Kyla Scanlon wants to remind us that “people are the economy”

Back in 2021, when GameStop stocks started to surge (along with other meme stocks like AMC and Blackberry), Kyla Scanlon started making TikTok videos. “I kind of noticed that there’s a gap between how people understood the economy and what was actually happening,” said Scanlon in an interview with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal.

This launched Scanlon’s career as an economic educator on social media, with hundreds of thousands of followers across both TikTok and Instagram. Her latest project is a book, “In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work,” where she hopes to help people better understand the nuances of the economy and that, at the end of the day, the economy is about people.

Click the media player above to hear Scanlon’s discussion with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal about writing the book. The following is an excerpt from the book’s introduction laying out her philosophy on economic education.

What do we really need to know about how the economy works? The answer is pretty simple. Most of it is intuitive, even if it doesn’t seem so.

Honestly, it might be for the best if you can’t remember a thing your teacher said about monetary policy, since our normal ways of thinking about the economy bake in untested assumptions, “the way we’ve always done it” models, and a troubling disconnect between theory and the concerns of real people.

I know the last few years of economic news have been . . . disorienting. Reality feels almost like a dream state. That’s because the algorithms controlling our news feeds reward alarmism over objectivity, and the Fed—and all other central banks, for that matter—purposefully speaks in vague, wordy language—known as Fedspeak, defined by the economist Alan Blinder as “a turgid dialect of English”— in an attempt to stop the markets from overreacting, and with the unfortunate side effect of confusing everyone.

In other words, the headlines are served to us with a nice topping of whipped cream: fluff and froth exacerbating each and every issue so we become as reactive and worried and mad as possible. After all, the key to capturing clicks is convincing people that you have the answers to their questions—that you hold the proverbial key to all the solutions. If you can overcomplicate simple things loudly, people will pay attention.

Economic literacy for all has been my mission since high school, when I dabbled in options trading and wrote about it for my first blog, Scanlon onStocks. After majoring in finance, economics, and data analytics in college, I worked in asset management at Capital Group, conducting macroeconomic analysis and modeling investment strategies. But I found myself spending more and more time making videos and writing my newsletter, trying to connect the dots between what’s happening and why for everyone out there sweating over the hypersensationalized, jargon-filled economic headlines.

This book is for anyone who wants to understand how the economy works and their role in it, anyone trying to make sense of the way monetary policy plays games with their bank account balance, anyone wondering why borrowing money is expensive and how a downturn could impact their home buying opportunities, anyone intimidated by the terrible terminology and dusty theories, and anyone who’s ever looked outside their window into the world beyond and said, “Hmm, what really is going on out there?”

You might have scratched your head over questions such as:

• Is our high (and constantly increasing) national debt really a threat?
• Is money just a meme?
• What is a “mild” recession, exactly?
• What are Fed cred, Fed flexing, and Fedspeak?
• If many companies are earning record profits, why are they passing costs on to consumers?
• What are the behavioral pushes and pulls that make economies work?

When you become an informed economic citizen, you become aware not only of how economic problems and concerns affect you but also how you can benefit from those problems and concerns.

At the most basic level, economics is the study of change: how to handle change and how to predict change. Money changes hands. Just think of when you buy something as simple as a coffee. You swipe your card, the money goes from your bank account to the store’s bank account and eventually back out into the economy as the store buys more coffee beans or pays their workers or their rent. That’s a lot of change, and that’s just one transaction.

The economy is also a reflection of volatile human emotions, going up and down, surging and quieting. Things can be quite unstable in the long term, but business cycles trend upward toward growth—but the struggle toward stability can lead to economic events such as recessions and downturns. But just like how most things trend toward okay-ness in life, so does the economy! We often forget that the economy is really a bunch of people peopling around. This book in your hands right now is an economic activity. The car you drive is an eco­nomic activity. Going to the coffee shop, buying a new pair of pants, eating an apple—everything has some element of economics threaded into it.

I know that sounds kind of dorky—“You’re the economy!”—but it’s true. And everyone deserves the opportunity to understand it.

Excerpted from IN THIS ECONOMY? How Money & Markets Really Work by Kyla Scanlon. Copyright © 2024 by Kyla Scanlon. Published in the United States by Crown Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved.