Summer camp capitalism

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2024

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Summer camp is a classic rite of passage in the U.S. It's a place of self-discovery, where kids come to make new friends and take on new challenges. But what if it were ALSO a place where children came to learn how to survive in a free market economy?

That's part of the idea behind a summer camp at JA BizTown, in Portland, Oregon. Kids at the camp run tiny fake businesses in a tiny fake town. There are retail stores and restaurants, insurance companies and power utilities. As camp begins, a gaggle of child CEOs take out business loans from their peers in the tiny fake banking industry – and they spend the day racing to run their businesses profitably enough to get out of debt before pickup time.

On today's show, Planet Money takes a romp through capitalism summer camp. Will the children of BizTown be able to make ends meet and pay back their loans to the banks? Or will a string of defaults send this dollhouse economy into financial collapse? It's Shark Tank meets Lord of the Flies.

This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Sally Helm. It was produced by James Sneed, and edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Gilly Moon. Planet Money's executive producer is Alex Goldmark.

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0:23.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:28.0	Asher Spear is preparing for the
0:30.0	Asher Spear is preparing for the biggest job interview of his life and he's feeling pretty nervous about it.
0:37.0	There are potentially dozens of other qualified candidates in the running and Asher hasn't had a job in a very long time.
0:44.3	How long have you been unemployed?
0:46.3	11 years.
0:47.3	And why is that?
0:48.3	I'm a child.
0:49.3	I can't have a job.
0:50.3	Yeah we should mention Asher hasn't worked for 11 years because he is in fact only 11 years old.
0:57.0	I mean I can do stuff like mowing people's lawns and stuff, but these dang laws prevent me from a real pain job.
1:04.4	Dang you, child labour laws.
1:07.0	Dang you!
1:08.3	Asher cannot wait to get his first W-2.
1:11.2	So this summer, when he and his parents were looking into
1:14.4	potential fun camps, they decided to send him to a place where he can pretend to
1:19.9	join the workforce. Where in the world are we right now?
	...

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