Some resources that I stumbled upon recently that I thought you could use in the classroom:

• From Visual Capitalist: History of Credit Cards (3:26)

• From Planet Money podcast (18 minutes): Put a Chip On It

“What took so long for it to get here? And now that it is here, why have so few stores adopted it? Today on the show, we bring you a brief history of what’s in your pocket. It’s a story of convenience vs. fraud—and it also includes a hippie inventor, the origin of the last great upgrade on your card, the magnetic stripe, and why it takes so long to “dip the chip.”

• From NY Times: Credit Cards Encourage Extra Spending

“When you vary the payment method, people are willing to pay more,” said Duncan Simester, a professor of marketing at M.I.T. who published a landmark paper on the subject in 2001. “You’re not forking over a dollar bill, so there is less sensation of loss.” With M.B.A. students as the subjects, Mr. Simester and a colleague, Drazen Prelec, held an auction of tickets to basketball and baseball games featuring two local teams, the Boston Celtics and the Boston Red Sox.

Some participants were told they would have to pay by credit card, others were informed that only cash would be accepted. When credit cards were an option, the M.B.A. students offered to pay roughly twice as much as they were willing to hand over in cash for the same tickets. “The most surprising thing was the size of the effect,” said Mr. Simester, who titled the resulting paper ‘Always Leave Home Without It: A Further Investigation of the Credit-Card Effect on Willingness to Pay.’ ”

He added that while it was not unusual to see spending patterns shift by 5 or 10 percent in experiments, “you don’t see too many examples where people offer double what they would have otherwise.”

• From Newsweek: Is Facebook about to become a financial services company too?

Facebook seems ready to radically reimagine credit cards—minus the “card” part, of course. It’s already a foregone conclusion that by next decade carrying a plastic card to buy stuff will be as anachronistic as hauling around a boom box to listen to music.

Facebook is reportedly going to give its Messenger app the ability to make payments, much like Apple Pay or Android Pay. This direction became evident way back in 2014, when Facebook hired mobile payments whiz David Markus away from PayPal to run Messenger. (Some enterprising folks at The Information analyzed Messenger source code and found telltale signs of a coming payments capability.)

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.