| ▲ | WarmWash 4 hours ago |
| I don't know how economics escaped basic elementary/middle school curriculum. There is so much confusion in people's lives around money, and so much destruction that results from it, yet we still don't teach the basics of what is going on in school. It's totally perplexing to me. |
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| ▲ | supertrope 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Economics class is usually in high school and it's optional. Schools are really expensive to operate. Most districts and schools make it easy to graduate to maximize their graduation rates. Standardized testing is suppose to catch local lowering of standards but state departments of education are also under pressure to maximize test pass rate. So resources flow into pulling the bottom quintile of students up to a minimum standard. This means teaching to the test on math and English, and de-prioritizing other subjects or dropping them entirely. We could expand the breadth of educational basic standards. This would require a cultural shift in valuing formal education more, increasing teacher training/recruiting resources, making schools year round, more centralization of education budgets at the state or even Federal level. Generally speaking public schools tend to be better in states like Massachusetts than Kansas. |
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| ▲ | VLM an hour ago | parent [-] | | "it's optional." LOL, no. In the majority of states in the USA, districts in the state are not allowed to graduate students without taking both an econ class and a personal finance class. Kansas is one of the stricter states. I can only think of three off the top of my head that do not mandate econ/finance classes, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington. Pretty hilarious to claim MA has better education requirements than KS LOL when its the other way around. Also hilarious when the average SAT score in Kansas is 1256 vs a mere 1128 in Massachusetts, LOL. I can't immediately think of any way that the schools in MA are better than KS, which is pretty funny. Is there even one stat or requirement where MA beats KS? Maybe college sports scores... That said, public schools are mandatory pass, and the kids know it. I think the problem with education is the prepack solutions sold by politicians intentionally don't reflect reality, sometimes intentionally reflect the opposite, and are designed to be ineffective or even actively counterproductive. | | |
| ▲ | absurddoctor 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Looking around, it looks like MA beats KS on most metrics. For example, 55% of MA students take the SAT, while only 2% of KS students take the test. There is a reason that MA always ends up at the top of lists that rank public education while KS is much lower. To be fair, KS has been improving in rankings quite a bit, which I agree MA has been unable to do. MA did pass a personal finance requirement for schools earlier this year. Like many other states it doesn’t have to be, but can be a stand alone course. While it may seem like MA is lagging behind, the majority of those requirements have been put into place within the last 5 or 6 years, so this is pretty new in most places. And a lot of states have done things that seem counter productive, like allowing a personal finance course to replace core math requirements. MA typically lets schools figure out how to implement requirements, so as in most cases the wealthier areas will figure out a high quality way to do this, and the poor areas will do their best to meet the state requirements for the lowest cost, providing less benefits to the students than it should. (Yet another reason that relying so heavily on local resources for public education is a poor choice). | | |
| ▲ | boplicity 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > 55% of MA students take the SAT, while only 2% of KS students take the test. This makes me think an interesting metric would be total SAT points per 100k population. If only 2% of Kansas students are taking the SAT, that's kind of shocking, actually. But maybe the state University there doesn't require it? |
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| ▲ | rayiner 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Most people aren't capable of understanding numbers: https://politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/06/msnbc/bad-math.... You can't educate them to do it, any more than you can educate your average person to be able to reliably hit three pointers. It's a physical limitation. That's why socialization is so important. You can't get voters to understand the difference between billions and trillions or put anything in context when the numbers get that big. All you can do is socialize them from an early age to have directionally correct gut feelings like, "there's no such thing as a free lunch" or "saving is good." |
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| ▲ | boplicity 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Hilarious. They were right to do the comparison, but got it oh so wrong. I was recently trying to understand Elon Musk's wealth, and come up with similar comparison: For example, he could make millionaire's of every single person in Seattle, and still have hundreds billions of dollars of wealth left over. Truly mind boggling. |
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| ▲ | everybodyknows 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Scarcity of instructors competent to teach such subjects? Followed by the natural bureaucratic response: Pretend no such need exists. |
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| ▲ | 01284a7e 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Destruction? It's by design: "One man gathers what another man spills." |
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| ▲ | WarmWash 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I know cynics would run to say this, but on the whole the lack of knowledge is an unambiguous net negative even to the powers that be. And they even know this, but somehow it's still expected for people to just innately understand what's going on, but they don't. And everyone else who does have the insight just ends up perpetually frustrated. | | |
| ▲ | 01284a7e 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The "lack of knowledge is an unambiguous net negative even to the powers that be". I think it's far more ambiguous and less measured of a net negative, than it is a clear, measured net positive for the "powers that be" if we define them as the wealthy. You can take a very clear, measured look at wealth distribution over the past 50 years. | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I have never worked with anyone in business who wished their customers had less economic/financial literacy. Just endless frustration. On the other hand, you have a massive contingent of people who are constantly scoring own goals because their economic insight is purely an emotional surface level intuition. | | |
| ▲ | supertrope 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It depends. Predatory salesmen are happy to oblige a customer's desire for a $299 monthly payment, while glossing over the 84 month schedule and 12% interest. They have a very short term view. Uninformed customers are like shooting fish in a barrel. A mainstream bank takes a longer term view. They offer financial literacy info for customers who are interested. If a customer overdrafts less frequently and is able to leave significant amounts of money deposited the interest spread is more profitable than collecting overdraft fees. | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The predatory loan market is a fringe market though, and it's not even that lucrative because delayed payments and default rates are so high (and bankruptcy rinses the lender). Don't confuse the existence of people who profit on inefficiencies as being a sign that the system works best with those inefficiencies, or that those inefficieces are even particularly profitable. | | |
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| ▲ | add-sub-mul-div 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| If calculators had never been invented then perhaps arithmetic and economic literacy would be required of citizens. A big problem is that we invented a tool for something that's most powerful when you can do it easily and constantly in your head. People are not pulling out the tool to use it constantly because there's friction to that. |
