No it isn't. The root cause of America's problems is a deep-seated, societal belief that you can always blame the victim and attendant governmental malfeasance and neglect in actually fixing the numerous traps which ensure that when something goes wrong, everyone piles on until that person is destitute.

American society is setup to find someone, anyone to pin a problem on, even if it would ruin that person, just to ensure that "everyone" doesn't have to think or worry about it existing. It is writ large a tragedy of the commons, where everyone thinks the specific wrong they experience is unAmerican but everything else is a failure of rugged individualism and bootstraps.

I think you totally mis the point. It's not about education, it's about a system where you can't opt out of in US.

What is your credit score? If you are from US, you probably know. If you are from somewhere else, you are probably staring at your screen saying "what???".

Shops giving out their own credit cards... crazy.

You can always choose to pay cash for everything you want, and eschew credit altogether, it's just so much harder to muster up the cash for big-ticket purchases like homes and automobiles that it's easier to game the system for credit building than it is to save for decades for a home to own.

It's not that you can't do it, but that trading potential future earnings for money now is so damned practical that it's hard to ignore.

I'm planning to do that. I am 2 thirds on my way to buy house with cash. No need to borrow any money. That will be my dream!

>We're still over-emphasizing passing grades over effectively growing new American citizens...

2/3rds of state legislatures are actively hostile to basic tenets of science, let alone the government teaching "effective American citizenship".

We just recently legalized malpractice for financial advisors. The rules preventing them from screwing their clients out of their retirement savings were spun as hurting consumer choice. Imagine how it'd be spun if there was a movement for public schools to teach "effective citizenship".

It would be nice if schools allocated more time for the young kids to get to share with teachers which topics that they wanted to know more about, just a block of unstructured time like the agoras of Ancient Greece. Just some form of rubric-free authentic curiosity-driven discourse, to break out of the teacher-student hierarchical relation a bit and to widen their understanding of learning, I suppose.

> We just recently legalized malpractice for financial advisors.

Do you have reference?

Link[1] is from forbes, but you get the idea. Matt Levine mentioned it once or twice in his column a week or 3 ago.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiehopkins/2017/02/03/trump-s...

I didn't learn finance in Germany in school but we all knew that taking on massive debt is stupid. It's the advertising and easy access to consumer credit. Wage increases have been replaced by easier access to credit.

Germany is the other extreme though. Not sure if that is healthier.

The German model definitely has lower risks. If something goes wrong, there will still be something left with which you can rebuild.

The American high-risk model on the other hand is definitely one that isn't long-term sustainable, but it wins out in short term, until another crash happens.

I think especially in the last 30 years the risk has been shifted to lower incomes. To me that's the real evil.