But in gaining them, we use up our scarce stockpile of resources, and we poison our delicate life-support systems. In other words, we pay a price in environmental quality for what we achieve in material comforts. In this simulation, you will encounter this very basic dilemma. You live in a simple economy made up of Producers, Consumers, Resource Developers, and Environmental Planners. Here the producers make things out of resources and sell them to consumers.
Consumers work at a job, earning money to buy and consume products.
The resource developers invest money in mines, oil wells, forests, farms, and water in order to develop resources, which they sell to producers. The environmental planners worry about the quality of the environment and the quality of life, and try to modify the economic system to achieve their goals. You will be assigned one of these roles. You will need a copy of the Tables to proceed. This reflects the fact that people in different occupations earn different amounts of money and therefore belong to different socioeconomic classes.