Collection
Ethics, Economics, and Social Issues

Help your middle school and high school students think critically with 16 ready-made lessons about ethical issues. These lessons help students understand why ideas of right and wrong are vital to economic decision making.

 

In this collection of lessons, students will create and support an argument for or against a sweatshop boycott using primary and secondary sources; consider perspectives related to whether or not businesses have a social responsibility during a simulation, primary source discussion, and creating a marketing pitch for a company’s board of directors; play the roles of doctors and patients, demonstrating the motives of self-interest, duty, and character in economic transactions; learn how their bias impacts their decision-making and research.

Lesson

Can We End Housing Insecurity?

Students compare the economic costs and benefits of helping people who are experiencing housing insecurity and consider the ethical implications.
Key Concepts: AP Microeconomics, Basic Economic Concepts, Cost and Benefits…

Should Private Companies Operate Prisons?

Students analyze and rank the four general goals of corrections to help them determine their personal beliefs about what prisons...
Key Concepts: Cost and Benefits, Firms and Production, Government Goods and Services…

Can You Be Fashionable and Ethical?

Students “produce” blue jeans and make business choices about production to simulate the decision of changing from more expensive, but...
Key Concepts: AP Microeconomics, Basic Economic Concepts, Cost and Benefits…

What Can We Do About Pollution?

Students play charades to mimic noise pollution and consider the question "what can be done if someone's choices are putting...
Key Concepts: AP Microeconomics, Externalities, Externalities…

Should We Allow a Market for Transplant Organs?

Should you be able to sell your kidney? Students explore the ethics and economics of organ donation while learning about...
Key Concepts: Allocation, Barriers to Trade, Basic Economic Concepts…

Can You Allocate Ethically?

In Lesson #4 from the Ethics, Economics, and Social Issues curriculum, students work in groups to analyze allocation methods, apply...
Key Concepts: Allocation, Allocation, Allocation…

Does Self-Interest Prevent Economic Justice?

In Lesson #7 0f the Ethics, Economics, and Social Issues curriculum, students explore basic ideas of justice by examing government...
Key Concepts: Cost-Benefit Analysis, Incentives, Marginal Analysis

Do Businesses Have Social Responsibility?

In Lesson #6 of the Ethics, Economics, and Social Issues curriculum, students will participate in a simulation and discussion to...
Key Concepts: Business Organization, Externalities, Firms and Production…

Can You Conduct Research Ethically?

In Lesson #2 of the "Ethics, Economics, and Social Issues" curriculum, students learn about positive and normative economics and how...
Key Concepts: Cost-Benefit Analysis, Marginal Analysis

Is Efficiency Ethical?

In Lesson #5 of the Ethics, Economics, and Social Issues curriculum, students role-play to understand both the power and limits...
Key Concepts: Scarcity