5 ms·

OECD Teens lack financial literacy and maths skills for digital economy

35 points by Pamar 2y ago

graemep 2y ago
Teens have not had much experience and it takes experience to learn these skills. I think a lot of adults will struggle too. Moving to cashless has made things harder to track, we have more financial products and more complex ones available. I think the solution is probably more adult education and learning opportunities so people can learn as they need to.
- MuffinFlavored 2y ago
  > Teens have not had much experience and it takes experience to learn these skills. Is that to say teens of the past were forced to have more experience and current teens are more "coddled" / able to escape into digital distractions / not forced to overcome hardships like we did in the past?
  - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    As a young person, yes I would agree with this.
- gklitz 2y ago
  > Moving to cashless has made things harder to track How so? As I see it, if anything it has made it extremely easy to track things.
  - doubled112 2y ago
    I think by "track" they mean "keep track of". A lot of people don't get the same connection to digits in a DB as they did to cash, plus you can't spend cash you don't have. If you hand somebody $500, they know how much they have, and they know how much they spent even after a few transactions. If you hand somebody a debit card with a balance of $500, it's easier to lose track and keep swiping until it's in overdraft.
  - physicsguy 2y ago
    It's easier to see an instant balance, but I think there's a big difference between that and managing money that was much more manual before. I think by virtue of the manual process, people had to be much more familiar with the maths. I can remember my parents sitting down with a cheque book which had a transaction log at the back, and all of their receipts and logging those so that they knew their exact balance at a given time and knew how much they'd got left to spend from the account.
    - gklitz 2y ago
      > I can remember my parents sitting down with a cheque book which had a transaction log at the back, and all of their receipts and logging those so that they knew their exact balance at a given time and knew how much they'd got left to spend from the account. Nothing about being cashless prevents them doing this, of cause if feels silly since you also have all this information instantly available without the work.
      - xg15 2y ago
        And yet, no one is doing this, because it's perfectly possible to spend money without keeping track of it. On the other hand, with cash, you're sort of forced to keep track of it, because otherwise it will just physically run out.
      - Pamar 2y ago
        The "instantly available part" is not really true, though. I am an expat in Germany, I have two different German bank accounts plus one in my home country. My main income is the monthly check from my company but I have lots of different ways to spend it (the aforementioned acvoubts, credit cards, paypal and sometimes even just cash. So the only way to have an overall picture of what I am spending my money is to actually periodically log it manually, labelling each transaction and adding a short description of what it was for.
        gklitz 2y ago
        I mean sure, you either need an app for it, or a piece of paper, but that’s no different from before cashless, the difference is that before I had to get manual extracts from my bank and go through them myself, and now I have an app that automatially tracks purchases to steam as “hobby/games” and our local supermarket as groceries. Point is that it always required some action on your part, but today it requires way way less, and is far more automated.
- samarthr1 2y ago
  As a newly minted ex teen, I agree that we have insufficient life experience. My dad is of the opinion that the experiences gained with independence in low impact, yet meaningful decisions and experiencing the consequences thereof is the best way to impart wisdom. He maddeningly will tell me to go swim myself when the stakes are low, but will listen and give suggestions when matters get more impactful long term. From my observations about my peer group, I seem to be the most "free" in the terms of making decisions for many things.
tekla 2y ago
>> Across the 14 OECD countries within the 20 nations surveyed — including the US, Italy and the Netherlands — an average of 18 per cent of teens had difficulties using division to handle their finances. >> These low-performing students struggled with everyday spending decisions, such as calculating whether buying tomatoes by the box or kilogramme was better value. I have a hard time imagining how low education standards are.
- galdosdi 2y ago
  Let me help your imagination then! I substitute taught 10th grade math at a Midwestern public school district for half a year in 2021 I had multiple students who pulled out their calculators to multiply by 1 or by 0. This is extreme, most weren't that bad, but the median student was pretty confused about fractions. I was supposed to teach sines and cosines.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    And people wonder why you need a college degree for most jobs; all a high school diploma shows is you mostly showed up.
    - galdosdi 2y ago
      Didn't used to be this way. I recently looked at my mom's 1960s history book from 5th grade she found in her old things, and was pretty surprised at how the reading and content seemed be aimed at a similar level as 8th or 9th grade when I went to school in the 90s. And what I experienced when I worked in schools in 2021 was far lower standards than even then. I wonder if it just has to do with the low hanging fruit effect -- productivity goes down as you extend from harvesting just the lowest hanging fruit to all the fruit, even the most marginal. When my mom went to high school, she was the only one in her family who went. In the time and place she grew up in, going to high school was as rare and impressive as getting a postgraduate degree is today. Only students with sufficient motivation would even attempt high school. Needless to say, you don't have to worry about disruptive kids or keeping them motivated in that environment.
neilv 2y ago
> These low-performing students struggled with everyday spending decisions, such as calculating whether buying tomatoes by the box or kilogramme was better value. While we know that's a more complicated problem than just the arithmetic the article implies, a dark pattern by retailers actively works against the arithmetic challenge... More often than not, when I look at the cost per unit on a grocery store shelf tag, or on Amazon, the retailer will be using different units for different SKUs of essentially the same generic product -- between different brands, and even between different sized packages of the same brand. So instead of being helpful, it's a time-wasting diversion from the arithmetic, and also noise diversion cluttering the actual per-package prices. Don't tell me that a grocery chain doesn't know what kind of product is in a package, nor know that consumers would like to be able to compare the cost per some reasonable unit of that kind. Software didn't invent the dark pattern; we just scaled up earlier slimy innovations.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  I'm a little obsessive about the unit cost of everyday items and in addition to them using inconsistent units, it's not uncommon for it to be wrong. A few days ago I was in a CVS and a 4.25 oz box of candy was $1.99 and listed with a per oz cost of 39.8 cents. Either the price had gone up or through shrinkflation the size went from 5 oz to 4.25 oz and the unit cost was not recalculated. I see it too regularly to be able to trust that number on the tag.
  - neilv 2y ago
    Oh yeah, I notice outright wrong ones, too. In partial defense of the retailer, sometimes those seem to be due to the product being miscoded in their database (e.g., involving bundles of multiple retail packages, or maybe just the occasional typo of info that's not caught). Which could be accidental (rather than some of the other obfuscation, which is glaring and pervasive enough to seem intentional). But even when accidental, it gives the impression that they don't care that the information they're displaying authoritatively is outright wrong (or they would find a way not to do it so often).
- cedws 2y ago
physicsguy 2y ago
I suspect that despite people's familiarity with technology, it's not just maths that will hold them back in this. I taught 1st year undergrad students in Engineering (mechanical, civil, aerospace) programming between 2014-2019, usually Python and C. We saw a rapid average decline in ability over that period in basic functionality with computers. Really first noticed it in about 2016. As in, being able to download files, move them around in Explorer on Windows or Finder on Mac, understanding nested directory structures, and find them again. There wasn't much difference in entry grades or anything between the year groups. I strongly suspect this was largely due to smartphones coming out over people's formative years and meaning that they weren't using computers as much, so coming into University and going into the workplace they'd find it much harder. The iPhone launched in 2007 and so these kids entering University in 2016 onwards would have been born in 1998 and so started to be exposed to them from primary education, whereas slightly older kids wouldn't have seen them til they were already in secondary education.
- kwere 2y ago
  its mostly due of computer science becoming mainstream and no more niche or for "asocial nerds". Only a selfselected minority 'back then' thinkered their afternoons around computers
- Spivak 2y ago
  > As in, being able to download files, move them around in Explorer on Windows or Finder on Mac, understanding nested directory structures, and find them again I mean they were using computers, just a different mode of computing. I think the take-away is that these things just aren't as intuitive as we assume they are. The filesystem is a fairly complex abstraction with an huge API that grew organically over a long period of time and the user-facing interface modeled a paper-oriented office with filing cabinets and briefcases that doesn't exist anymore. I would approach it backwards if I was teaching it today where you code in an all-in-one dev environment where the fact that say Python modules are files doesn't really matter. And then the filesysrem is presented as the way to persist data across program invocations.
  - SR2Z 2y ago

35 points by Pamar 2y ago

Teens have not had much experience and it takes experience to learn these skills. I think a lot of adults will struggle too. Moving to cashless has made things harder to track, we have more financial products and more complex ones available. I think the solution is probably more adult education and learning opportunities so people can learn as they need to.

MuffinFlavored 2y ago
> Teens have not had much experience and it takes experience to learn these skills. Is that to say teens of the past were forced to have more experience and current teens are more "coddled" / able to escape into digital distractions / not forced to overcome hardships like we did in the past?
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  As a young person, yes I would agree with this.
gklitz 2y ago
> Moving to cashless has made things harder to track How so? As I see it, if anything it has made it extremely easy to track things.
- doubled112 2y ago
  I think by "track" they mean "keep track of". A lot of people don't get the same connection to digits in a DB as they did to cash, plus you can't spend cash you don't have. If you hand somebody $500, they know how much they have, and they know how much they spent even after a few transactions. If you hand somebody a debit card with a balance of $500, it's easier to lose track and keep swiping until it's in overdraft.
- physicsguy 2y ago
  It's easier to see an instant balance, but I think there's a big difference between that and managing money that was much more manual before. I think by virtue of the manual process, people had to be much more familiar with the maths. I can remember my parents sitting down with a cheque book which had a transaction log at the back, and all of their receipts and logging those so that they knew their exact balance at a given time and knew how much they'd got left to spend from the account.
  - gklitz 2y ago
    > I can remember my parents sitting down with a cheque book which had a transaction log at the back, and all of their receipts and logging those so that they knew their exact balance at a given time and knew how much they'd got left to spend from the account. Nothing about being cashless prevents them doing this, of cause if feels silly since you also have all this information instantly available without the work.
    - xg15 2y ago
      And yet, no one is doing this, because it's perfectly possible to spend money without keeping track of it. On the other hand, with cash, you're sort of forced to keep track of it, because otherwise it will just physically run out.
    - Pamar 2y ago
      The "instantly available part" is not really true, though. I am an expat in Germany, I have two different German bank accounts plus one in my home country. My main income is the monthly check from my company but I have lots of different ways to spend it (the aforementioned acvoubts, credit cards, paypal and sometimes even just cash. So the only way to have an overall picture of what I am spending my money is to actually periodically log it manually, labelling each transaction and adding a short description of what it was for.
      - gklitz 2y ago
        I mean sure, you either need an app for it, or a piece of paper, but that’s no different from before cashless, the difference is that before I had to get manual extracts from my bank and go through them myself, and now I have an app that automatially tracks purchases to steam as “hobby/games” and our local supermarket as groceries. Point is that it always required some action on your part, but today it requires way way less, and is far more automated.
samarthr1 2y ago
As a newly minted ex teen, I agree that we have insufficient life experience. My dad is of the opinion that the experiences gained with independence in low impact, yet meaningful decisions and experiencing the consequences thereof is the best way to impart wisdom. He maddeningly will tell me to go swim myself when the stakes are low, but will listen and give suggestions when matters get more impactful long term. From my observations about my peer group, I seem to be the most "free" in the terms of making decisions for many things.

tekla 2y ago

>> Across the 14 OECD countries within the 20 nations surveyed — including the US, Italy and the Netherlands — an average of 18 per cent of teens had difficulties using division to handle their finances. >> These low-performing students struggled with everyday spending decisions, such as calculating whether buying tomatoes by the box or kilogramme was better value. I have a hard time imagining how low education standards are.

galdosdi 2y ago
Let me help your imagination then! I substitute taught 10th grade math at a Midwestern public school district for half a year in 2021 I had multiple students who pulled out their calculators to multiply by 1 or by 0. This is extreme, most weren't that bad, but the median student was pretty confused about fractions. I was supposed to teach sines and cosines.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  And people wonder why you need a college degree for most jobs; all a high school diploma shows is you mostly showed up.
  - galdosdi 2y ago
    Didn't used to be this way. I recently looked at my mom's 1960s history book from 5th grade she found in her old things, and was pretty surprised at how the reading and content seemed be aimed at a similar level as 8th or 9th grade when I went to school in the 90s. And what I experienced when I worked in schools in 2021 was far lower standards than even then. I wonder if it just has to do with the low hanging fruit effect -- productivity goes down as you extend from harvesting just the lowest hanging fruit to all the fruit, even the most marginal. When my mom went to high school, she was the only one in her family who went. In the time and place she grew up in, going to high school was as rare and impressive as getting a postgraduate degree is today. Only students with sufficient motivation would even attempt high school. Needless to say, you don't have to worry about disruptive kids or keeping them motivated in that environment.

neilv 2y ago

> These low-performing students struggled with everyday spending decisions, such as calculating whether buying tomatoes by the box or kilogramme was better value. While we know that's a more complicated problem than just the arithmetic the article implies, a dark pattern by retailers actively works against the arithmetic challenge... More often than not, when I look at the cost per unit on a grocery store shelf tag, or on Amazon, the retailer will be using different units for different SKUs of essentially the same generic product -- between different brands, and even between different sized packages of the same brand. So instead of being helpful, it's a time-wasting diversion from the arithmetic, and also noise diversion cluttering the actual per-package prices. Don't tell me that a grocery chain doesn't know what kind of product is in a package, nor know that consumers would like to be able to compare the cost per some reasonable unit of that kind. Software didn't invent the dark pattern; we just scaled up earlier slimy innovations.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
I'm a little obsessive about the unit cost of everyday items and in addition to them using inconsistent units, it's not uncommon for it to be wrong. A few days ago I was in a CVS and a 4.25 oz box of candy was $1.99 and listed with a per oz cost of 39.8 cents. Either the price had gone up or through shrinkflation the size went from 5 oz to 4.25 oz and the unit cost was not recalculated. I see it too regularly to be able to trust that number on the tag.
- neilv 2y ago
  Oh yeah, I notice outright wrong ones, too. In partial defense of the retailer, sometimes those seem to be due to the product being miscoded in their database (e.g., involving bundles of multiple retail packages, or maybe just the occasional typo of info that's not caught). Which could be accidental (rather than some of the other obfuscation, which is glaring and pervasive enough to seem intentional). But even when accidental, it gives the impression that they don't care that the information they're displaying authoritatively is outright wrong (or they would find a way not to do it so often).
cedws 2y ago

physicsguy 2y ago

I suspect that despite people's familiarity with technology, it's not just maths that will hold them back in this. I taught 1st year undergrad students in Engineering (mechanical, civil, aerospace) programming between 2014-2019, usually Python and C. We saw a rapid average decline in ability over that period in basic functionality with computers. Really first noticed it in about 2016. As in, being able to download files, move them around in Explorer on Windows or Finder on Mac, understanding nested directory structures, and find them again. There wasn't much difference in entry grades or anything between the year groups. I strongly suspect this was largely due to smartphones coming out over people's formative years and meaning that they weren't using computers as much, so coming into University and going into the workplace they'd find it much harder. The iPhone launched in 2007 and so these kids entering University in 2016 onwards would have been born in 1998 and so started to be exposed to them from primary education, whereas slightly older kids wouldn't have seen them til they were already in secondary education.

kwere 2y ago
its mostly due of computer science becoming mainstream and no more niche or for "asocial nerds". Only a selfselected minority 'back then' thinkered their afternoons around computers
Spivak 2y ago
> As in, being able to download files, move them around in Explorer on Windows or Finder on Mac, understanding nested directory structures, and find them again I mean they were using computers, just a different mode of computing. I think the take-away is that these things just aren't as intuitive as we assume they are. The filesystem is a fairly complex abstraction with an huge API that grew organically over a long period of time and the user-facing interface modeled a paper-oriented office with filing cabinets and briefcases that doesn't exist anymore. I would approach it backwards if I was teaching it today where you code in an all-in-one dev environment where the fact that say Python modules are files doesn't really matter. And then the filesysrem is presented as the way to persist data across program invocations.
- SR2Z 2y ago