Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 140 posts

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#71

Post by prepend »

watwut wrote: post #55
scarface74 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What instead of the "Latte Factor", they said... - buy a house that is well below your means or even move some place where your cost of living compared to your money earning potential is favorable. -Get a degree in something that can make money instead of a BS in Ancient Chinese Art History. -Don't go into debt getting a degree from a prestigious college to be a high school teacher. Go to a cheap state school. -Buy a…

Majority of students go for practical or practically sounding degrees. And those who dont are clustered among students from more rich families. The "students are choosing impractical degrees" is just a way to ignore actual economy problems and blaming result on students.

What is the breakdown of degrees? What source leads you to think most have practical degrees?

I found this link, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cta.asp, that says “Of the 1.9 million bachelor's degrees conferred in 2015–16, over half were concentrated in six fields of study: business (372,000 degrees), health professions and related programs (229,000 degrees), social sciences and history (161,000 degrees), psychology (117,000 degrees), biological and biomedical sciences (114,000 degrees), and engineering (107,000 degrees).”

I don’t know how you define practical, but this makes me think many, perhaps most are not practical if you mean worth going into substantial ($50k+) student loan debt.

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#73

Post by folli »

poster123 wrote: post #69

One argument against redistribution is that one is taking money from high-IQ, more responsible people who know how to manage money on average and giving it to low-IQ, less responsible people who don't know how to manage money. This needs to be balanced against the primary argument for redistribution, that someone earning $30K/year can use an extra $1K more than someone earning $300K/year wil l miss it.

To follow this line of thought, you're then advocating for heavy inheritance taxation?

A heir of a multi-billion dollar fortune is not more likely to have an above average IQ or be more responsible, so he should start from scratch as does the average Joe?

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#74

Post by nkrisc »

djhworld wrote: post #25
Kuiper wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when you consider that most supermarket labels will also include the "price per unit weight" or "price per unit volume" on the shelf with a smaller font, it becomes trivially easy to compare which bottle of soap is going to get you the most for your money. Or maybe you neglect to do this (simply opting for the container that looks the most appealing rather than optimizing for the amount of liquid per dolla…

I guess the problem for the older generation, especially here in the UK, is they were raised on imperial units and have never really gotten used to metric. Not saying that excuses it, but it could explain part of the reason why some people don't fully grasp the £-per-X calculations

Well I'm not that old so maybe it's different but as an American raised on imperial units I find metric absurdly easy to learn because it is just shuffling a decimal point around.

Going from metric to imperial must be challenging.

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#75

Post by megaman22 »

scarface74 wrote: post #24
hammock wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you supposed to monitor your spending if you cannot figure out how much you paid for chicken?

This reminds me of the myth of the "Latte Factor". http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_united_states_of_...

The "Latte Factor" is a real thing. Not necessarily by itself, but it is indicative of a larger systemic problem.

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#76

Post by poster123 »

folli wrote: post #73
poster123 wrote: post #69

One argument against redistribution is that one is taking money from high-IQ, more responsible people who know how to manage money on average and giving it to low-IQ, less responsible people who don't know how to manage money. This needs to be balanced against the primary argument for redistribution, that someone earning $30K/year can use an extra $1K more than someone earning $300K/year wil l miss it.

To follow this line of thought, you're then advocating for heavy inheritance taxation? A heir of a multi-billion dollar fortune is not more likely to have an above average IQ or be more responsible, so he should start from scratch as does the average Joe?

Billionaires are smarter, more hardworking, and ambitious on average, and there is likely some genetic competent to each of these qualities. Certainly there is for IQ.

Is your guess for the average IQ of Bill Gates' children 100? I'd guess say 130.

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#77

Post by noufalibrahim »

stagbeetle wrote: post #52
noufalibrahim wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While your point is literally true, having basic arithmetic proficiency does go some way in making sense of the world. Quick mental calculations to see when you'll reach a certain place, ability to compare things when they're in different units etc. It's not only the skills but the overall mental model that they help create. The world starts to become a little more rational and sensible when you can do this.

Tell that to every maths teacher. "Show your work" was a nightmare.

As a kid, it was. As a secondary level student, I found it useful sometimes to write things out in detail when I was stuck and all the mental models I had didn't work. Good maths teachers can tell the difference and in my case, often did.

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#79

Post by apo »

Some will look and this and say, "big deal, people can't do math in their heads."

There may be more to it. Consider the recent "riddle" in which a man buys a horse, sells it, and buys it back again, then sells it. The question is, how much money did the man make or lose:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/math-riddle-quiz-q...

It was so simple to me that it seemed like it must be a trick question. It's not.

I asked this question to people I was certain would get the right answer - and they didn't.

This is a deep topic that needs to be explored much more thoroughly than it might appear on the surface. I suspect that many of the people who can't do this kind of reasoning are running companies and countries.

Re: 'Striking weaknesses' in adult financial skills

#80

Post by YorkianTones »

kartan wrote: post #5

If you want capitalism to work, you need some kind of "homo economicus" that is able to look for their own selfinterest. If what you have is companies powered by complex financial systems and artificial intelligence help while consumers are not able to get a discount right, you are going to end with all money in one side of the table with the other empty handed. This is another reason to improve our education systems…

I think capitalism is much simpler: capital begets capital. Those who have capital will accumulate more capital, almost infinitely, until the capital/income ratio reaches an equilibrium who knows how high (in the absence of major corrections like wars and hyper inflation). Add inherited wealth and low taxes. Capitalism's winners are those who already have capital. Thomas Pickety's book "Capital in the 21st Century" cogently illustrates this using massive tax return based data sets.
Post reply on HN