I'm not sure about that, my impression is a lot of people know they should save for tomorrow but they just aren't very good at resisting the temptations. Just like smokers know smoking is bad for them and the over weight know they shouldn't indulge.

If we wanted to do something about it then we need to look at schemes like the UK workplace pensions. It's compulsary for employers and opt-out for employees. It has resulted in many more people saving for retirement.

Financial literacy is arithmetic and basic math. Addition of pay, subtraction of monthly expenses. Interest is not difficult to calculate, either.

We give everyone the tools they need. If they are still incompetent that is on them.

You have to take an online course about understanding student loans and interest before you can accept a federal loan. The idea that students don’t know what they are getting into is absurd.

What people aren't taught is good financial sense and what to prioritize in life. We can't pretend that every child has educated family members to teach them this. And ignoring this means perpetuating a cycle of pain and suffering because the uneducated poor have kids too, and they'll be the ones teaching them how to live their lives. There were no classes that could've prepared me to invest into appreciating asset X instead of depreciating asset Y, which is a trap people fall into far too often to just ignore as a fact of life. There's nothing in the typical school curriculum that could ever teach some people that money should be prioritized toward important needs (housing, good food, etc.) instead of frivolous wants. Especially considering that entire industries are based around trying to part these people from their money year after year. Horrible from an environmental standpoint too.

Not saying you're wrong btw, just throwing something out there.

I hear what you are saying but it’s 2020. If you don’t have basic financial literacy it’s because you don’t care.

And fundamentally I don’t understand how someone could be short on paying bills every single month and not think to themselves “gee maybe I should search the internet to help solve this repeated problem that I have.”

Somehow 33% of people can’t pay their bills every month but smartphone penetration is greater than 66%. How do so many people have access to the entire knowledge of humanity in the palm of their hand but also have not EVER searched on the internet for financial advice?

I can't help but wonder if everyone downvoting people preaching personal responsibility are also part of the problem. As a society today (in America at least), we're increasingly condemning those preaching personal responsibility in almost every venue, or at least every liberal venue. There's still some push for personal responsibility amongst conservatives.

In a way, this appears to be a result of recency bias and our collective forgetting that preaching personal responsibility was once the norm in western societies. While I'm an atheist myself, long before there was any government social safety net, the church provided this safety net, but when it did, that safety net came with the expectation of learning lessons like "God helps those that help themselves".

As a society, yes it's important to have empathy for other who have made mistakes. Even Judeo-Christian religion makes room for this lesson through stories like the prodigal son. But you can't just have empathy without accountability unless you're willing to accept that more people will become a burden on the productive than if you have a culture of accountability.

You've got to have a balance between both empathy and accountability and squelching voices promoting accountability, but downvoting for example, throws this balance out of whack.

>As a society today

This isn't new, most religions have something to say about usary. If anything has changed it's the increase in media manipulation, marketing and easy credit. My parents didn't have a credit card because they didn't exist at that time.

At an individual level if you are over spending then yes, sort it out. But when half the population can't deal with a financial emergency then the problem is clearly systemic.

People have an excuse for everything while holding all of human knowledge in the palm of their hand.

It’s not 1975. All of human knowledge is a few taps away. If you are ignorant on finance it is because you don’t care or don’t want to know. Either way, it’s on the individual.