When you sit down to a game of Brass you’ll have five different building types in front of you, each enticing in their own way. Really Brass straddles two different games–an efficiency exercise in which you try to balance money expenditures against victory points with a limited number of actions and a deeply interactive economic and geographic game where opportunities and incentives rise and fall with every action. The smoky complexion of the game board highlights the industrial period in which it’s set, and the players are tasked with building factories across north west England as profitably and efficiently as possible. I wouldn’t want to play it without adequate lighting in the room. The new version from Roxley Games is beautiful, though it pushes the line of “too dark”. What does this have to do with Martin Wallace’s Brass (now called Brass: Lancashire)? It’s the best example I’ve played of a game that captures this elegant economic process. I think (and hope) the students picked up on my excitement, but I’m here to tell you today that the spontaneous order of the market is downright beautiful. Entrepreneurship is about predicting such things and taking advantage of it, pushing this economic process further and further”. “And when demand shifts right, the price and quantity sold go up, but what does that do? What does that signal to entrepreneurs now that stuff is getting sold more at higher prices? They’ll want to get in on that, shifting supply right, resulting in even more economic activity at lower and lower prices. At this point I think I sort of hopped in delight. Someone correctly suggests that demand shifts right. “Regardless, what happens on a large scale if, say, some immigrants arrive in a country? What does that move if we consider goods and services as a whole?” At this point I wave my arms about in a kind of crossed wiggly motion. “Now, of course, the price of something doesn’t really reach this theoretical equilibrium because the lines are always in flux”. I see their eyes start to glaze, but I’ve got two minutes until the end of class and time for one more demonstration. How is this relevant to the debate topic of energy policy? Well what happens when an energy source is taxed? Or subsidized? How does that shift those diagonals, changing the market clearing price and quantity? What happens with competing goods complementary goods? I quickly ponder and dismiss the idea of mentioning elasticity. I emphasize that the graph is super abstracted–a representation of an idea, not mathematical precision. So I started with the basic supply and demand graph the square-L border tracking price and quantity and those intersecting diagonal lines representing supply and demand. Nor will I comment on the regret they might have felt for raising their hands when I asked if they wanted this explanation. How much they enjoyed or learned from this brief flurry of graph-making and gesticulating I will not comment on. Last week my high school debate students got to experience me trying to explain the fundamentals of microeconomics in 15 minutes.
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