“What influential liberal – “

It took just three words before Alex Pepper of Chantilly High School in Chantilly, Va., buzzed in to answer the question.

“John Kenneth Galbraith,” he said with a triumphant smile.

The question, one of many that the moderator and CNBC anchor, Ron Insana, didn’t have the opportunity to finish before a student buzzed in, was: “What influential liberal economist and anchor of the ‘The Affluent Society’ died at the age of 97 last month?”

Poised with buzzers in hand and with spotlights glaring down, high school students from across the country competed yesterday for a gold-colored trophy and thousands of dollars in U.S. Savings Bonds at the annual National Economics Challenge.

Mr. Insana, who hosts “Street Signs,” joked that many of the students knew more about economics than his colleagues at CNBC.

In an attempt to boost interest in economics among high school students, the National Council on Economic Education joined with the Goldman Sachs Foundation to create the annual high school competition. Yesterday’s event was hosted at the New York Public Library.

Teams from schools across the country are divided into four regions – the East, West, Midwest, and the Heartland. Competitors must answer questions about macroeconomics, microeconomics, international economics, and current events.

The competition is divided into the Adam Smith and David Ricardo divisions for students enrolled in Advanced Placement economic classes and those in a one-semester course, respectively. No teams from New York City high schools made it to the final round.

With tensions riding high, a team from the Hibbing High School in Minnesota took on Chantilly High School in the David Ricardo division.

With just a semester of economics under their collective belts, the teams fielded questions about the circular flow model,the 4-firm concentration ratio, and federal funds rates.

Neither team could answer questions about the corporate tax rate (35%) and the name of the 1938 Act that made false advertising and the misrepresentation of products illegal (the Wheeler-Lea act).

The Hibbing team took the first round with a score of 13 to 8 and became the first all-girls team in the competition’s six- year history to win first prize. It’s hard to say if they would make the school’s most famous graduate, Bob Dylan, proud.

For the second year in a row, the Iolani School in Honolulu took first prize in the Adam Smith division.

The four students – Bryce Aisaka, Robert Atkinson, Megan Chock, and Dean Ushijima – attributed their success to the “colonel.” The team’s coach, a former Army colonel with a master’s degree in economics from the University of Texas and a few year’s of teaching experience at West Point, Richard Rankin, runs a tight ship.

“They call me colonel, but I don’t play that role at all,” Mr. Rankin, who did tours in Vietnam and Korea, said. “Although when we make a decision we stick to it.”

For example, on Sunday night, the team decided to indulge Ms. Chock’s hankering for noodles and walked almost two miles to a restaurant in Koreatown, returning to the hotel at 2 a.m.

In preparation for the event, the team met almost every day, practiced with the buzzers, and took on additional reading, conquering between them: “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman, “Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and a number of college textbooks.

Each winning student and coach takes home a $3,000 saving bond and the second-place team members receive $1,500 U.S. saving bonds.

“Every student is indeed a winner,” the chairman of the Goldman Sachs Foundation, John Whitehead, reassured the audience as the second place teams stepped up to receive their metals.

The winning and losing teams slapped hands at the end, congratulating one another as if at a softball game.

In one important lesson about economic incentive, most students said that the biggest motivating factor in entering the competition was the all-expense paid trip to New York City.