together that makes a profit .
Sadly economics is not a required course in highschool or college these days in America (unless you are taking a major that requires it as a prerequisite). I think some highschools don't even teach it which has often been a major pet peeve of mine. I have no idea why the department of education decided that every student needed to take biology but not economics, the latter would be FAR more useful and teach things they could actually apply to succeed after graduation. Nothing against biology, I loved the course, but THAT seems like it should be a curiosity class instead of many other subjects.
I feel strongly about this and I'm gonna talk about it lol.
It'd be nice if the average citizen understood these basic concepts, then they wouldn't get into as much debt or vote for ridiculous politicians that promise things that don't work.
Case in point: taxing businesses directly is silly. A business is not a person, it's what supports the economy by buying/selling and hiring people. it does NOT help employees or buyers but just raises prices as businesses just amortize any costs they get. You can tax individuals when make money from their business but don't tax the business for existing and don't tax a business for investing its profits into growing as this creates jobs. I see taxing businesses heavily as just directly hurting the economy as it raises entry barriers to starting new companies and entrepreneurship and makes everything cost more. It also serves to keep established businesses in control ironically because its harder for new companies to get started and compete with all the red tape.
The same goes for setting a MINIMUM wage at AVERAGE living level. That's silly as well, it erases entry-level jobs and makes it harder to get a new job. Why do you think unemployment for the young generation is so high in places like California and jobs are good in places like Tennessee that didn't set minimum wage too high? I can remember over the past 15 years fast-food like MacDonalds going from having 15 people working in the back to 4-5 today. Why? Minimum wages. MacDonalds doesn't want to make their food expensive because their whole selling point is cheap&fast! So they instead make their existing employees work harder and hire less of them. Oh, and your food also takes 2-3x as long to make because of it. And we wonder why young people have a hard time getting jobs...if these places were allowed to hire new people for less they'd immediately do it, but they can't because these places have to make money to survive. So we've erased millions of jobs to make those with jobs already more comfortable. I liked the old way where you started at a low wage that was below average living level but quickly got raises if you worked hard. Places like MacDonald's actually used to work this way to encourage employees to work hard and stay since getting new low-paying jobs was pretty easy. Good luck getting a raise there today.
I don't approve of wealth redistribution or over 50% inheritance taxes either, but at least it isn't directly doing the opposite of what they say and actually HURTING the economy. But anything where you cost businesses money goes directly into making them have to spend less (hire less with minimum wage) or charge more. Very few businesses operate with the large profit margins these people claim. Doing this stuff doesn't make them make less money, it makes less jobs and makes you have to spend more. This has always been the way the economy works. If the average american took basic economics I they would recognize this stuff and not elect politicians who do these things.
In my opinion most of the policies over the past decade have done nothing but artificially raise the cost of living, cause inflation, and cause unemployment, and the ironic thing is they claim these things are doing the opposite. They get away with this because the average person has a short memory span and doesn't realize the bad side effects of these policies are DELAYED. They occur over the next year or so. But by that time the politician is elected or out the door so what do they care eh? It's all about manufacturing issues to argue about and it doesn't matter if they are real or not as long as they can get people to take about it and care. I'm pretty jaded even at 26 after seeing the stupid things that are said during elections and the way the economy keeps getting worse as we move farther from free markets. The reason it hasn't been far worse is the government keeps borrowing way more money then it makes to pump into the economy. This can't last forever. Keynesianism is NOT an sound economic theory. It basically just says you can create the semblance of prosperity and affect the economy in the short term by borrowing money and subsidizing/paying into different sectors of it. I'm sure it looked attractive back in the 70's when there were still decades before we'd be so far in debt before we could get out of it, but the repercussions are coming. Ironically, whoever is in office when things get bad will probably get blamed, instead of the real perpetrators over the past few decades. A president only gets blamed for what happens in his 4 years after all, which is why this cycle will continue and no one will fix the problems. Because stopping now will immediately cause a depression. Many sectors of the economy now depend on the government dumping cash into it every year. :/
I know this forum is multicultural and everyone loves to bash America, but this critique goes for most of the Western world and we're hardly unique in these problems. The best economies, in my opinion, are all in Asia at this point. It doesn't matter how much GDP they are putting out, but how healthy the economies are and not running a massive debt means they will recover far quicker and take our business away if we get a global market crash from all these slow problems. China, Japan, and Korea are already starting to take over global markets in many sectors now, how easy do you think it will be if we keep hurting our businesses competitiveness through all these taxes and regulations? I get the idea behind these things, and some of them like the FDC and pollution regulation are healthy, but many of them are unnecessary or could be accomplished more simply.
To bring it back on topic: teaching students gold management and time management in a game like civ5 is a good start, but since there are no delayed loans it still doesn't warn against the use of credit cards
. I guess the closest thing is borrowing money for gpt during a golden age lol.
Just out of curiosity, how many other civ5 fans/nerds are free market advocates?
