Economic Lessons from the Musical Hamilton

Abstract

The musical Hamilton is the most popular musical in recent history and might be the best single album one could use to teach economic concepts. We explore how the songs in Hamilton can be used to teach about opportunity cost, trade-offs, time preferences and time-inconsistent preferences, the Federal Reserve System and central banking, economic freedom, and more. We also provide discussion questions that educators could use to teach concepts presented in Hamilton. †Susquehanna University 1 That said, there are some books or plays that could be used. For example, new research shows how one could use the Berenstain Bears books (albeit using multiple books) or Shakespeare plays (see Yetter, 2016 and Green, 2002, respectively).

The Most Magical Way to Teach: Disney Music In The Classroom

“…Lesson plans and teaching opportunities have been identified for ESPN's 30 for 30 series (Al-Bahrani and Patel, 2015b), various Pixar films (Mateer et al, 2021), and various films from the Star Wars franchise (Smith, Rousu, and Hackenberry, 2021). O'Roark (2017) details how economic concepts can be found in various superhero storylines, many of which fall under Disney's Marvel Studios, while Rousu and Conrad (2017) outline economics concepts covered in the musical Hamilton, which was adapted by Disney into a musical film in 2020. While resources have been developed and identified that utilize visual media to teach economics concepts, the main resource missing from the "Disney Teaching Vault" has been the music from their associated soundtracks.…”

Teaching economics using scenes from <i>Superstore</i>

“…Others have focused on using media to target particular concepts like how markets work (Kuester and Mateer 2018;Rousu 2018;Mateer, and Vachris 2017); game theory (Burke, Robak, and Stumpf 2018;Geerling, Mateer, and Addler 2020); marginal revenue product (Wooten and White 2018), and the Coase Theorem (Murphy, Schuler, and Wooten 2020). The use of media extends beyond individual television series or movies and has included the use of Broadway shows (Rousu 2016;Rousu & Conrad 2017), superheroes (O'Roark 2017); Kollywood movies, i.e., South India (Bose 2020); and a wide variety of comedy, commercials, and music videos (Wooten 2018;Ziliak, 2015).…”

Music 4 Econ: https://music4econ.com/

“…This is demonstrated by the publication of multiple papers explaining how music can be used to teach economics. Papers have been written targeting particular songs (Krasnozhon, 2013), Broadway shows (Rousu and Conrad, 2017) various genres (Melichar, 2018;O'Roark, Holder and Mateer, 2018;Roussu, 2016;Wooten, Geerling, and Calma, 2021), and even student-created music based projects (Al-Bahrani, et al, 2017;Holder, et al, 2015;Geerling, et al, 2019). Other work focuses on using music to teach particular courses (Van Horn and Van Horn, 2013;Ben Abdesslem, 2022) and specific topics (Geerling, et al, 2021;Rousu, 2018, Rousu, et al 2021.…”