Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

#121

Post by elhudy » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

silverpepsi wrote: post #68

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no windfall in poverty. In general, folks with money are able to have things like comfortable shoes, entertainment, and not worry about their electricity being turned off if they have a flat tire. Every "windfall" takes care of a need, makes you more secure with things like food and shelter, or gives you some mental relief by providing a few moments of entertainment. There is no saving for those other things…

False theories of poverty spread by people like yourself are the reason more people don't get the right advice to get out. They're told something crazy like "well yeah you just don't have enough money, too bad" The guy I'm talking about has windfalls - and when they come he'll feel so bad he goes out with friends and blows $30 on a meal. If he changed his celebrations to $15 meals using a coupon clipped from the pape…

>False theories of poverty spread by people like yourself are the reason more people don't get the right advice to get out.

What exactly is your theory of poverty, if you don't mind me asking? That impoverished folk should be better at saving, and then they wouldn't be impoverished?

Re: Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

#122

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:02 PM UTC

senden9 wrote: post #114

We in Austria have such courses. It was in the core plan of the public school I was on. I think two years long. One or two hours a week. It was as called "economic and economic law".

We had courses called “home economics” in US public middle school (grades 6-8, age 11-14). Near as I can remember, they were exclusively cooking and sewing/crafts with no content that contained the $ symbol.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

#123

Post by pgcj_poster » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

You're going to have a hard time teaching finance to people with almost no money to manage.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

#124

Post by BurningFrog » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #80

silverpepsi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're really, really on to something, but just simply that calling it "surviving poverty" will give most people the wrong impression. You've got to convince people that by spending every windfall (and by windfall I literally mean like 20 to 50 extra dollars) to "make up" for the resentment they felt when they couldn't pay their rent on time and got Eviction Notice #1... they've got to SAVE IT or the entire r…

> There are probably 10 guys like him for every person who actually is so broke there is no way out...This is what America's "poor" looks like, it is far more a mental state than concrete reality. No, this is what poverty looks like in the strawman you've built up in your head. I guarantee you the person you describe exists, and is just as you describe - but they're also not representative of American poverty. But th…

I won't speculate about numbers, but until I dealt with people with "spending problems", I had NO IDEA seemingly smart people could be like that!

Simplest way to describe it is that their definition of "I can afford X" is "right now I have more money than X costs". Really!

These people will of course always be poor, regardless of income, subsidies etc.

How many they are is an empirical question, and I haven't seen any data.

One idea to handle them I like is to pay people daily, instead of monthly/biweekly. In the modern computerized world, that should be simple, and could really help some people.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

#125

Post by sershe » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #60

silverpepsi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're really, really on to something, but just simply that calling it "surviving poverty" will give most people the wrong impression. You've got to convince people that by spending every windfall (and by windfall I literally mean like 20 to 50 extra dollars) to "make up" for the resentment they felt when they couldn't pay their rent on time and got Eviction Notice #1... they've got to SAVE IT or the entire r…

There is no windfall in poverty. In general, folks with money are able to have things like comfortable shoes, entertainment, and not worry about their electricity being turned off if they have a flat tire. Every "windfall" takes care of a need, makes you more secure with things like food and shelter, or gives you some mental relief by providing a few moments of entertainment. There is no saving for those other things…

There's much more windfall in poverty than in non-poverty; when you have stable and sufficient income, you don't have windfalls almost by definition, and middle-income people don't get stock awards or huge bonuses either. When you work odd jobs, or get help from relatives, or whatever, it's all windfalls.

I won't claim it's the majority, but I've certainly seen lots of people blow windfalls of all sizes on ridiculous things (from someone working crappy odd jobs like loading trucks for barely enough money for food and necessities getting a one-time construction gig for a fixed sum and blowing it on a huge party, to barely have enough money for food again in literally a week; to someone using a bonus AND running up credit card debt to go on a fancy vacation, probably far more expensive than my techie vacations, and then complaining to everyone how they have crippling levels of credit card debt interest payments).

I can kinda understand where the psychological need might come from, but it has to be fixed regardless... just like drug addiction while explainable needs to be fixed. That is, if you care to reduce poverty.

Oh an my favorite example from Russia is where someone's rainy day fund of ~$1000 in cash (in the 90ies/early oughts that was a lot of money) was stolen by their sibling and blown on restaurants and expensive clothing. When found out and confronted, the sibling was defensive and said well you were not using it anyway! That's the psychology of many poor as I see it (not the stealing, the "not using" part).

Re: Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

#126

Post by leetcrew » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

mellosouls wrote: post #10

everyone should a fundamental understanding of how a savings account, CD account, IRA, Roth IRA, 401(k) and MSA account work. Likewise, everyone should have a fundamental understanding of the equity markets, derivatives markets, futures markets, bond and treasury markets along with an understanding of how interest rates work and their effects on financial instruments like mortgages. How much money do you think most p…

the median net worth of a US household is $121,411. you have to go down into the bottom quartile to find households with a net worth under $10k. most americans absolutely have enough money to make investments relevant.

https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/

Re: Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

#127

Post by BurningFrog » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

It seems school curriculums are inherently very conservative. By default, like any other organization, you keep doing what you did last year. With very little outside competition or other forces for change, inertia dominates.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

#128

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

cateye wrote: post #58

Schools are mainly about supplying cheap workforce for existing companies. Learning things like starting your own company or managing money in a way that increases negotiation power of the workers, is a disadvantage for companies. Having financial knowledge is also not always a direct requirement to get the job at a company, so actually it doesn't provide a direct competitive advantage if you are in the job seeker po…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

#129

Post by leetcrew » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

jl2718 wrote: post #90

This information is readily available already. The only important thing is what’s not available. My brother got the best small business education possible by selling energy contracts door-to-door. He learned how every type of small business in NYC works: how much money they make, how much money comes from ‘other’ sources, how they manage cash versus credit income, how much gets stolen from them, who owns the business…

> Young attractive women also get an excellent financial education through dating, at least in terms of how much money people have made through various means, and how smart they have to be for it. I think this is yet another reason why women quit the engineering pipeline.

this doesn't really make sense. you have to date someone for a while to get a good understanding of how much they make and what it takes to do that. in the short term, all you're really learning is how much they want to impress you. you would have to date several people concurrently for a year to get as much insight as your brother likely got in a week of work.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn’t finance a part of the core curriculum at schools?

#130

Post by lhl » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:23 PM UTC

When I was in middle school in US public school in the 90s, we had a Home Economics class where we were taught how to balance a checkbook, and that was about all the financial literacy that was covered.

Personally, I agree that it was a huge disservice to most students, and I think that a better general life skills class (I'd probably lump in civics/voting, dealing with various bureaucratic/administrative tasks, effective online research, personal privacy, how one might evaluate various professional services, resume writing etc) that includes basic financial literacy would be much more useful than just about anything else taught in school (to me, learning to socialize, properly empathize, and to reason and critically think are even more important, but also generally not part of most standard curricula).

After college, I got very into FIRE and personal investing, and eventually a while back put together my own basic financial literacy guide. It boiled down first to budgeting and calculating expenses (especially discretionary expenditures) vs earnings (As a school lesson, I think being forced to try to figure out a budget of a single parent on a minimum wage would be pretty eye-opening). For a general class, a practical lesson on tax filing would probably be worthwhile. And then for investing I agree about covering the general landscape of various savings and investments work, but more focused on in-depth/concrete lessons on fundamental concepts. Compounding, tax-advantage, dollar cost averaging, correlation, and rebalancing would basically cover it I think.

I think learning about how money (and debt) works - I'd argue that most people don't have a great understanding of that at all, some basic macroeconomics, and maybe some freakonomics type topics for color would be useful as well, but I don't think that financial literacy needs to go beyond the very basics to give everyone a bare minimum framework to be able do their own research/learning. But I also generally think that should be the goal of every topic taught, which seems to be rather at outs with mainstream teaching and learning practice in American public education.