Standards - Social Studies

Explain why productive resources are limited and why individuals, businesses, and governments have to make choices in order to meet needs and wants.

Explaining scarcity as a basic condition that exists when unlimited wants exceed limited productive resources

Explaining land (an example of a natural resource), labor (an example of a human resource), capital (an example of a physical or human resource), and entrepreneurship to be the factors of production

Explaining opportunity cost as the next best alternative to relinquish when individuals, businesses, and governments confront scarcity by making choices

Explain how rational decision making entails comparing additional costs of alternatives to additional benefits.

Illustrating on a production-possibilities curve how rational decision making involves trade-offs between two options

Explaining rational decision making as the comparison between marginal benefits and marginal costs of an action

Describe different economic systems used to allocate scarce goods and services.

Defining command, market, and mixed economic systems

Describing how different economic systems answer the three basic economic questions of what to produce, how to produce, and for whom to produce

Evaluating how each type of system addresses private ownership, profit motive, consumer sovereignty, competition, and government regulation

Describe the role of government in a market economy, including promoting and securing competition, protecting private property rights, promoting equity, providing public goods and services, resolving externalities and other market failures, and stabilizing growth in the economy.

Explaining how government regulation and deregulation policies affect consumers and producers

Explain that a country’s standard of living depends upon its ability to produce goods and services.

Explaining productivity as the amount of outputs, or goods and services, produced from inputs, or factors of production

Describing how investments in factories, equipment, education, new technology, training, and health improve economic growth and living standards

Describe how specialization and voluntary exchange between buyers and sellers lead to mutually beneficial outcomes.

Illustrating on a circular-flow diagram the product market; the factor market; the real flow of goods and services between and among businesses, households, and government; and the flow of money

Constructing examples of specialization and exchange

Illustrating on a table and graph the law of supply and demand

Describing the role of buyers and sellers in determining market clearing price

Illustrating on a table and graph how supply and demand determine equilibrium price and quantity

Illustrating on a graph of supply and demand how price movements eliminate shortages and surpluses

Illustrating on a graph how different factors cause changes in a market supply and demand

Explaining how prices serve as incentives in a market economy

Describe the organization and role of business.

Comparing types of business firms, including sole proprietorships, partnerships, and corporations

Explaining the role of profit as an incentive, including short-term versus long-run decisions, for all firms

Describing basic characteristics of pure competition, monopoly, monopolistic competition, and oligopoly

Explaining ways firms finance operations, including retained earnings, stocks, and debt, and the advantages and disadvantages of each

Explaining ways firms engage in price and nonprice competition

Recognizing the role of economic institutions, including labor unions and nonprofit organizations, in market economies

Explain the impact of the labor market on the United States’ economy.

Identifying regional characteristics of the labor force of the United States, including gender, race, socioeconomic background, education, age, and regional specialization

Explaining how supply of and demand for labor affect wages