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> You probably don't remember learning much about money or finance in high school. I do. > A 2014 meta-analysis of 169 papers and 201 studies, however, found

> You probably don't remember learning much about money or finance in high school. 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.

ypcx 5y ago
> That doesn't mean it "doesn't work" If our education fails to teach, then our education has failed.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  People know they shouldn’t carry credit card debt. They just want stuff too much. That’s not an education problem as they know they shouldn’t do that.
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    This is reductionist to the point of uselessness. People "know" tons of crap, and singular known facts don't dictate behavior by themselves, no matter who you are. Every tradeoff you make is a result of all your collected experience and knowledge on the topic as well as your desires and the complexities of time-based decision making (bad now = good later, and vice versa, where the "bad" and "good" things are never quite comparable qualitatively). 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.
- jopsen 5y ago
  > If our education fails to teach, then our education has failed. Or education was not the solution?
  - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    Education is a kind of solution but effectiveness is also a factor. I went through D.A.R.E and a whole host of other health and mindfulness classes. Just because you educated someone doesn’t mean they’re going to become immune to what you’re trying to teach them to avoid. Drugs, crime, and overeating are always going to be issues no matter how much “education” you throw at young people.
    - jopsen 5y ago
      My point exactly, the focus on education is likely misplaced. 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.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
>not learning and never reading a book in their lives, Maybe because the education system isn't devised to educate but to babysit?
- kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
  Or maybe because when you start to educate someone, they throw a textbook at another student and they have to interrupt the class to deal with disciplinary measures and EMTs. At that point, sure it becomes babysitting for the rest of the students.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    Education for humans was never meant to be done on a classwide level. That's why it sucks.
kiba 5y ago
OK. So you're educated about finance. 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.
- kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
  That's literally what my personal finance class taught in high school as a part of the government mandated financial literacy class. 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.
  - kiba 5y ago
    They are useful information. For a lot of people, that's great. But it is not the same thing as practice, as in actually doing the work of saving and resisting temptation such as eating out.
    - enkid 5y ago
      But it is a prerequisite.
    - kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
      Okay I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure why this is being used as an argument against teaching personal finance... 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.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
> Nobody is paying attention and actively prides themselves in not learning and never reading a book in their lives, that's the problem. 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.
- enkid 5y ago
  I don't think that type of corruption is most prevalent in Western societies.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  > 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. Can you name one country in the world where it is not true?
- throwdecro 5y ago
  Real-world success is generally a matter of luck no matter what the incentives are. You can't make your cancer research pan out, you can only do it diligently and find out later if it was the right direction. You can definitely screw it up. But you can't make it work without a bit of luck. 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.
antiutopian 5y ago
So if your explanation is right, then we should also expect to see only a tiny effect in the practical use of math, reading, writing, etc. between people who went to school and people who didn't. Because only 2 cared enough to pay attention. Right?
- pjscott 5y ago
  Beyond the really elementary things that get repeated often enough and insistently enough for most people to learn them whether they're interested or not -- basic reading, basic writing, addition and subtraction -- yes, as far as I can tell most people don't retain much from school. Not for long, anyway. It's easy to think otherwise if you're (for example) an engineer surrounded by unusually studious people in your day-to-day life, but standardized tests administered more broadly give a less encouraging picture.
  - wonnage 5y ago
    Sometimes it's not a retention problem, it's that they never learned the stuff in the first place. You're pretty doomed if you fall behind in school, it's all up to some individual going above and beyond (a teacher, a family member, a friend) to save you, because the system will just keep shuffling you along to adulthood, and then all the consequences hit at once. Take this loan with compound interest you can't understand because you can't multiply, buy a massive depreciating asset with it (car, mobile home...) because you don't know what "depreciating" is...
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education looks at research on retention and finds it to support you on this point.
bedhead 5y ago
I’m guessing you had great parents?
wonnage 5y ago
This is an amazingly narcissistic viewpoint: 1. You are part of the blessed 5% (how do you know?) 2. Anyone who disagrees is actively malicious (it's not all about you, man) 3. It worked for you, therefore it must work for everyone (if only they were as awesome as you, right?)
ngold 5y ago
I would avoid anyone that named themselves kafkaincarnate. That's just terrifying. 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.
happytoexplain 5y ago
This is essentially the common fallacy along the lines of "Everybody deserves what they get and gets what they deserve". Society can't, and indeed does not, work that way.
autokad 5y ago
I agree, this article was worse than crap. its dangerous
skybrian 5y ago
As I understand it, selection effects are pervasive in education. It’s a lot easier to show good results if you can choose to teach only the smart kids. 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.

ypcx 5y ago

> That doesn't mean it "doesn't work" If our education fails to teach, then our education has failed.

MattGaiser 5y ago
People know they shouldn’t carry credit card debt. They just want stuff too much. That’s not an education problem as they know they shouldn’t do that.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  This is reductionist to the point of uselessness. People "know" tons of crap, and singular known facts don't dictate behavior by themselves, no matter who you are. Every tradeoff you make is a result of all your collected experience and knowledge on the topic as well as your desires and the complexities of time-based decision making (bad now = good later, and vice versa, where the "bad" and "good" things are never quite comparable qualitatively). 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.
jopsen 5y ago
> If our education fails to teach, then our education has failed. Or education was not the solution?
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  Education is a kind of solution but effectiveness is also a factor. I went through D.A.R.E and a whole host of other health and mindfulness classes. Just because you educated someone doesn’t mean they’re going to become immune to what you’re trying to teach them to avoid. Drugs, crime, and overeating are always going to be issues no matter how much “education” you throw at young people.
  - jopsen 5y ago
    My point exactly, the focus on education is likely misplaced. 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.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

>not learning and never reading a book in their lives, Maybe because the education system isn't devised to educate but to babysit?

kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
Or maybe because when you start to educate someone, they throw a textbook at another student and they have to interrupt the class to deal with disciplinary measures and EMTs. At that point, sure it becomes babysitting for the rest of the students.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  Education for humans was never meant to be done on a classwide level. That's why it sucks.

kiba 5y ago

OK. So you're educated about finance. 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.

kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
That's literally what my personal finance class taught in high school as a part of the government mandated financial literacy class. 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.
- kiba 5y ago
  They are useful information. For a lot of people, that's great. But it is not the same thing as practice, as in actually doing the work of saving and resisting temptation such as eating out.
  - enkid 5y ago
    But it is a prerequisite.
  - kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
    Okay I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure why this is being used as an argument against teaching personal finance... 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.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

> Nobody is paying attention and actively prides themselves in not learning and never reading a book in their lives, that's the problem. 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.

enkid 5y ago
I don't think that type of corruption is most prevalent in Western societies.
xyzzyz 5y ago
> 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. Can you name one country in the world where it is not true?
throwdecro 5y ago
Real-world success is generally a matter of luck no matter what the incentives are. You can't make your cancer research pan out, you can only do it diligently and find out later if it was the right direction. You can definitely screw it up. But you can't make it work without a bit of luck. 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.

antiutopian 5y ago

So if your explanation is right, then we should also expect to see only a tiny effect in the practical use of math, reading, writing, etc. between people who went to school and people who didn't. Because only 2 cared enough to pay attention. Right?

pjscott 5y ago
Beyond the really elementary things that get repeated often enough and insistently enough for most people to learn them whether they're interested or not -- basic reading, basic writing, addition and subtraction -- yes, as far as I can tell most people don't retain much from school. Not for long, anyway. It's easy to think otherwise if you're (for example) an engineer surrounded by unusually studious people in your day-to-day life, but standardized tests administered more broadly give a less encouraging picture.
- wonnage 5y ago
  Sometimes it's not a retention problem, it's that they never learned the stuff in the first place. You're pretty doomed if you fall behind in school, it's all up to some individual going above and beyond (a teacher, a family member, a friend) to save you, because the system will just keep shuffling you along to adulthood, and then all the consequences hit at once. Take this loan with compound interest you can't understand because you can't multiply, buy a massive depreciating asset with it (car, mobile home...) because you don't know what "depreciating" is...
- abecedarius 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education looks at research on retention and finds it to support you on this point.

bedhead 5y ago

I’m guessing you had great parents?

wonnage 5y ago

This is an amazingly narcissistic viewpoint: 1. You are part of the blessed 5% (how do you know?) 2. Anyone who disagrees is actively malicious (it's not all about you, man) 3. It worked for you, therefore it must work for everyone (if only they were as awesome as you, right?)

ngold 5y ago

I would avoid anyone that named themselves kafkaincarnate. That's just terrifying. 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.

happytoexplain 5y ago

This is essentially the common fallacy along the lines of "Everybody deserves what they get and gets what they deserve". Society can't, and indeed does not, work that way.

autokad 5y ago

I agree, this article was worse than crap. its dangerous

skybrian 5y ago

As I understand it, selection effects are pervasive in education. It’s a lot easier to show good results if you can choose to teach only the smart kids. 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.