Cheap money buys jobs only for a while.

Steer the economy makes the room a set of central banks. When you seat the committees, everyone who has joined is dealt, in the order they joined, into committees of at least four, and each committee steers one fictional country, Country 1, Country 2 and so on, for eight years. Every member votes a rate each year, from 0% to 15%, and the committee's rate is its middle vote: with an even number of votes, the average of the middle two. A member who does not vote is left out of it, and a committee with no votes holds last year's rate, which its phones say before the votes close.

Each country's economy is a model, and every screen says so: the textbook three-equation model, with an IS curve whose real interest rate bites a year later, an expectations-augmented Phillips curve and Okun's law. People expect this year's inflation to be last year's, output above its potential pushes inflation up, and unemployment falls as output rises. Year 1 runs on the 4% every country starts with. The model also has a capacity law: an economy cannot run more than 4% above potential, and where that binds the big screen draws a wall beside the country's point.

Each year opens with its news, the same for every country, and a year closes when every member has voted, when its clock runs out, or when you press “Close year 3's votes now”, which shows how many have voted. Then the rates the committees set land on a strip, every country moves at once on the big screen's plane, unemployment across and inflation up, and its path inks behind it. The room's words say what the data did, and they name a shock only when every country moved its way. “Open year 4” opens the next year.

After year 8 the model's short-run lines are drawn, one for each inflation people might expect, then one vertical line at the model's natural rate of unemployment, 5%, with the band within one point of it shaded: the long run. The verdict counts the countries that ended near it and gives the range of their inflation. A last step ranks the countries by points off target, fewest first.

The big screen shows countries, never members: each country's number and its model economy, and the rates the committees set. Each phone shows only its own country: the dashboard its committee decides from, the rate it set and what that rate did a year later, and at the end its decade and its place. Try the screen-and-phone preview: the phone is yours, on Country 2's committee, and fictional classmates on six committees vote through the same runtime as the lesson.

A note for the teacher, with what the room meets year by year. Years 1 and 2 are quiet, with a government that wants unemployment under 4% before its election in year 4. In year 3 oil prices double: three points on inflation and two off output, so inflation and unemployment rise together. In year 6 the banks stop lending, three points off output, and they lend again in year 7. The oil shock echoes the 1970s, and a committee that fights its inflation hard meets the recession Paul Volcker's Federal Reserve chose to end it. The room's countries are fictional, and no screen or phone names a real central bank.