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AP Macroeconomics

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Online for the 2023-2024 School Year

Teacher: Howard Richman

Email: hrichman@aphomeschoolers.com

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Costs and Requirements:

Who can register: Any homeschooled student who is a sophomore, junior or senior in high school. There is no application. If this description does not state that registration is closed, there is still room in the class. 

Microeconomics Option: Some students will want to take the AP Microeconomics exam as well. If so, you can study for it on your own or you can take Dan Burns second semester microeconomics class, also available from PA Homeschoolers Online. Dan Burns class will start when the active portion of my class ends, using the same textbook.

Highly interactive: Students discuss economics, respond to each others’ essays, and play economics games on the class website. Students are expected to log on to the website every weekday.  

Class Description: Are you the sort of person who likes to talk about the effects of government policies and what the government should or should not do? You may be a born economist. Macroeconomics is the part of economics that studies government actions and looks mostly at problems of the economy as a whole such as inflation, unemployment, recession, international trade, and long-term growth. We will specifically learn about economics theories of important economists from Adam Smith, to Keynes, to Milton Friedman.

In this class, you will learn how to predict the effects of government actions. For example, "What happens to unemployment rates when the government raises the minimum wage or cuts taxes?"

You will learn the skills necessary for analyzing economics problems: how to use the vocabulary of economists, how to draw “supply” and “demand” curves, how to read economics graphs, how to pull the economy out of recessions or inflationary spirals and how to promote long-term economic growth.

The most fun part of the class is the economics simulation games. Each game will be played twice (each run lasting two weeks), and there will be four games during the year.

  1. The Business Game: You will either be a burger retailer or a wholesaler. Wholesalers arrange sales to retailers and decide whether or not to build new factories and/or invest in improved technology. Retailers sell to a fictional public and the amount they sell depends upon their market share, price, and advertising. This game teaches the microeconomics of supply and demand through a business simulation.
  2. Guns or Butter Game: You are the absolute dictator of a country and you need to decide how to spend your money. You can also trade with your allies to take advantage of each country’s comparative advantages. But watch out, if you don’t build enough weapons you could be attacked. This game teaches about the importance of investment, maintaining defensive strength, and comparative advantage in international trade.
  3. Investment Game: You are both a government and an investor. As a government you use fiscal and monetary policies to try to attract investment. As an investor you try to pick the best countries (from among the other countries) for your new factories. This game teaches some of the relationships between money supply, government spending, taxation, interest rates, and private investment.
  4. Economic Warfare Game: You will be either the business or the government segment of a country. Businesses are trying to make more money than other businesses and governments are trying to advance their economy while using currency manipulations, spies, and counterspies to gain competitive advantages over other countries. This game requires an understanding of international capital movements and foreign trade, the main factors that affect the relative prices of currencies.

Class Schedule. The class will start the last week of August with one week off for Thanksgiving and two weeks off in the winter, including Christmas Day and New Years Day. The daily classes and assignments will end at the end of January. You would still need to review in order to prepare for the final exam that parents administer in April and the actual AP Macroeconomics exam in May.  In 2023, 54% of the students in the class scored 5's on the actual AP exam (equivalent to a college "A+" or "A") and another 17% received "4's" (equivalent to a college "A" or "A-").  

Want to Get a Head Start? I recommend two excellent video series that you can watch before class starts:

Teacher qualifications: This will be my 26th year teaching this class to homeschoolers over the Internet. I graduated with a BA in Economics from Carnegie Mellon University and I co-authored a 2008 economics policy book, Trading Away Our Future, and a 2014 economics book Balanced Trade with my father, a Professor Emeritus in economics from the University of Pittsburgh, and my eldest always-homeschooled son, an associate professor of political science at Old Dominion University. 

 

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