How is it that basic economic literacy has so fallen by the wayside for our young people? This 15-minute cartoon can’t have a target audience older than 10 (in it’s time), but the majority of adults I know don’t possess even this level of knowledge on the subject.
I don’t claim to have a perfect explanation for why that is. Have we outsourced our critical thinking to a dangerous degree? Have we become reliant on a one-size-fits-all education system to be the source of all knowledge, and then ignored any oversight? Is it simply a matter of rational ignorance, or has entertainment grown so robust that kids no longer have the attention span for cartoon ducks talking about Rai stones?
The great likelihood is that there are many factors, some benign and some less so, that combine to shift our culture. And of course, I have no real evidence that our current generation is any less economically literate than the generation that watched this cartoon – for all I know, the words of Scrooge McDuck fell on deaf ears even then, and the reason we’ve stopped making cartoons like this is because people realized they didn’t work.
Regardless, I was pleased to stumble across this little gem. And whether in the interest of economic or historical literacy, I’m happy to pass it on.
The Opportunity Machine 