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Engaging Gen Z Students with Economic Lessons Featuring MrBeast
Educators must evolve from a mindset of teaching millennials about economics (Carrasco-Gallego, 2017) to focusing on the next generation of students: Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012.
We summarize the application of economic concepts in viral YouTube videos created by Jimmy Donaldson, known more popularly online as MrBeast. His viral videos are known for expensive challenges and are incredibly popular among Gen Z students. We present three lesson plans based on three different MrBeast videos that include episode summaries, key economic concepts, and multiple assessment questions. The lesson plans focus on core economic concepts and include opportunities to teach concepts such as scarcity, opportunity cost, marginal analysis, business costs, and production. With more than 170 million subscribers as of this writing and over 29 billion views, MrBeast’s viral videos offer a unique opportunity for creatively teaching economics to a new generation of students.
Read the Full Paper
This paper was originally published by the Journal of Economics Teaching
Economic Dynamism
The Price of Stagnation: Britain’s Retreat from Dynamism
We face a basic issue: we do not let cities or communities grow or die.
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London and the Architecture of Creative Growth
Preserving London's creative dynamism will require humility from policymakers and a commitment to keeping the city liveable.
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The New Frontier of Capital: What SpaceX’s IPO Tells Us About American Capital Markets
The ultimate trajectory of SpaceX remains uncertain, a reflection of the inherent nature of progress at the frontier rather than a flaw in the system that produced it.
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The middle class has not been hollowed out; rather, the overall decline stems from the net movement of families upward into the upper-middle class.
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Is Economics a Failure?
Rather than ending with “economics is broken,” Alexander Rosenberg’s deliberately provocative book 'Blunt Instrument' argues that “economics is useful for a different reason than economists often say.” That is a serious and worthwhile thesis.
Locke, Meet Claude
The concern is not regulation per se. It is a regulation that outruns its justification by arriving before the evidence, foreclosing the technology before its benefits are understood, and insulating the powerful from competition that would otherwise discipline them. That is the pattern worth resisting.
