Mounds View High economics team wins national title

(Mounds View High School students Jacob Weightman, Emily Ruan, Abraham Chen, and Sam Rush at the 2015 Minnesota Economics Challenge, April 7. Photo by Paula Keller)

Four students from Mounds View High School went to the National Economics Challenge and came back with the national championship after defeating a team from Carmel, Ind.

The winning students are Abraham Chen, Emily Ruan, Sam Rush, and Jacob Weightman. Their coach was Martha Rush, a social studies and economics teacher at Mounds View High School.

Martha Rush can't remember what the winning question was but she does remember the answer.

"The answer was Ricardian equivalence," Rush said. "Emily knew what that was."

Ricardian equivalence is a proposition used to argue that consumer spending isn't affected by government stimulus.

The team took the title in the Adam Smith Division, for students in advanced placement or honors economics classes, on Monday in New York City. Each student received $1,000 in cash, not including the all-expenses-paid trip to New York.

This is the first time Mounds View High School has won the National Economics Challenge℠, and the third time the school has competed at the national level. Eight different Minnesota high schools have reached the national finals in the past 15 years, more than any other state.

Litte Falls High School, a perennial power in the David Ricardo division for smaller schools, won the title in 2012 and 2013, and was first runner-up in 2014. That school's team did not compete this year, however.

Mounds View represented Minnesota after winning first place in the state Economics Challenge competition, held last month. They then advanced to the National Finals as one of the top four highest scoring teams at the National Semi-Finals competition, outpacing over 10,000 other students to win the all-expense paid trip to New York City.

The challenge is the only national economics competition for high school students. Curt Anderson, a professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, established the competition in Minnesota in 1986, and the competition became a national program in 2001.