I want to talk about how we can train young children as soon as they’re able to grasp a story, as soon as they’re able to follow along while you’re reading a book to them.

How can we get them to start to embrace important principles of liberty, and important economic concepts as well? It turns out that it’s possible, and I’ll talk about a few examples that I’ve tried to do in my own work with children’s books.

My number one recommendation for training young students is to employ the power of stories. Humans have used stories, both real and fictional, to convey and preserve important principles for millennia. Stories are very important and very useful when we’re trying to preserve important ideas. All stories have a basic structure in which the characters start in some initial state, they confront a conflict that disturbs the state, then they act to resolve the conflict.

The ending state is either some return to normalcy, a new and better state, or in the case of tragedies, a sad state that the characters failed to prevent. In all cases, the characters change and make sacrifices in their attempt to achieve a better state of affairs. That’s the arc of any story. If it’s a good story, if it has those sorts of elements, it means that it’s a part of this grand history that we have of using stories to preserve some information…..

In conclusion, while reading, writing, and attending lectures are essential for training young economists, good stories take students further than these standard educational elements. Every good economist needs to be able to draw a supply and demand graph, but inspiring anyone—not just children—to take part in the intellectual battle of our day will require stories.

We already have a mighty villain, and I see in this room many great heroes. So let’s make sure that our children are not only equipped with what they learn in the classroom and in textbooks, but inspired to become the hero.