Affluenza

Affluenza:

is a one-hour television special that explores the high social and environmental costs of materialism and overconsumption.

There is a teacher's guide here and a sequel.

At the opposite of "affluenza" is voluntary simplicity, and there are varying lifestyles in between. Many people are touchy and defensive about their position on the economic scale, and many are resentful of folks with more, but everything's relative. What's frugal to one family is extravagant to another. Reading blogs on this subject, both from a personal finance perspective and from a moral perspective, has been a real education on how people respond to the issue.

High school personal finance and economics sites such as this one tend to focus on money management, which is part of it, but there are also ethical issues involved. What are they? Do those economics texts even mention them? How will they figure in planning for the future? This sylabus defines "ethics" as

limitations a society imposes upon it members

What limitations does our society impose on our economic lives? I hear capitalism praised without restraint, and I hear "success" equated to economic prosperity, and I hear universal health care condemned as "give-away" Socialism.... Are the limitations our society imposes as few as they seem to me?

Here's a report on Economic Mobility in America.

And while you're thinking about money, take a look at this and think about how intertwined our use of money is with our ethics.