The Sadly Prophetic Relevance of Our New Book

Happy Monday!

I’m writing to you, once again, from my home office. I’m guessing you’re reading this, once again, from your home as well. What a time to be alive!

I figure that you might be getting sick of hearing the same old voices, so I thought I’d give you a chance to hear from the illustrator of the Tuttle Twins books, Elijah Stanfield, for a change.

Elijah recently posted something on Facebook that I think is worthy of sharing to an even larger audience. He said:

I was concerned that the latest Tuttle Twins book was too full of economic principles. It is so loaded with knowledge that each page could start a discussion that could last days. (By the way, we’ve developed a homeschool curriculum that facilitates those discussions.)

But just a couple of weeks since being printed, the choice to create this book now feels prophetic with what’s happening in today’s “messed up market.”

Understanding this information will benefit you significantly in the coming months.

If the supply chain is working why are there shortages of toilet paper and groceries?

How could these shortages be quickly resolved?

How do 0% interest rates affect you, and what choices can you make to minimize being harmed by the market distortions that will follow?

How do bailouts and market subsidies stunt innovation and enable corporate irresponsibility?

How is this affecting you?

What solutions are better than bailouts?

Of course I could try to answer these questions without you buying the books—but stories are funner, and you can see the pictures. 😉

Elijah isn’t just a great illustrator and friend—he’s also a pretty smart dude. And he’s right! There’s no way we could have known when we wrote The Tuttle Twins and the Messed Up Market that its messages would become so pertinent so quickly.

I’m not going to say that I’m happy about it; I wish that the lessons in this book were merely educational and not quickly becoming a real time guide to what can go wrong, and how quickly what people value or need or feel can affect markets and in turn, affect nearly every aspect of our lives.

As with all of our other books, we included a Glossary of Terms at the back of Messed Up Market. Check it out:

Delayed Gratification: Resisting an immediate reward in favor of a later reward instead.

Incentive: Something that induces a person to action.

Interest: A fee charged to a person who borrows money.

Microenterprise: A small business employing only a few people.

Opportunity Cost: What a person misses out on by choosing an alternative option.

Praxeology: The study of human action.

Risk: The chance something bad will happen.

Subsidy: Monetary assistance, typically given with no expectation of repayment.

Trade-off: Reducing or losing one option in favor of increasing gaining another.

We also offer some discussion questions at the back of all of our books to help parents delve deeper into helping their kids understand what they’ve just learned. These, added to the questions that Elijah pointed out, make for a pretty fantastic overview of human action, markets, entrepreneurship, and government intervention:

1. Why don’t banks just let people borrow money for free?

2. What is wrong with bailing out people who made poor choices?

3. Are there things for which you seek instant gratification?

4. What type of microenterprise can you start?

5. What incentives do you have to make money?

We certainly didn’t plan to write the perfect book for this time, but it turns out that we really did.

If you’re looking for ways to help your kids (and maybe even yourself or other adults you know) make sense of all the crazy things happening in the world right now, you should really check out The Tuttle Twins and the Messed Up Market.

I can promise you that your kids will walk away knowing more about economics than a lot of adults… and nearly all members of Congress.

— Connor