Economics in Children's Books

Harry Potter is unabashedly the Magical World of Monopolies. Almost every significant economic good or service is provided by a single provider from banking to wands to books and, finally, to school. The only exception is the entrepreneurial entry by the Weasley brothers into an existing but clearly underserved market. One suspects had Voldemort gone after the monopoly businesses rather than the government he may have been more successful in his evil ways.

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More from NYT article referred by Gans;

Such common tropes irk Ms. Gubar, an avowed liberal. “In children’s literature,” she said, “there is often this offensive classism whereby the poor are virtuous and the rich are evil.”

Some children’s books teach young readers what happens when there is an underdeveloped market economy. Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, said “Little House on the Prairie” showed his 8-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son how difficult life was in the absence of specialization. “For these guys, it was so tough,” Mr. Bloom said. “Pa built his own house, they grew their own food, they sewed their own clothes. You realize how easy it is to live now.”

Even advanced concepts, like organized labor, show up in children’s literature. Justin Wolfers, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, cited “Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type” by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin, a book about cows that withhold milk from a farmer until he provides electric blankets. Mr. Wolfers read the book to his 1-year-old daughter, Matilda, during the Wisconsin protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s attack on union rights.

Mr. Wolfers said the book also illustrated economic efficiency. A duck, the liaison between the cows and the farmer, persuades the farmer to install a diving board in the pond. “That costs the farmer almost nothing but the ducks really value it,” Mr. Wolfers said. “The diving board is a public good.”

Sometimes, economists think that children’s books get things wrong. Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax,” about the destruction of a forest by a greedy industrialist, “assumes that there is no economic system in place,” Mr. Conant said. In a modern capitalist economy, he said, the trees “would get very valuable as they got scarce, and the person with the property rights would harvest them at an economically reasonable rate.”

By and large, the economic lessons in children’s books lean left of center. “I think the writers are not particularly sympathetic to or don’t understand how a market works,” said Gary S. Becker, the Nobel laureate who teaches economics at the University of Chicago. “It’s not easy to convey that to a child. It’s not always easy to convey it to grown-ups.”

For the most part, the economic concepts conveyed in the books reflect values like generosity and equity rather than competition. Raymond Fisman, an economist at Columbia University, said his 3-year-old daughter’s favorite books teach the importance of sharing and gift-giving, values that might not lead to the greatest wealth in the real world. But, he added, “I doubt that 3 is the age where you start teaching people the brutal economic truths of grown-up commerce