In January 2009, Zimbabwe put a hundred-trillion-dollar bill into circulation.
That’s a one with fourteen zeros, and it couldn't buy a loaf of bread.
Of course it took them years to get there, but once it hit critical mass it happened very fast.
What’s the saying? “Slowly at first and then all at once,” yeah.
The government kept spending money it didn't have, and kept printing more to cover the difference. Prices went up, so they printed more, so prices went up again. By 2008 prices were doubling every day. Workers would get paid in the morning and rush to spend it at lunch, because by dinner it was worth half as much. Stores rewrote their price tags by hand two or three times a day. It cost a hundred billion Zimbabwean dollars to buy three eggs.
People preferred being paid in food and fuel, because actual bread and gas held value and the money did not. Everybody's savings just… disappeared. No one technically stole it. I mean, it was still in the bank or stuffed into a coffee can, but that didn’t stop it from turning into nothing. Of course the men who ran the printing press went on TV and blamed sanctions, foreigners, saboteurs—anybody but themselves.
A country was bankrupted and brought to its knees even though no crops had failed, and no war knocked down the factories. A handful of guys in charge of the money made a series of choices that each sounded fine at the time, but ended up turning a country used to grow enough food to feed a big chunk of southern Africa into somewhere you hauled cash in a wheelbarrow to buy less than you could carry home in one hand.
Something very similar happened in Germany in the 1920s, when one U.S. dollar was worth trillions of marks.
It destroyed the middle class, left deep social trauma, and weakened the republic to the point that it welcomed Hitler with open arms. It happened in Venezuela a few years ago too.
It’s the same playbook every time, and every country that runs it swears theirs is the special case.
Knowing that kids learn best by storytelling, we gave teens a front-row seat to the lessons Zimbabwe, Germany, and Venezuela learned the hard way in our Tuttle Twins and the Hyperinflation Devastation.
It's one of our teen Choose Your Consequence books—where the reader gets to make the character's choices and then see the consequences of those choices play out in dozens of possible storylines and endings.
In Hyperinflation Devastation, readers help teenage Ethan and Emily navigate being far from home when disaster strikes, and the local currency goes into a freefall. They have to figure out what to trade, who to trust, and how to eat when the cash in their hand is turning to garbage by the hour.
It’s a page-turning adventure that kids come out of actually understanding how fragile money is, how quickly a government can destroy it, and what that means for average people, just trying to survive.
We’ve actually got five books in this set. Each one drops the reader into a different mess—hyperinflation, a family losing their house to eminent domain, a town handing all its power to a guy who promises to fix everything, what happens when a natural disaster strikes, resources become scarce and society stops being polite, and more.
The whole set is on sale right now, with all five books going for just $59. If you've got a teenager who thinks economics is boring, this is a fantastic way to teach them important economic principles in a way they'll actually remember and apply.
You can shop the sale here.
— Connor
