Have you ever wondered how your parents got you your favorite toy, delicious pizza, or that cool hair cut? Do you ask yourself why some people in our country are rich while others are poor? To understand these and other related issues, you should start by learning about what the economy is and how it works. The economy has a lot to do with how money is made and how it is spent. People called economists study a subject called economics, which looks at how money and goods are moved around, including ideas like supply and demand and ways that people spend, invest, or earn money.

• Ways Kids Can Learn About Economics: This article has ten different ways that parents can help you learn about economics.
• Teaching Economics to Kids: It’s important to start learning about money and how to use it wisely when you’re a kid, so you’ll make good decisions when you’re an adult.
• What Is Economics? Economics is a subject that studies how people make decisions about using resources.
• About the Subject of Economics: Economists use things like sociology, psychology, and math to look at how people make decisions about their money, time, and goods.

Any economy consists of buyers and sellers. Buying and selling things is the basis for any economy. For a trade to take place, the buyer and seller have to agree on a price at which goods or services will be exchanged. Goods are things you can hold in your hand, like a piece of fruit or a toy, things that have to be grown or made by sellers. Services are things people sell that you can’t hold in your hand, like time or talent: For instance, if someone pays you to mow their lawn or fix their fence, you’re selling your services.

• What Is Economics All About? Understand the basics of economics by reading through this slide show.
• Economics and Choices: A lot of economics comes down to choices about how people will spend their time or money.
• Products Versus Services: Learn more about the main differences between goods and services here.
• Characteristics of Goods and Services: This document goes into detail about goods, services, and the differences between them.

When people make decisions about spending, they have to think about needs and wants. While needs are things that we can’t do without, wants are goods and services that we don’t need but wish to have. Examples of needs include clothes, shelter, and food. Wants are things like ice cream, toys, and designer clothes.

• Finding the Balance Between Needs and Wants: An important part of being able to manage your money well is knowing which things are needs and which are wants, then making sure that you pay for your needs first.
• Needs Versus Wants: Try out these activities that can help you figure out what your wants and needs are.
• Understanding Wants and Needs: When you only have a limited amount of resources like money and time, you have to figure out how to balance your needs and wants to work with what you have.
• Wants and Needs Activity: Teachers can use this activity to help you and your friends learn about wants and needs.

A key idea in economics is supply and demand. Demand refers to how much of a product people want: How many people want it? How much will they buy? How much will they pay? Supply is how much of a product there is. These two things work together to set the prices of products. For instance, if there are a lot of bananas to sell but nobody wants to eat them, the price of bananas will fall: If supply is high and demand is low, sellers need to drop their prices until someone buys what they’re selling. But if supply is low and demand is high, prices go up. Think about a hot new toy or limited-edition collectible and how things like these sometimes disappear from store shelves, then show up for sale online at twice the price. If everybody wants something but there aren’t very many, sellers can charge more, knowing that someone out there will want the product enough to pay more for it. When the supply balances out with the demand, so the amount available is close to the amount people want to buy, the price reaches equilibrium; it settles in one place and stays steady.

• Supply, Demand, and Market Equilibrium: When supply and demand are out of balance, prices can rise or fall dramatically.
• Supply and Demand: A Basic Law of Economics: Supply and demand are behind a lot of what goes on in the economy.
• Basic Economics: Supply and Demand: Look at this page to learn more about how supply and demand influence prices.
• Supply and Demand: Supply and demand are said to have an inverse relationship. That means that when one goes up, the other goes down.
• Price Theory: When there’s more than one seller of a product on the market, they will compete for buyers, lowering their prices until they reache what the buyers are willing to pay.

Think of some of the things you would like to have. You might want to buy a new video game and have plenty of money, but the game you want is sold out. Or you might really want a new laptop, but you don’t have enough money. Scarcity is when there isn’t enough of something, and it makes people make tough choices. When a product is in scarce supply, a seller can raise the price. But when money is in scarce supply, you need to make tough choices about what you’ll do with the money you do have and what you’ll live without.

• Scarcity and Choice: Scarcity can lead to difficult decisions about what will be done with the resources that exist.
• Choice: The Core of Economics: People have to make choices and forego certain products in order to meet their needs.
• Scarcity, Choice, and Opportunity Cost: Opportunity cost is the loss of the value of the next-best thing to what you choose to do with a resource. For example, if you spend $60 on a video game, the opportunity cost might be a movie out with a friend the next day: Now that you’ve spent that $60, you don’t have it to buy movie tickets.

Interdependence means that we all depend on other people for some of our needs. Since no single person can make everything that they need, we have to buy some of the goods and services we need or want from others.

• How Interdependent Are You? A lot of the things you buy and use come from other places. A big part of economics is trade, and on a global scale, that means making things and exporting them to other places, then importing things made somewhere else.

Inflation is a trickier economic topic, but basically, it’s when prices go up faster than the amount of money people have can keep up. When there’s inflation, you’ll be able to afford less of a product for the same amount of money than you would have before inflation kicked in. A little bit of inflation is normal over time, but too much at once can really hurt people and the economy.

• What Is Inflation? Inflation happens when prices for goods and services go up.
• The Effects of Inflation on the Economy: A little bit of inflation can be good, but a lot of inflation can be very bad.
• An In-Depth Look at Inflation: There are both good and bad things about inflation.

Another thing you might hear people talking about when they talk about the economy is the stock market. Stock is an investment in a company: When you buy a share of stock, you basically buy a piece of the company. When the company makes more money, your stock grows in value, too.

• What Is the Stock Market? The stock market is a system that lets people buy and sell stock.
• How Does the Stock Market Work? This article explains the basics about the stock market, including what ticker symbols are and how people buy and sell stocks.