The Economics of Recess

It’s a bit of a blast from the past but you’ve got to check out this old episode of Disney’s Recess. The series followed six fourth graders, T.J. Detweiler, Ashley Spinelli, Vince LaSalle, Gretchen Grundler, Mikey Blumberg and Gus Griswald. Think of it like The Breakfast Club for elementary school.

Episode 23A was titled “The Economics of Recess.” The school is seized by a Monster Sticker craze, and the students begin using stickers as currency. T.J. starts with nothing but through hard work and investments, he becomes the richest kid in school and goes mad with power. It chalked full of bogus economic theory, and contains all the standard tropes of proletariat propaganda, but for an economics geek like me, it’s just delicious.

How fitting that the first use of the Monster Sticker currency is to bribe authority figures, in this case hall monitors. I also especially like the line, “It’s a free country, outside the playground that is.” So true. It’s also especially telling that the way to disrupt entrenched economic and increasingly political power is to implement an alternative currency.

It may seem like a flight of fancy, but the use of collectibles as currency rings true with my experience of recess. Who remembers Pogs or Marvel Trading Cards?

When I was a kid we all played in the street, and when the ice cream truck drove by everyone ran inside to get a dollar from their parents. I rarely had money and never liked buying consumables because it meant the money was lost. So, I always bought the only non consumable the ice cream truck sold:baseball cards.

I didn’t watch baseball. I didn’t play baseball. I didn’t even like baseball. But I collected baseball cards for an intuitive economic reason. They were a better store of value than ice cream. Then I discovered other kids collected baseball cards too, and best of all they wanted to trade.

I organized my collection into teams, and within each team according to stats. I had no idea what the numbers meant, and still don’t, but I understood that high numbers added to their subjective value. I eventually traded away all my baseball cards for Marvel trading cards, which had a higher subjective value for me.

By forgoing ice cream for baseball cards from the ice cream truck, and trading baseball cards for Marvel cards at recess, I collected a complete set of the First Edition Marvel Trading Cards without setting foot in a comic book store. Other kids from my street have only memories of ice cream, but I still have this collection.

Then of course there were Pogs. Each player had his own collection of Pogs and at least one Slammer. Pogs were silver dollar sized cardboard rounds, usually printed with comic book characters, and Slammers were a discs made of metal or plastic or some other heavier material. Each player contributes an equal number of face-down Pogs to build a stack, then players take turns throwing their Slammer on the top of the stack, scattering the Pogs. Each player keeps the Pogs that land face-up. The Pogs that land face-down are stacked again and the game goes on.

Pogs were banned by the school faculty because they said it was gambling, and it was I suppose. I guess playing marbles, or any game that kids play for keeps is like gambling. But the school also banned trading baseball cards and Marvel cards during recess.

I distinctly remember learning something about currency from this. It seemed to me that school was saying that Pogs and trading cards were money. Pogs were money for gambling, like poker chips, and trading cards were money for trading, like dollar bills. And it immediately struck me as utter hypocrisy that the school ran their little student store, trading pencils and stickers for FRNs, but banned me trading baseball cards for Marvel cards.

Pogs left the playground because the game always drew a crowd which got attention from the yard duty. There were still a couple of secluded spots where kids played, but the hype died down.

On the other hand the black market in trading cards thrived under the ban, because a trade could be concealed. Trades occurred discreetly between two people, and we all knew who collected what.

Because the cards were contraband, the risk of confiscation became as issue. Where I used to bring my whole collection with me to school, after the ban I only brought a small selection I was looking to offload. Where traders used to spread out their offer on a table, now they concealed their trades in small handheld stacks. We became like numbers runners, memorizing not only our own collections but each other’s collections. High end trades were scheduled a day in advance, because we left the valuable stuff at home.

Suspiciously absent from the Economics of Recess episode is any market intervention from the school faculty, in fact throughout the Recess series the playground is an anarchic world where students resolve their own problems without appeal to authority. But in the real world, I learned a lot of intuitive economics on the playground. Not only foundational economic principles like subjective value, but also the impotence of prohibitions, and the resilience of the black market.

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