If we had a more meritocratic society, I doubt people would pride themselves in their ignorance.
But as it stands, our society rewards both luck and misfortune - and we privatize gains and socialize losses.
Combine that with the fact that access corruption is rampant in Western societies - and the way to succeed is to take excessive risk, woo gatekeepers, execute, and get lucky.
Only one of those requires the type of intelligence you get in school (execution). And if you have enough luck or corruption, you don't even need to execute.
Why do the hard work on trying to find cures for common forms of cancer, make breakthroughs toward fusion energy, or increase crop yields on staple crops - when you can take on excessive risk in property speculation and your odds of financial success are many times higher?
I'm a strong believer that the world is getting better every day - even in recent times. But I'm not sure how much longer that trend will last in a world that gives smart people very few incentives to do things that actually benefit society.
Maybe with enough people we're destined to get lucky and progress no matter what.
If people can't keep their luck-based gains, no one has any real reason to try anything unusual. Everyone would be chasing the puck instead of skating to the open ice hoping to catch a break. Society would stagnate.
You won't get any luck if you don't try.
Working to put yourself into a situation where luck can find you will greatly increase your luck.
If we all accepted that luck is the driving force, decided that we would rather live in a world where hard work and intelligence pays off - then it's possible to imagine a world in which you're rewarded for hard work (on areas of importance) and gains are socialized instead of losses. The socialized gains could pay people who worked hard and their ideas didn't pan out.
I'm not saying this is a world that would work and is better.
But it's pretty unimaginative to think it's just flat out impossible to have progress in any society that isn't structured around luck.
If you are going to propose banging our head into that wall again you can’t just naively point out how great it sounds from first principles. Been there, done that. Instead you need to seriously grapple with those failures and convincingly explain why this time will be different.
Or about the 25th largest economy in the world, if looking at it that way.
And it's a better corporate analogy than most, considering it essentially does everything from retail to services.
It seems like a possible option.
Also getting everyone to accept one worldview. Maybe the most important area of importance would be educating people to see things the way you see...
Can you name one country in the world where it is not true?
But I would not be so hostile to luck. We need it. The Lord of the Rings would never exist if Tolkien wasn't lucky enough to come down with a trench foot and thus survive the Great War. mRNA vaccines might not exist if Katalin Karikó did not beat that cancer in the late 1990s. Etc.
Cut the welfare, stop punishing success with higher taxes and you'll see just how much better people can be.
Failure is not being rewarded, being a member of sociery is, it's not about performance.
Dollar for dollar poor people pay 1 sixth of the income taxes that high income earners pay. If that's not rewarding failure, what is?
But it's not uncommon, we do it with our kids all the time. "If you don't perform good grades, you are not good enough". My point being that changing that view to, "look at what opportunities you (will) have now". Someone being a failure according to you may be quite demotivated at reaching a high income due to the fact that it seems impossible, why do the effort? For what is more important than playing a role in society, and be a good human? Is really income a value of how human you are?
You're also assuming high incomes are completely independent of Central Banks subsidizing asset prices.
But personal finance is mostly about personal habits and actions. You can understand what is a financially sound plan of action all you want. For example, I wasted money on eating out three times last week, whereas previously I only eat out once per week successfully for weeks on end.
Information is insufficient. Practice is required.
I am unsure exactly what information these firms provided. Even if it's sound information, it doesn't necessary translate to practice.
How to budget. Why to budget. How to write a check. What is a bank account? How to open a bank account. What food costs. What does produce cost? Compare that to X restaurant. What are good ways to save money? What are the costs of renting vs owning, etc.
This wasn't a "stock market" class, though they briefly covered business and what a stock/investing was.
But it is not the same thing as practice, as in actually doing the work of saving and resisting temptation such as eating out.
Academic vs. real life is a strange debate to me. It seems that to some people that academics itself is sacrosanct and plenty, and to others real life is sacrosanct and plenty. This entire article is about academic data being sacrosanct about these classes, and that's literally what I railed against. To me, I believe in both. They go hand in hand.
So for instance, if you're talking about the action of cooking, I also was required to take a Home Ec class independently of the personal finance requirement. There are many requirements in a high school, this is just one class we are talking about. The Home Ec class had grades based on how well we would sew up and patch clothing, create pillows and such, and cook various things. So there's some practical experience.
Now, you're also debating about an essentially real world "resisting" of urges and that's clearly not going to be able to be "taught" as you say. But we're talking about preparing children for adulthood, and in adulthood, you're going to experience that either way.
If they don't know what the term "interest rate" is, how exactly are they going to learn it from a 10+ page credit card legalese document? That seems enormously more opaque to me. You can learn it from others, sure, but they had to learn it somewhere and they likely learned it from a book or from school, or from learning it by screwing up the hard way.
If we're trying to reduce the amount of people that long term screw up, then having them equipped to understand the language of the real world is a great place to start instead of at the ground floor with zero knowledge. And yes, real world experience is necessary, too, but short of giving kids raw eggs and meat and having thousands of stoves in the lunchroom instead of prepared food I'm not sure how you would accomplish that.
Some people are privileged enough to have parents that can teach them this stuff, but largely after generations of not knowing these things in impoverished areas or having parents that have to work to do the things like cook for their children and pay their own bills when they get home, those fresh "graduates" are going to start from scratch not knowing the language nor having the experience and wind up screwing up, possibly in a way that is impossible to get out of and end up homeless or buried in extreme debt with interest rates they do not understand. Increasing the odds of your success by helping you understand the terms being thrown at you is going to help prevent that. As is having you go through the motions of doing the cooking, in this example.
But it comes down to for me as I said, I believe in real world experience AND education on a subject. Education can teach you what you need to practice in the first place sometimes, rather than end up unable to understand why you are trapped and what could potentially help you become untrapped. I don't see these as mutually exclusive.
It’s also about common knowledge and frameworks.
Knowing you should not have to pay to maintain a checking account, for instance. Or that filing a tax return can produce a refund. How to pay down debt when you have spare cash and different types of debt, or how to compare two purchasing options—a monthly or an up front.
Was it definitely a waste? The time you spend preparing your own food has value. As does the mental impact of (depending what you bought) the pleasure of a meal you could not have made for yourself; and the relief of pressure of not having to do it yourself.
Most hobbies aren't immediately awesome, a certain section of the learning curve must be climbed.
I still remember my silent desperation when I sat in front of a PC back in 1994 for the first time. Computers were totally alien to me at that time. Ten years later I was programming in several languages.
So, on the one hand, teaching only two kids in a class of 40 is too easy. On the other, sometimes nothing seems to work because studies don’t account for inherent differences in aptitude.
If our education fails to teach, then our education has failed.
That’s not an education problem as they know they shouldn’t do that.
Education affects humans, and education can be changed to better affect humans, but humans can't simply be changed except by education, so it's the ultimate irony to look at people doing a bad job, their fault or not, and imply we somehow can't or shouldn't use the one and only tool we have to change people. Giving up is easy, especially if it's strangers you're giving up on and you don't care about the entire picture of the society you live in. Bettering education is very hard. Taken together, it's obvious why so many people just want to say "they deserve it" and no longer think about it.
Or education was not the solution?
Sure, personal responsibility is not without importance.
But we don't solve obesity or poverty through education. We all know to eat healthy and exercise.
Making the right choices easier often has a bigger effect.
Maybe because the education system isn't devised to educate but to babysit?
On a side note, my favorite kafka story out of all his saved works was, the blind paranoid mole digging tunnels. I'm a big fan of kafka but would never want to align my brain with his tragic way of thinking. But he was not wrong to be paranoid, he lived a pretty terrible life in a pretty terrible time.
I do.
> A 2014 meta-analysis of 169 papers and 201 studies, however, found that "interventions to improve financial literacy explain only 0.1% of the variance in financial behaviors studied" — and that low-income students had even weaker correlations.
That's because only two kids in a class of 40-ish were paying attention. It's the same two kids who were paying attention in science, math, literature, history, etc. That asinine argument can be made about education itself. Nobody is paying attention and actively prides themselves in not learning and never reading a book in their lives, that's the problem. That doesn't mean it "doesn't work", and that you should short change the students that actually want to participate.
It certainly helped me get out of poverty. The only people I've ever heard argue against this (until now) were people who actively wanted me to fail in life because they couldn't imagine themselves understanding it ever since they were already financially illiterate adults.
I took the lessons and the beatings so that I wouldn't have to continue taking the beatings later in life. The small fraction of students that you end up teaching actually do appreciate it.