After eight years of apps, podcasts, finance influencers, and new high school requirements, the average American adult still gets about half of basic personal finance questions right. Gen Z, the generation that grew up with a budgeting app on every phone, scores 38%. Adults with the lowest scores are twice as likely to be stuck in debt and three times as likely to be financially fragile. One car repair or one missed shift, and everything wobbles.

Teaching more does help. Across 76 randomized experiments with more than 160,000 people, those who got financial education knew more and made better money decisions. When Georgia, Idaho and Texas required personal finance in high school, young adults there ended up with higher credit scores and fewer missed payments. So why hasn't the overall number moved? Because knowledge fades. What doesn't fade is habit.

I think we've been asking the wrong question. We keep asking what kids should know about money. The better question is when they start practicing money decisions. You don't learn to ride a bike by reading about balance, but learning about money by trial and error gets expensive. So how do kids practice somewhere safe?

Dr. Stephen Day has been answering that at his own kitchen table. He and his four kids run a mini economy with real jobs, play money, a household store and, yes, taxes. In this conversation, he walks through how to set one up in an hour on a Saturday, why parents should do chores and get paid too, and what his family says instead of "opportunity cost." We also talk about how he went from academic journals to a book deal with a major publisher.

More resources at www.decodeecon.com

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Brandon Sheridan is back on the show. In August, he told us the economy was moving sideways. A month and a half later, I asked him if anything had changed. Short answer: not much.

Then we got into the conversation I've wanted to have with him for a while: his new paper, with 25 coauthors, on what students bring to the first day of an economics class. If you teach economics, this one is for you.

Here’s my takeaway up front: in this job market, you have to prove yourself more than ever.

Friday’s jobs report was the last one before the midterm elections, and it was boring. Boring the way a cold labor market is boring. Nobody is getting laid off in big waves. Nobody is getting hired either.

This week on the Decode Econ podcast, Dr. Jeni Al-Bahrani joins me to talk about what that looks like on the ground. Jeni teaches the senior capstone at Miami University. In fall 2024, about 80% of her seniors had a job lined up before graduation. This fall, it’s about 30%.

Our students want accountability; they want to be challenged, but when you hold them to higher standards, they are pushing back. Jeni called them “Ouchie” moments. If you have noticed that your students are changing, this episode is for you.

We also talk about the three hours at the Apple Store, a lesson in switching costs, and a server who told us the pretzels don’t come with butter, not “in this economy.”

Our economy is changing, so are your students

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In a classroom, I can teach you how the world is supposed to work. Study abroad shows you how it actually works. Dr. Darshak Patel joins me to talk about taking students to Kenya to watch a universal basic income program up close, and why he would rather learn a new country alongside his students than teach one he already knows.

Darshak is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Kentucky. We met there as graduate students. Since then, we have written many papers together, co-founded The Econ Games, and continue working to make economics accessible to students.

In this episode, we cover

1. The importance of global education and how to get started
2. How the Econ Games Started
3. The importance of community in economics

Did you study abroad? Tell us in the comments what lesson stuck with you.

Show Notes

1. Art of Econ paper- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2612992
2. Darshak’s previous podcast appearance https://youtu.be/7clw4vTIi5I?si=cAOI4wMl4um3f3y9
3. The Fed Decision https://youtu.be/NR12z1Rs07U?si=fDxdDPW6qrPbdSIU
4. Once Brothers- ESPN 30 for 30 paper https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.4284/0038-4038-2013.299
5. Once Brothers Documentary https://youtu.be/fVw5vnukwJ4?si=TBYhqMkE74IWvS-C

Development economics explained simply: what's the difference between the macro and micro sides of the field?

Development economics sounds like a topic for "somewhere else." It's not.

In my latest Decode Econ conversation, I sat down with two economists who study the same big question — how economies, and the people inside them, actually develop — from completely different altitudes. Dr. Amrita Dhar tracks capital flows into emerging markets and, closer to home, how U.S. states split the bill for K-12 schools. Dr. Shreyasee Das studies what happens inside a household in rural India after the lights come on.

That second one stopped me. Shreyasee's research on rural electrification found that as women gained more independence, information, and control over their own lives, fertility often dropped — but in some households, so did stability and safety. Progress doesn't move in a straight line. Sometimes it just moves the friction somewhere else.

We also got into something I think about a lot: development economics isn't just a lens for poor countries. Flint's water crisis, schools without air conditioning, sewage problems in the rural South — the same forces we study abroad are sitting here in our own zip codes.

And we closed on something I want to actually do something about, not just talk about: why the researchers doing this work — especially women — aren't the ones you see on podcasts and panels. That's turning into a real project between the three of us now.

Resources

Amrita’s Resources

1. Poor Economics by Abhijeet Banerjee and Esther Duflo https://amzn.to/4cIhgFd

2. Analytical Development Economics - Kaushik Basu https://amzn.to/4cBAQTG

Shreyasee

1. Amartya Sen's Capability Approach Amartya Sen's Capability Approach https://amzn.to/4gXNf5C

2. Amartya Sen's Tanner Lecture #1: Equality of What https://tannerlectures.org/lectures/equality-of-what/

3. Amartya Sen's Tanner Lecture #2: Standard of Living

https://tannerlectures.org/lectures/the-standard-of-living/

4. Women's Role in Economic Development by Ester Boserup

https://amzn.to/4AbIJsZ

No homework. No midterms. No final exam. In this episode of Decode Econ, I sit down with Dr. Shishir Shakya, an economist at Appalachian State University, who redesigned his entire econometrics and statistics courses around one question: what happens if we stop preparing students for the job market of 2022 and start preparing them for 2028?We get into:Why he cut his curriculum down to the "absolute theoretical minimum" — and how that made his students learn fasterHis AI-based oral exam system that catches understanding gaps multiple-choice tests missThe uncomfortable question I pushed him on: if students can't use AI, why can professors?Why he thinks every student — marketing, supply chain, or otherwise — needs to start thinking like an engineerWhat "flourishing" means in an AI economy, and why creative destruction isn't just a threatIf you're an educator, a student, or just trying to figure out what skills actually matter in an AI-driven labor market, this conversation will change how you think about learning itself.Connect with Dr. Shishir Shakya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shishir-shakya/ Subscribe to Decode Econ for weekly breakdowns of the economy and your place in it.00:49 – Intro: How AI is disrupting education02:17 – No homework, no midterms, no finals — what replaced them11:22 – The moment AI broke his old teaching model16:05 – Inside his AI-powered oral exam system24:33 – "If students can't use AI, why can professors?"39:06 – Preparing students for the job market of 2028

Startups just had a record funding quarter — $285 billion in Q1 2026. Here's what the headline doesn't tell you: 43% of that went to one company's raise, and the rest of the money is piling into AI. So if you're a student founder building anything else, what does "record year" actually mean for you?I sat down with Dr. Jeni Al Bahrani, who teaches entrepreneurship at Miami University's Farmer School of Business, and Sarah Bosse, a senior who went from a student in Dr. A's class to her TA to her mentee.

We get into why entrepreneurs can't outsource economics to their accountant, the pricing mistake Sarah watched half her classmates make as a TA, why rising interest rates change what investors are willing to fund, and why TAM/SAM/SOM is really a demand-estimation problem dressed up as a pitch-deck slide. We also get into why I've stopped calling them "soft skills" — they're durable skills, and they're the actual product of a good entrepreneurship classroom.Timestamps:0:00 – Why should entrepreneurs learn economics at all?10:00 – The pricing mistake that burns first-time founders17:00 – Interest rates, the $285B funding headline, and what it means if you're not building AI33:00 – TAM/SAM/SOM: the market-sizing mistake that isn't really about math44:00 – Why "soft skills" is the wrong word, and what workforce-ready actually meansIf this episode connects to something you're building — or teaching — leave a comment and tell me what's landing.