Junior Achievement

When I taught 3^rd and 4^th grade Junior Achievement, the program included a discussion of the difference between needs and wants. Here’s an interesting exercise based on that idea.

Mentally go through all your possessions, placing an N for need or a W for want on all of them. What is the breakdown between down the N’s and the W’s? For how many was it hard to decide? What conclusions do you draw?

We are a society that can quickly deliver the wants but is slow to deliver the needs—in housing, in economic equality, in good jobs, for example. Media and marketing convince us that our wants are our needs (have what celebrities have, you deserve it, it needs to be bigger and better, you can’t be the best you without it).

Maybe corona can call us to strike a proper balance between wants and needs, for ourselves and our country.