Nearly 1 in 3 American workers run out of money before payday

What people aren't taught is good financial sense and what to prioritize in life. We can't pretend that every child has educated family members to teach them this. And ignoring this means perpetuating a cycle of pain and suffering because the uneducated poor have kids too, and they'll be the ones teaching them how to live their lives. There were no classes that could've prepared me to invest into appreciating asset X instead of depreciating asset Y, which is a trap people fall into far too often to just ignore as a fact of life. There's nothing in the typical school curriculum that could ever teach some people that money should be prioritized toward important needs (housing, good food, etc.) instead of frivolous wants. Especially considering that entire industries are based around trying to part these people from their money year after year. Horrible from an environmental standpoint too.

Not saying you're wrong btw, just throwing something out there.

I can't help but wonder if everyone downvoting people preaching personal responsibility are also part of the problem. As a society today (in America at least), we're increasingly condemning those preaching personal responsibility in almost every venue, or at least every liberal venue. There's still some push for personal responsibility amongst conservatives.

In a way, this appears to be a result of recency bias and our collective forgetting that preaching personal responsibility was once the norm in western societies. While I'm an atheist myself, long before there was any government social safety net, the church provided this safety net, but when it did, that safety net came with the expectation of learning lessons like "God helps those that help themselves".

As a society, yes it's important to have empathy for other who have made mistakes. Even Judeo-Christian religion makes room for this lesson through stories like the prodigal son. But you can't just have empathy without accountability unless you're willing to accept that more people will become a burden on the productive than if you have a culture of accountability.

You've got to have a balance between both empathy and accountability and squelching voices promoting accountability, but downvoting for example, throws this balance out of whack.

Looking at these numbers it clearly doesn't exist for a substantial part of the population. Where it does I'd argue it's mostly just habit.

Financial literacy includes knowing what various financial instruments are for.

Knowing how to think about your budget beyond the expenses that you have every single week or month.

Knowing how a credit card works and why that makes it dangerous. Knowing ways to avoid that danger (with or without a credit card).

Knowing what a bank account is for and how to open one.

Knowing what investing is, why it's a good thing, and where and how to get started with it.

Knowing what a credit score is, what goes into it, and why it's important.

Those are all important components of financial literacy. They involve knowledge that not everybody is exposed to. Using that knowledge does often require being able to add/subtract/multiply/divide.

But while math competency is necessary for successful budgeting and financial management, it is by no means sufficient for either.