FINANCE FOR TEENS Our homeschooling family didn't sign up for this class, but there's lots to learn from economic turmoil.

• Author: Tuccille, J.D.
• Position: LIFESTYLE

THERE MAY BE no better education about the uses and abuses of money than simply being alive right now. Inflation? Recession? Investment risks and opportunities? Supply chain disruptions? Regulatory distortions? We're all soaking in an intense economics immersion class, not that any of us ever intended to register for these lessons. I'm treating it as an opportunity to enhance my son's education.

Employment plays a major role in these lessons, since the shrinking labor participation rate has revived opportunities for teenagers willing to work. My son, Anthony, landed a job at the local supermarket and now fields frequent offers of more hours as his short-staffed managers try to fill the schedule.

At the supermarket, Anthony sees empty shelves alternating with unexpected gluts of some items. Inventory has become unpredictable because of lingering disruptions from pandemic lockdowns and the ongoing fracturing of the world into economic blocs.

"They're completely out of paper towels," Anthony told me one day, soon after the store was on the receiving end of a seeming peach avalanche. "You'd think they'd be able to plan this better."

"They used to," I told him. "But you can't just turn economies on and off without causing big trouble." That turned into a discussion about the lockdowns of the last couple of years and their effect on labor, production, and supply.

Conversations like that can lead to larger lessons. Fortunately, Milton Friedman's 1980 Free to Choose miniseries, which explains how people are enriched by markets and impoverished by government intervention, is available on Amazon Prime. So are free market videos by Swedish historian Johan Norberg, including a 2011 update on Friedman's series. Norberg's recent work on YouTube displays a broad appreciation for innovation and classical liberal ideas.

But to dive deep into money-related issues, you must turn to the written word. So Anthony's homeschooling curriculum included a thorough reading of Henry Hazlitt's classic Economics in One Lesson, which has sold more than 1 million copies. First published in 1946, the book was last updated by the author in 1978, during a period of high inflation resulting from fiscal and...