On the narrow point of teaching a 10-year-old economics, I think aquinas is on the right track. Microeconomics 101 could readily be taught by a competent (and sensitive) instructor. Well-taught, it's positive and predictive: how will price and quantity be determined in given markets or given certain changes (including government regulation). You can use more or less math, but intuitive examples (deriving the demand curve for cookies or something) often will do. (I wonder whether macro requires more abstract thinking than a 10-year-old can manage: I tried at that age with my kids, and they glazed over at money supply and inflation. They got price change and could intuit micro dynamics (if more cookie sellers enter the market, where will price tend to go?), but the macro stuff was hard for them.) Even in micro, though, one would need to take some care: concepts like "profit" and "cost" are not intuitive to 10-year-olds as they are to HS students.
On the wider point of whether math and science are privileged in the gifted world, as a positive matter, yes. Most of the gifted sites and organizations (we are most familiar with CTY) have a strong math/science bent. Interestingly, it seems on a casual glance that that many people on these forums have kids esp. gifted in those areas. As a normative matter, whether gifted studies should emphasize math and science, I'm less certain. One of my kids is highly gifted verbally, but he has followed a different developmental path than what I understand is a math- and science-type path: he was reading (by choice), say, OLIVER TWIST as a 2nd grader but couldn't understand much given the archaic usage and historical context. But he loved just throwing himself at it to see what he could make of it. Ditto Shakespeare at 10. Re-reading Dickens as a 5th grader, he got more, and now in HS it's an easy read for him -- he prefers Joyce, Stoppard, and so on! So there's a big developmental leap somewhere around 12-13, and it isn't clear to me (as a rank amateur) how one would cultivate verbal giftedness other than letting them read, read, read, and then re-read. Are there studies of verbal giftedness and its development?
