Occupy Wall Street protests are too big to ignore in the classroom

How to tackle the world of global finance, the banking crisis, government debt and recession in your classroom
fascinating statistics to get your pupils thinking plus free teaching resources
A member of the Occupy Wall Street movement
PJ White
Fri 14 Oct 2011 04.51 EDT

How long is a million seconds. Have a guess. Feel smug if you got anywhere near the correct answer: 12 days.

Now have another guess. How long is a billion seconds? Thirty-one years.

Really? Yup. A billion is a lot bigger than a million. High-five anyone you know who's reached the grand age of 31. They've lived a billion seconds. Crazy.

Try the quiz in class as a starter to exploring big numbers in the financial world. Yes, this is serious financial education - global economics, if you like. But fear not. Any enthusiastic and fearless teacher can do it. If students can feel intuitively how much bigger a billion is than a million they will have a handy lifelong skill. It's also a great starting point for understanding the banking crisis, government debt and the street protests known as Occupy Wall Street.

Numbers scramble many people's thought processes. So think short and simple, and link to real life examples that students might care about.

For example, remember the controversially-scrapped Education Maintenance Allowance. Hands up who knows its annual total cost? Around £580 million. A lot of money? Using the time analogy above, assuming a rate of a pound a second, the cost of EMA could be expressed as 19 years. Compare it with total government spending for a year. At £700 billion that translates to around 21,700 years. Perhaps EMA wasn't so costly. Anyway, it's a useful perspective.

Students could be asked to work those comparisons themselves, even to source the original figures from the internet. Ask them to list financial sums they would like to know more about, perhaps footballers' salaries or the total school budget. Set the figures in context and see if attitudes change to them. When a politician boasts of spending several millions on a project, will students be impressed?

Take students' budding relationship with financial numbers to the next level. A trillion is a thousand billion - 1 followed by 12 zeros. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years. You may gasp. It is an unfeasibly large number for the ordinary human brain to wrap itself around.

Banks and complex financial institutions (technical terms for what the redtop tabloids call greedy bankers) got rich from trading in unregulated loans and insurance products that were apparently worth trillions, yes trillions, of dollars but turned out to be worthless. Yes, worthless. No one knew whether they were worth anything or not, which amounts to the same thing. That became apparent in the credit crunch of 2008, when years of cheap and easily-available loans suddenly ended.

If the complex financial institutions had been ordinary-sized business they would have gone bust. They weren't ordinary. In 2008 the Royal Bank of Scotland had assets worth £1.9 trillion. It owed £1.8 trillion. Both figures are a lot more than twice the total current UK government spending. When people use the phrase "too big to fail", they are not messing about. They are not saying that failure would be a bit awkward or unpleasant. They are imagining catastrophe.

So the banks were not allowed to go bust. Governments stepped in to save them. Government money comes from taxes. Tax income is not enough to cover government spending, creating a gap known as a deficit. After a tense political stand-off this summer, the US deficit was raised to $14 trillion. Time for another gasp. President Obama is committed to reducing it by $4 trillion over the next ten years. That means school closures and cuts in health insurance, social security and projects to help those on low incomes. People are already suffering shortages of basics, including food, following the recession. One in seven households in the US is food insecure

That is the background to the Occupy Wall Street protests. Across the nation people are losing jobs, homes and going hungry while US government funds are being used to support financial institutions widely blamed for the economic troubles. The central demand of OWS is to free politicians from the influence of wealth and financial interest.

If you feel that numbers are really beyond you or the class, there's still plenty to discuss in this. Has anyone a good thing to say about bankers? Do street demonstrations achieve anything? How are the police dealing with protestors? Who believes that banks have been greedy? Will bailing them out be morally hazardous because it will cause them to behave the same way in future? Is a bank that is too big to fail simply too big.

General talk is good, but the discussion will be a lot more informed if you think about the numbers first.

PJ White is a freelance education writer and journalist. He runs the youthmoney website for financial education. You can follow him on twitter @petewhite

For more resources about finance and understanding money for 14-18 year old pupils look at the game of Fortunity which helps pupils to learn how to confront financial challenges in a fun and engaging way.

There is also the Money Quiz which offers a fun way to start off any discussion about money and is ideal for students aged from 11-14.

Older students may also benefit from looking at this guide to politics and capitalism.

Or for younger pupils aged 5-7 there is this teaching resource about the value of money.


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