Today’s Teens Learn Economics Through Memes
Reddit and TikTok teach valuable lessons about stocks & more.
In the past, if you wanted to learn about finance, then you would have to take a finance course, or watch a YouTube video, or read a book. You would follow the advice of Charlie Munger or Warren Buffet, or maybe you would even practice with an online stock simulator.
But today’s teens (and many adults) do it differently. They use memes.
Yes, that’s right — memes, those silly, random images and videos you see blasted all over the internet, are used to teach teens important lessons about the economy.
It all started with the subreddit r/MemeEconomy, created in 2016, which is “a place where individuals can buy, sell, share, make, and invest in memes freely.” It currently has 1.3 million followers.
This subreddit acts as a sort of simulated market — but based around memes, and its version of cash, Memecoins. Users will post different memes and meme templates and encourage other users to either buy or sell them, which people can do as well as creating balances and firms. The subreddit encourages people to “think, live, and breathe like a true meme investor.”
There’s even a magazine, called Meme Insider, that functions much like Forbes or Fortune would in the real world.
The concept of treating memes like stocks has also moved onto another platform in recent months — TikTok. When people see a TikTok they like or think will soon go viral, they will comment “investing on this TikTok at ___ likes,” noting how many likes the TikTok had when they invested, in order to mark that they had gotten in early.
There is also the “stonks” meme which is used ironically online to react to poor but funny decisions. Here’s an example:
Ultimately, there isn’t really a tangible benefit to doing well in the meme economy — your only reward is what many call “fake internet points.” But it does show the creativity of the internet — to be able to apply a real-world system to the world of memes, in order to discuss their cultural and “economic” value. And in this, people are developing incredibly important critical thinking skills that can end up being applied to the real world as well.
