"Adulting" courses in America
economist.com
economist.com
That’s not because you are a child or an idiot. It’s because you know your parents have EXPERIENCE, and that is something you will never acquire from a course.
This kind of thread bothers me with it's hand wringing. Parents and teachers often spoke of their lives in casual conversation when I was growing up and it was pretty clear to me that, aside from it being a response to having no adult around to make a more useful conversation with for them, there was an element of educational intent.
Sewing? The course will explain and show you, after which you gain experience by practice. Making financial decisions? This rests a lot on knowing facts about how financials work, and a course is absolutely one correct way of learning those.
For experience, I'd rather think of things like - how do you cope with the death of a loved one? How do you decide who to be or what to do? How do you manage your emotions, streghts and weaknesses?
One can objectively reason through the first set of considerations, while the second involves a subjective element and is likely heavily influenced by their upbringing and life experiences.
Nobody knows how much to save or how much to spend on insurance. It's completely reasonable to seek advice, and one's parents might be a great starting point.
Their experience is approximately useless.
... whereas there's a huge amount of well-supported expert advice out there. You don't even need to take a course. Search the damned Internet.
... and don't give me any "cocky youth" bullshit. I'm old enough to be the parent of a large fraction of people on Hacker News.
Will the next residents understand that the drip-watering system 'blows out' sometimes, and needs fixing? How did I understand that? I've never lived in a house with a drip-watering system. But I heard these noises (high-pitched weeeeeee! as the air gets pushed out of the line; sound of water through pipes even though I hadn't turned a tap on), I wondered what it was, I investigated, I figured out it was the watering system.
And then one day those noises changed. Interesting. Investigate! Oh, one of the connectors has come loose. I should fix that.
Next year, the drip-watering system just doesn't work. Nothing happens. I remember when it turned on I could hear the solenoid tapping in and out. Now, nothing. A bit of figuring out later and I realise it froze in winter. The tap was full of water, it closed its relay, night came, it froze, it expanded. Damn. I bought a new unit and now I drain it come late autumn.
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This plus one hundred other things.
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So can I tell all this to the incoming residents, whomever they might be? I thought to write a 'house manual'. Maybe knock up a little website.
But, no. I can't. Because this is what we refer to as 'common sense'. Can I teach a stranger common sense? Alas.
Invent a thing that can teach an adult common sense and there's your next unicorn.
> But, no. I can't. Because this is what we refer to as 'common sense'. Can I teach a stranger common sense?
Those hidden details about the house aren't really common sense. You know because you either set it up or had to figure it out.
I have started writing a house manual because I've owned this house since before it was built and there are a lot of little details I know (like what's inside walls where and why, where buried pipes and utilities are, etc) that would take a lot of trial and error for someone else to figure out.
Having said that, a first time buyer will always be a first time buyer, and a house will probably suffer initially whilst they learn the skills to support their purchase.
This is what makes old houses a thing though: they're tough and built to tolerate a certain amount of stupidity - they wouldn't still be standing otherwise.
I try to take notes about things I do to my old house that I don't hear my peers with newer houses talk about, and if I do sell this house, I probably would offer to share all the notes when the buyer picks up the keys. Notes are also beneficial for my partner and future me.
Please do! Make it on paper, too.
I got a few old school binders with the house, and it's been a life saver. It's sorted by room, and all sorts of useful things are in there: Exact model number of the water heater. Wiring diagrams of the garage and cellar. Location of the master water valve. The location of the tool to reach inside the ventilation ducts. Where the stones are dug in the garden. How water flows when there is flooding. How to replace filters in the rain spouts. The garden roof may take damage from heavy snowfall, but that the incline of the garage roof is enough.
I am extremely grateful for this binder and try to keep it updated for the next owner. It seems a bit elitist to call it common sense. Sure, it's a house, everything can be repaired. But it's good to know why things are built the way they are. And it is much more useful to find out that the watering system needs to be drained late autumn before the fact.
Yes, you can teach people your common sense.
My parents are real estate agents and have seen this a handful of times. The buyers are always very appreciative. In fact, their house came with a plastic bin with filing folders containing manuals/warrantees/etc for stuff in the house (Fridge, Oven, Dishwasher, Pool stuff, etc).
I’ve not gone that far but I have a rough floor plan with the circuit breaker noted for each switch and most lights. Also a 3D version I built of the house in a cad-type app. I’d happily give it (and info about the smart home devices, like switches) to the next owner but I have a feeling it would be mostly useless.
It worked.
The headline says “too much”, but the article doesn’t quantify cluelessness in adults, instead presenting an anecdote.
Presumably those who take the class… aren’t clueless anymore and others don’t need the class?
Or maybe the problem is that people are naive enough to take the class in the first place because they can’t learn life skills this way?
The skills they mention in the article, budgeting and rejection and so forth, are also important. But there is a layer under that too.
1. Compound interest 2. Taxation 3. Insurance... Term/health 4. Asset classes... Equity /debt/real estate/gold/bonds and risk/reward 5. Evaluating investment plans/schemes
Shrinking as in they are already homeowners and married with children, but not rising to the responsibility of it? Or shrinking as in not becoming a home owner, or getting married, or having children. If its the latter, could there possibly be some other explanation?
>there has been a generational shift and that young people are less mature than their forebears were at the same age.
Less employed, too.
It's difficult and scary, and it's tempting to use the supposed equivalents the modern economy offers.
I think we need to make an effort to explain to young people that along with responsibility comes independence and life satisfaction.
As for owning property instead of renting, that one is massively more influenced by whether you can afford to buy a property or rent. Renting requires much less money and that is all there is to it. Neither makes you more or less satisfied in life.
It's not better in generic culture: many do not know how to handle paper and write with a pen which is REASONABLE these days IF you know how to write on a computer and handle your files properly but no, that second part is not known as well. I know some PhDs who do not know how to manage their own info, even their libraries in Zotero and can't properly quote a damn email.
But is it, really?
That was already the era of "information overload" and "future shock."
It’s not often that I diss content, but if there was ever a summary of a topic written that tried to sound like it was a novel idea by labelling everything under the sun, this is it.
Maybe I’m not smart enough to understand it, but honestly after 4 tries I still don’t get what the point is.
Also, the topic of “reflexive” came about in the early to mid 20th century, so for many people here, our parents have always existed in this reflexive modern. That doesn’t mean things have gotten more complex in the last generation
Personally I find this the easiest simple mental model for reflexive modernity:
"Modernity linearly accelerated change. Reflexive modernity loops back on itself and accelerates the acceleration". So a bit of "singularity is near".
The whole theory itself has quite a bit more baggage, but again I agree, the wikipedia article does not help at all.
The linked page to “reflexive” is much better, FWIW.
Meanwhile sociology was hardest hit by the replication crisis and I see no sign that they have done anything to improve replicability of their "research"
Do you have some sources for Sociology being hit harder than, say, Psychology, in the replication crisis? I personally don't even know of a many labs replication attempt from them (Sociology). So we probably don't know.
That said, Sociology is the attempt to explain the most complex thing in the universe (collective behavior arising out of sentient individuals), so if you think there's a better way, I'd be extremely excited :)
The 1890s were a tumultuous time. You now had cities with a nightlife, because the arc light and other new technologies meant you no longer depended on candles. Photography and telegraphy was now decades old - by the 1880s news could travel around the world within hours. This fueled the presses, powered by Linotype machines that could churn out pages with ease.
Telephony was now available in homes. The first X-ray was 1895. Hollerith's tabulating machine completed the 1890 census in only six years - two years less than the 1880 census - and transformed information processing.
Astronomy was making exciting new discovery, polar explorers were getting closer to the poles. Steam engines were getting ever more powerful. The Turbinia - the first turbine-powered steamship, 1894 - upset old ideas on ship power.
The chemical industry, with Germans in the lead, created amazing new products. Bayer produced Aspirin in the late 1890, and the new synthetic colors transformed the Victorian era.
The 1890's/1900s were not a lot simpler.
My grandfather's shop included a lathe and welding torch. He and my dad swapped out the engine to a car in my Dad's carport. That's technology - the car, the tools to fix it, and parts supply system to make it possible.
My mother had an automatic sewing machine which she used to make clothes. Sewing machines, motorized sewing machines, the looms to make the cloth, the machines to process the cotton - all technology.
We had several hams in the neighborhood, and CB radios were a craze. That's technology.
We got the city newspaper, which was possible from centuries of technological development - the printing press, ink and paper production, typesetting machines, distribution, vending machines.
Most homes had a particle accelerator in them to watch TV. That's certainly technology.
Compare a home now to one made two generations ago, and little has changed - assuming you are lucky enough to avoid the inherent death cycle of products tied to a smartphone. You've got easier access to shows and music, but people in the 1970s still had TV, radio, records, etc.
Compare a home from 1925 to two generations before that, and there you'll see a whole lot more changed.
Electricity is technology. Running water is technology. Municipal sewage is technology. Telephony is technology. Cheap aluminum is technology. Gasoline is technology. Weather forecasting is technology. The vertical filing system is technology. A card catalog is technology. Punched cards is technology.
You had access to a lot of technology when you were young. Why do you dismiss it so?
Not all technology is equal. It varies in complexity and the demands it places on our lives.
Now how do you get from your true observation to characterize how technology now is 'several orders of magnitude' greater than the 'very little "technology"' af3d had as kid?
When you talk about "demands it places on our lives", do you mean modern life has higher demands, or lower? And is that a good thing?
Like, in the 1800s, employees worked 12 hour shifts, 6 days/week, with few rest days or holidays. Working conditions were horrible, and a simple slip in attention could cut your fingers off or worse.
That placed a high demand on people's lives - higher than ours now, and higher than those in the Middle Ages. Quoting https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_... :
"Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind."
My mother would make clothes for the family when I was a kid. Sewing is a complex skill which takes effort and time to learn. She stopped when the price of cloth got more expensive than the price of pre-made clothing. Does technology place fewer demands on our lives now?
And how do you factor in the lack of effort we should have been doing to avoid global warming - a problem we've known about since I was a teenager in the 1980s?
Which makes it decidedly difficult to see a simple correlation between technology and ease of life, no matter how many "orders of magnitude" technology has changed.
Original HN title: "Too many adults are absolutely clueless"
The fact that they have shifted from talking about economics to telling us about skills we should have or which countries the "free world" deems democratic enough this week is unimpressive.
This publication is nothing more than a pedestal to launch assaults on the average citizen.
They expect average Joe to decide about his health insurance plan? Joe is not aware of half his bodily functions let alone make decisions based on assumptions of what might happen to him 40 years down the road. And he has to be an expert in litigation as well because you can bet the insurance company is going to fight him in every way.
The fact that people are forced to transact is despicable.
I am a firm believer that libertarian content must be outright banned in this platform with a domain ban certain publications this one being the first.
/rant
You're a bit late complaining about that, they've been covering non-economics topics since about 1846 when the Corn Laws were abolished.
I definitely noticed this with exchange students from the US a little more than a decade ago in uni. In Germany it's pretty common for 18 year old's to share an apartment in the city with one or two mates, you wash, you cook together, the drinking age is 16 etc.
When we interacted with US students, a lot of them even a bit older got wasted like teens and threw up everywhere, couldn't operate a washing machine, couldn't cook a normal homemade meal and so on. I think the US college experience has a lot to do with this. Over here you live on your own and it's like a job, nobody cares if you show up, apparently in the US it's like an adult daycare almost. No wonder people in their mid 20s can't do chores.
Yes, it is surely that young people are just wusses and not that they're also much poorer than previous generations, which forces them to postpone things like marriage, child-rearing, and purchasing a home.