Economy and the Unexpected Effects of Contracts - part of the *Preparing for Real Life* Sequence

[Gunnar Zarncke]

I remember a time when my father-in-law told me that elementary finance and law should be part of the school curriculum. And he meant practical aspects like what kinds of contracts are there, what kind of property, how they are enforced, default obligations and such. It made tremendous sense. Since then I wondered how I'd teach my children those missing parts.

Maybe I should note that I am from Germany and yes, we get classes in economy, but if I'm not very misinformed that is all more theoretical, abstract and high level, nothing that would help you e.g. start a company. Maybe it is different in other countries, but I doubt it. I have the vague feeling that keeping the masses naive about such basic processes serves the elites and the system in some way...

So I started talking about property, contracts and such constructions early and with real examples. Today I see the consequences of my cunning teachings. Watch the capitalism raise its ugly head:

My son saw himself motivated to clean up his room: His media time was used up and he needed to fix his room to unlock more (see Sequence about Media and Housekeeping) . It was overdue. Remains of lots of completed and uncompleted projects littered the whole room. In most cases he solves this alone but this time he chose to do "radio advertizements". He had hooked up an amplifier to a loudspeaker in the living room and we heard: "Fun in the basement - join cleanup and get a coupon for stuff for worth 3EUR - only now!" (including voice and sound effects). It seemed to work, his brothers helped and I saw them carrying bags of garbage outside. And also some loot. But it also got a conflict in the end when one of the coupons should be traded in for some earlier debt instead of for getting scrapped stuff. Was that a valid use? Presumably the debt (which was put down at that time in writing, yeah real seriously, in a folder called "contracts") was about other used stuff. So reasoning that the coupon should cancel that debt was comprehensible. But the But the creditor judged no, that was not what was written on the coupon literally (of course there was such a coupon). Angry the coupon owner pronounced his dissatisfaction and destroyed the coupon and left.

How did this end? To be continued...