Content Standard 18: Economic Fluctuations

Grade 8 Benchmark

1. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a basic measure of a nation’s economic output and income. It is the total market value, measured in dollars, of all final goods and services produced in the economy in one year.

Grade 12 Benchmark

6. One person’s spending is other people’s income. Consequently, an initial change in spending (consumption, investment, government, or net exports) usually results in a larger change in national levels of income, spending, and output.

Content Standard 19: Unemployment and Inflation

Grade 8 Benchmarks

1. To be counted as unemployed, a person must be in the labor force. The labor force consists of people age 16 and over who are employed or actively seeking work. Thus the labor force is the sum of total employment and total unemployment.

3. The unemployment rate is the percentage of the labor force that is willing and able to work, does not currently have a job, and is actively looking for work.

Standard 20: Fiscal and Monetary Policy

Grade 12 Benchmarks

1. Fiscal policies are decisions by the federal government to change spending and tax levels. These decisions are adopted to influence national levels of output, employment and prices.

2. In the short run, increasing federal spending and/or reducing taxes can promote more employment and output, but these policies also put upward pressure on the price level and interest rates. Decreased federal spending and/or increased taxes tend to lower price levels and interest rates over the long term, but they reduce employment and output levels in the short run.

Content Standard: Era 8

2. How the New Deal addressed the Great Depression, transformed American federalism, and initiated the welfare state.

Content Standard 2: Time, Continuity and Change

Human beings seek to understand their historical roots and to locate themselves in time. Knowing how to read and reconstruct the past allows one to develop a historical perspective and to answer questions such as:Who am I? What happened in the past? How am I connected to those in the past? How has the world changed and how might it change in the future? Why does our personal sense of relatedness to the past change?

Content Standard 6: Power, Authority, and Governance

Understanding the historical development of structures of power, authority, and governance and their evolving functions in contemporary U.S. society and other parts of the world is essential for developing civic competence. In exploring this theme, students confront questions such as: What is power? What forms does it take? Who holds it? How is it gained, used, and justified? What is legitimate authority? How are governments created, structured, maintained, and changed? How can individual rights be protected within the context of majority rule?

Content Standard 7: Production, Distribution and Consumption

Because people have wants that often exceed the resources available to them, a variety of ways have evolved to answer such questions as: What is to be produced? How is production to be organized? How are goods and services to be distributed? What is the most effective allocation of the factors of production (land, labor, capital, and management)?

Content Standard 10: Civic Ideals and Practices

An understanding of civic ideals and practices of citizenship is critical to full participation in society and is a central purpose of the social studies. Students confront such questions as:What is civic participation and how can I be involved? How has the meaning of citizenship evolved? What is the balance between rights and responsibilities? What is the role of the citizen in the community and the nation, and as a member of the world community? How can I make a positive difference?

• Great Depression Curriculum Unit Lesson 4: Dealing with the Great Depression