The only teacher who taught financial education was a substitute we might have seen for one lesson twice a year or something. I still remember him too, Mr. Roland. He called it his Roland-omics course.
I mean, we definitely didn’t even have that. And like you, home economics for me was basic sewing, cooking, some crafts.
Oh, there was one point in driver’s ed — an elective course — where we covered getting quotes from multiple car insurance providers rather than just taking the first one. I guess I should count that.
People need to work on their susceptibility to this.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and that’s gotta be part of it, but humans are humans. They don’t get better at that across generations unless doing it wrong is killing them, and even then, evolution isn’t a fast process. So basically, every new young human is starting from scratch.
The art of fine-tuning how you convince people to buy your thing is a developing field, and knowledge gets passed down among experts in written form, trained into them. We have marketing, advertising, communication science, psychology, economics. The rate of improvement blows past any kind of change that humans can biologically do.
Maybe we could teach humans how to deal with some of that, but my point is that we aren’t doing so, not in an institutionalized form. As a new human, I’m not just given some body of knowledge to counter all that work in trying to influence me. Each generation that goes by, you’d kind of expect humans to get worse at dealing with it, on the net, because the crowd influencing us is getting better more-quickly.
Sometimes we have regulations to deal with certain types of problematic things: pyramid schemes, misleading advertising, etc. But I’d say that that’s relatively limited.
EDIT: For the US, if you look at most of what the increase of spending over the past century is on, it’s on housing. Like, as society has gotten wealthier, our relative share of spending on, say, food has declined. But housing is up as a percentage of spending. And the housing we have is substantially larger in terms of per-capita square footage than it has been for past generations.
This one doesn’t go back a full century, but it does do the last 60.
In that time, median household real income has risen by a bit over 50%.
And median household real house price has risen by about 107%.
EDIT3: And over the past century, average household size has declined, also worth pointing out, so there are also fewer people in those larger, more-expensive houses.
I mean, we definitely didn’t even have that. And like you, home economics for me was basic sewing, cooking, some crafts.
Oh, there was one point in driver’s ed — an elective course — where we covered getting quotes from multiple car insurance providers rather than just taking the first one. I guess I should count that.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, and that’s gotta be part of it, but humans are humans. They don’t get better at that across generations unless doing it wrong is killing them, and even then, evolution isn’t a fast process. So basically, every new young human is starting from scratch.
The art of fine-tuning how you convince people to buy your thing is a developing field, and knowledge gets passed down among experts in written form, trained into them. We have marketing, advertising, communication science, psychology, economics. The rate of improvement blows past any kind of change that humans can biologically do.
Maybe we could teach humans how to deal with some of that, but my point is that we aren’t doing so, not in an institutionalized form. As a new human, I’m not just given some body of knowledge to counter all that work in trying to influence me. Each generation that goes by, you’d kind of expect humans to get worse at dealing with it, on the net, because the crowd influencing us is getting better more-quickly.
Sometimes we have regulations to deal with certain types of problematic things: pyramid schemes, misleading advertising, etc. But I’d say that that’s relatively limited.
EDIT: For the US, if you look at most of what the increase of spending over the past century is on, it’s on housing. Like, as society has gotten wealthier, our relative share of spending on, say, food has declined. But housing is up as a percentage of spending. And the housing we have is substantially larger in terms of per-capita square footage than it has been for past generations.
EDIT2:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/decline-u-s-housing-affordability-1967-2023/
This one doesn’t go back a full century, but it does do the last 60.
In that time, median household real income has risen by a bit over 50%.
And median household real house price has risen by about 107%.
EDIT3: And over the past century, average household size has declined, also worth pointing out, so there are also fewer people in those larger, more-expensive houses.
EDIT4: One more fun chart:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/25/a-look-at-the-state-of-affordable-housing-in-the-us/
EDIT5: This has some data that goes back the full century that I wanted:
https://thehustle.co/originals/why-america-has-so-many-big-houses