Hacker News Reader

> Nobody is paying attention and actively prides themselves in not learning and never reading a book in their lives, that's the problem.

If we had a more meritocratic society, I doubt people would pride themselves in their ignorance.

But as it stands, our society rewards both luck and misfortune - and we privatize gains and socialize losses.

Combine that with the fact that access corruption is rampant in Western societies - and the way to succeed is to take excessive risk, woo gatekeepers, execute, and get lucky.

Only one of those requires the type of intelligence you get in school (execution). And if you have enough luck or corruption, you don't even need to execute.

Why do the hard work on trying to find cures for common forms of cancer, make breakthroughs toward fusion energy, or increase crop yields on staple crops - when you can take on excessive risk in property speculation and your odds of financial success are many times higher?

I'm a strong believer that the world is getting better every day - even in recent times. But I'm not sure how much longer that trend will last in a world that gives smart people very few incentives to do things that actually benefit society.

Maybe with enough people we're destined to get lucky and progress no matter what.

Real-world success is generally a matter of luck no matter what the incentives are. You can't make your cancer research pan out, you can only do it diligently and find out later if it was the right direction. You can definitely screw it up. But you can't make it work without a bit of luck.

If people can't keep their luck-based gains, no one has any real reason to try anything unusual. Everyone would be chasing the puck instead of skating to the open ice hoping to catch a break. Society would stagnate.

Things look much more predictable and fair if you adjust your definition of success a little bit. A modest life with reasonable stability and time for some recreation and vacations is within reach for a large fraction of people (in Norcal - don't know about elsewhere) with some hard work and financial restraint. This feels like success to me.

> you can't make it work without a bit of luck.

You won't get any luck if you don't try.

Working to put yourself into a situation where luck can find you will greatly increase your luck.

Re: luck, from my father, "It's amazing how lucky well-prepared people are."

I guess if you can only imagine a society structured like it is today.

If we all accepted that luck is the driving force, decided that we would rather live in a world where hard work and intelligence pays off - then it's possible to imagine a world in which you're rewarded for hard work (on areas of importance) and gains are socialized instead of losses. The socialized gains could pay people who worked hard and their ideas didn't pan out.

I'm not saying this is a world that would work and is better.

But it's pretty unimaginative to think it's just flat out impossible to have progress in any society that isn't structured around luck.

Intelligent people tried central planning and it didn’t work. Repeatedly.

If you are going to propose banging our head into that wall again you can’t just naively point out how great it sounds from first principles. Been there, done that. Instead you need to seriously grapple with those failures and convincingly explain why this time will be different.

Seems to be working well for Walmart. A major problem with central planning is timely flow of accurate information. Although this is still a problem, it has become much easier to do so than in the past.

Do not confuse forms of governance intended for whole societies with those that work for smaller, more controlled and more selective organizations.

Walmart cannot be compared to the USA or China for sure, but your criticism is a little pedantic and presumptuous. There are national economies that are in the same order of magnitude as, or smaller than, that of Walmart's.

As context, if my numbers are right, then at ~$550B annual revenue Walmart would be around the GDP of Belgium and Thailand.

Or about the 25th largest economy in the world, if looking at it that way.

And it's a better corporate analogy than most, considering it essentially does everything from retail to services.

And it’s failing again! Interest rate interventionism has been slowly eroding social and economic mobility in the west for 30 years!

Why is decentralized planning impossible? Why can't areas of importance be picked by democratic vote?

It seems like a possible option.

I think the hard part of that is socializing the definition of "areas of importance"

Also getting everyone to accept one worldview. Maybe the most important area of importance would be educating people to see things the way you see...

I am all for it as long as I can decide what is important!

> Combine that with the fact that access corruption is rampant in Western societies - and the way to succeed is to take excessive risk, woo gatekeepers, execute, and get lucky.

Can you name one country in the world where it is not true?

I don't think that type of corruption is most prevalent in Western societies.

Luck sort of rewards itself, it is a part of its very definition.

But I would not be so hostile to luck. We need it. The Lord of the Rings would never exist if Tolkien wasn't lucky enough to come down with a trench foot and thus survive the Great War. mRNA vaccines might not exist if Katalin Karikó did not beat that cancer in the late 1990s. Etc.

The reason we don't have a meritocracy society is because failure is being rewarded.

Cut the welfare, stop punishing success with higher taxes and you'll see just how much better people can be.

Small fry compared to banks and companies being bailed out by the government.

That would be great for society but awful for it's citizens.

Failure is not being rewarded, being a member of sociery is, it's not about performance.

Failure is being rewarded with free services, lower taxes and a whole bunch of other benefits, this isnt really in question here.

Dollar for dollar poor people pay 1 sixth of the income taxes that high income earners pay. If that's not rewarding failure, what is?

You put an equal sign between failure and low income, which in my mind is quite baffling. You could be a failure and pay a lot of taxes too.

But it's not uncommon, we do it with our kids all the time. "If you don't perform good grades, you are not good enough". My point being that changing that view to, "look at what opportunities you (will) have now". Someone being a failure according to you may be quite demotivated at reaching a high income due to the fact that it seems impossible, why do the effort? For what is more important than playing a role in society, and be a good human? Is really income a value of how human you are?

You're assuming market prices for labor aren't artificially low because the system works against them.

You're also assuming high incomes are completely independent of Central Banks subsidizing asset prices.

OK. So you're educated about finance.

But personal finance is mostly about personal habits and actions. You can understand what is a financially sound plan of action all you want. For example, I wasted money on eating out three times last week, whereas previously I only eat out once per week successfully for weeks on end.

Information is insufficient. Practice is required.

I am unsure exactly what information these firms provided. Even if it's sound information, it doesn't necessary translate to practice.

That's literally what my personal finance class taught in high school as a part of the government mandated financial literacy class.

How to budget. Why to budget. How to write a check. What is a bank account? How to open a bank account. What food costs. What does produce cost? Compare that to X restaurant. What are good ways to save money? What are the costs of renting vs owning, etc.

This wasn't a "stock market" class, though they briefly covered business and what a stock/investing was.

They are useful information. For a lot of people, that's great.

But it is not the same thing as practice, as in actually doing the work of saving and resisting temptation such as eating out.

Okay I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure why this is being used as an argument against teaching personal finance...

Academic vs. real life is a strange debate to me. It seems that to some people that academics itself is sacrosanct and plenty, and to others real life is sacrosanct and plenty. This entire article is about academic data being sacrosanct about these classes, and that's literally what I railed against. To me, I believe in both. They go hand in hand.

So for instance, if you're talking about the action of cooking, I also was required to take a Home Ec class independently of the personal finance requirement. There are many requirements in a high school, this is just one class we are talking about. The Home Ec class had grades based on how well we would sew up and patch clothing, create pillows and such, and cook various things. So there's some practical experience.

Now, you're also debating about an essentially real world "resisting" of urges and that's clearly not going to be able to be "taught" as you say. But we're talking about preparing children for adulthood, and in adulthood, you're going to experience that either way.

If they don't know what the term "interest rate" is, how exactly are they going to learn it from a 10+ page credit card legalese document? That seems enormously more opaque to me. You can learn it from others, sure, but they had to learn it somewhere and they likely learned it from a book or from school, or from learning it by screwing up the hard way.

If we're trying to reduce the amount of people that long term screw up, then having them equipped to understand the language of the real world is a great place to start instead of at the ground floor with zero knowledge. And yes, real world experience is necessary, too, but short of giving kids raw eggs and meat and having thousands of stoves in the lunchroom instead of prepared food I'm not sure how you would accomplish that.

Some people are privileged enough to have parents that can teach them this stuff, but largely after generations of not knowing these things in impoverished areas or having parents that have to work to do the things like cook for their children and pay their own bills when they get home, those fresh "graduates" are going to start from scratch not knowing the language nor having the experience and wind up screwing up, possibly in a way that is impossible to get out of and end up homeless or buried in extreme debt with interest rates they do not understand. Increasing the odds of your success by helping you understand the terms being thrown at you is going to help prevent that. As is having you go through the motions of doing the cooking, in this example.

But it comes down to for me as I said, I believe in real world experience AND education on a subject. Education can teach you what you need to practice in the first place sometimes, rather than end up unable to understand why you are trapped and what could potentially help you become untrapped. I don't see these as mutually exclusive.

Will people do a better job of saving money and resisting temptation if we never teach them why that's important?

But it is a prerequisite.

> personal finance is mostly about personal habits and actions

It’s also about common knowledge and frameworks.

Knowing you should not have to pay to maintain a checking account, for instance. Or that filing a tax return can produce a refund. How to pay down debt when you have spare cash and different types of debt, or how to compare two purchasing options—a monthly or an up front.

> I wasted money on eating out three times last week

Was it definitely a waste? The time you spend preparing your own food has value. As does the mental impact of (depending what you bought) the pleasure of a meal you could not have made for yourself; and the relief of pressure of not having to do it yourself.

It is worth trying, though. Some people find out that cooking gives them more pleasure than waiting for their order to arrive.

Yes, this is called “people who enjoy cooking”.

True, but in order to find out if that is your case, you must try it out, and probably more than once.

Most hobbies aren't immediately awesome, a certain section of the learning curve must be climbed.

I still remember my silent desperation when I sat in front of a PC back in 1994 for the first time. Computers were totally alien to me at that time. Ten years later I was programming in several languages.

Personally, I enjoy both, equally, at different times.

This is essentially the common fallacy along the lines of "Everybody deserves what they get and gets what they deserve". Society can't, and indeed does not, work that way.

This is an amazingly narcissistic viewpoint: 1. You are part of the blessed 5% (how do you know?) 2. Anyone who disagrees is actively malicious (it's not all about you, man) 3. It worked for you, therefore it must work for everyone (if only they were as awesome as you, right?)

So if your explanation is right, then we should also expect to see only a tiny effect in the practical use of math, reading, writing, etc. between people who went to school and people who didn't. Because only 2 cared enough to pay attention. Right?

Beyond the really elementary things that get repeated often enough and insistently enough for most people to learn them whether they're interested or not -- basic reading, basic writing, addition and subtraction -- yes, as far as I can tell most people don't retain much from school. Not for long, anyway. It's easy to think otherwise if you're (for example) an engineer surrounded by unusually studious people in your day-to-day life, but standardized tests administered more broadly give a less encouraging picture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education looks at research on retention and finds it to support you on this point.

Sometimes it's not a retention problem, it's that they never learned the stuff in the first place. You're pretty doomed if you fall behind in school, it's all up to some individual going above and beyond (a teacher, a family member, a friend) to save you, because the system will just keep shuffling you along to adulthood, and then all the consequences hit at once. Take this loan with compound interest you can't understand because you can't multiply, buy a massive depreciating asset with it (car, mobile home...) because you don't know what "depreciating" is...

As I understand it, selection effects are pervasive in education. It’s a lot easier to show good results if you can choose to teach only the smart kids.

So, on the one hand, teaching only two kids in a class of 40 is too easy. On the other, sometimes nothing seems to work because studies don’t account for inherent differences in aptitude.

> That doesn't mean it "doesn't work"

If our education fails to teach, then our education has failed.

People know they shouldn’t carry credit card debt. They just want stuff too much.

That’s not an education problem as they know they shouldn’t do that.

This is reductionist to the point of uselessness. People "know" tons of crap, and singular known facts don't dictate behavior by themselves, no matter who you are. Every tradeoff you make is a result of all your collected experience and knowledge on the topic as well as your desires and the complexities of time-based decision making (bad now = good later, and vice versa, where the "bad" and "good" things are never quite comparable qualitatively).

Education affects humans, and education can be changed to better affect humans, but humans can't simply be changed except by education, so it's the ultimate irony to look at people doing a bad job, their fault or not, and imply we somehow can't or shouldn't use the one and only tool we have to change people. Giving up is easy, especially if it's strangers you're giving up on and you don't care about the entire picture of the society you live in. Bettering education is very hard. Taken together, it's obvious why so many people just want to say "they deserve it" and no longer think about it.

> If our education fails to teach, then our education has failed.

Or education was not the solution?

Education is a kind of solution but effectiveness is also a factor. I went through D.A.R.E and a whole host of other health and mindfulness classes. Just because you educated someone doesn’t mean they’re going to become immune to what you’re trying to teach them to avoid. Drugs, crime, and overeating are always going to be issues no matter how much “education” you throw at young people.

My point exactly, the focus on education is likely misplaced.

Sure, personal responsibility is not without importance.

But we don't solve obesity or poverty through education. We all know to eat healthy and exercise.

Making the right choices easier often has a bigger effect.

I’m guessing you had great parents?

>not learning and never reading a book in their lives,

Maybe because the education system isn't devised to educate but to babysit?

Or maybe because when you start to educate someone, they throw a textbook at another student and they have to interrupt the class to deal with disciplinary measures and EMTs. At that point, sure it becomes babysitting for the rest of the students.

Education for humans was never meant to be done on a classwide level. That's why it sucks.

I agree, this article was worse than crap. its dangerous

I would avoid anyone that named themselves kafkaincarnate. That's just terrifying.

On a side note, my favorite kafka story out of all his saved works was, the blind paranoid mole digging tunnels. I'm a big fan of kafka but would never want to align my brain with his tragic way of thinking. But he was not wrong to be paranoid, he lived a pretty terrible life in a pretty terrible time.