Economic lessons in children’s books lean left of center.

See Fairies, Witches and Supply and Demand by By MOTOKO RICH, NY Times, 8-20-11. Excerpts:

"Earlier this year, I picked up “The Saturdays,” by Elizabeth Enright, to read to my 7-year-old daughter. The novel, originally published in 1941, is about a family of four children being raised by their father and housekeeper.

I was struck by the chapter where Rush, one of the children, stops to watch a large snow-blower at work on a Manhattan street. A crowd gathers, and an old man grumbles that “hundreds of fellas” used to shovel the snow. “Nowadays they do it all by machinery. Ain’t no work for nobody.”

Aha! Capital vs. labor. And in “The Pushcart War,” by Jean Merrill, tenacious pushcart vendors battle a trio of trucking companies who band together to try to put the pushcarts out of business, leveraging cozy relationships with the mayor. Can you say cartel?

According to John Conant, director of the Center for Economic Education at Indiana State University, children’s books provide ripe material because literature deals with everyday life — a terrain shared with economics. Mr. Conant tries to help teachers tease out economic lessons from the books they regularly use in class.

One of the most common themes in books for young people reflects parents’ fears that their children will become “bad” consumers, said Marah Gubar, director of the children’s literature program at the University of Pittsburgh.

That often means rampant consumers are cast as villains, or at least losers."

"“In children’s literature,” she said, “there is often this offensive classism whereby the poor are virtuous and the rich are evil.”"

"Sometimes, economists think that children’s books get things wrong. Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax,” about the destruction of a forest by a greedy industrialist, “assumes that there is no economic system in place,” Mr. Conant said. In a modern capitalist economy, he said, the trees “would get very valuable as they got scarce, and the person with the property rights would harvest them at an economically reasonable rate.”

By and large, the economic lessons in children’s books lean left of center. “I think the writers are not particularly sympathetic to or don’t understand how a market works,” said Gary S. Becker, the Nobel laureate who teaches economics at the University of Chicago. “It’s not easy to convey that to a child. It’s not always easy to convey it to grown-ups.""