Comment by JonFish85 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JonFish85 | Hacker News Reader

While I agree that it's a great mental exercise to learn how to code (and to learn the mindset that goes along with it), isn't it much more important for every American to learn how to budget? To learn how to save money? To me, those are things that are far more important to the country as a whole than understanding even basic scripting.

As a quick example, the meaning of "afford" has changed in the last 2 generations or so. To my grandparents, "affording" a car meant being able to spend the money to buy the car outright. To many of my peers, "affording" a new car means being able to make the minimum payment on the car, or even just the lease payment.

Many of my peers (meaning my specific circle of friends) don't even budget, nevermind put aside money for the future. Hell, even friends in the finance industry don't contribute to their 401k because they'll "do it later". To me, this is a problem that is very serious for our country as a whole, moreso than people learning to understand some basic code.

Don't get me wrong, I think it would be great for everyone to be able to understand how computers work at a deeper level than "magic". It's just that I think no one really bothers to teach kids how to save money, to invest, to budget their lifestyle, etc. Just an opinion, though.

Forget coding and budgeting, I'd rather every American get 30 minutes of exercise 3 to 4 days per week. That would solve an awful lot of problems...

There has been a move towards credit rather than saving, but a big part of what you are talking about is actually just the economy tanking. People can't save. I don't have money for my healthcare, or for my taxes for this year, or for taxes for last year. The reason is that I have health problems I haven't been able to deal with. I am not uneducated and I have excellent technology skills. I don't spend a lot of money. I am not an unusual case.

Isn't that a rather ... subversive concept when a good fraction of those learning it will then apply it to the Federal budget, their state's budget and on down?

How is that subversive? It's basic personal finance. It's no more subversive than teaching kids to share toys encourages communism, in my mind.

In general, people shouldn't spend more than they make. If they spend more than they make one month a year, but save enough the other months to cover it, no big deal. I don't see how that's any different at a macro level, but I'm also not an economist.

To me it's far worse to avoid having people learn basic personal finance things than it is to avoid it, in case some people apply it to bigger things.

We have major debt problems in the population, in my opinion. The housing bubble was a part of it: buying things that one can't afford, with the assumption that prices always go up. Credit card debt being near $1 trillion (I think it's around $800b), college loans being over $1 trillion.... Borrowing has been made very easy for quite some time, but just because money is easy to get doesn't mean that the average person should borrow as much as they can (which is what I meant above when I said that affording minimum payments != affording something).

Put those numbers up against the median retirement savings, which are ~$150k for households with head-of-household aged 65+[1, Table 7]. It seems pretty obvious that we as a nation should be educating people to save for their future. I guess another solution, which would be to assume that people can't/won't save no matter what, and use the government to facilitate that "savings" (i.e. increase Social Security's role to the primary source of funds for retirement). That way we wouldn't have to worry about people subverting the system and can just trust the government to do all of the hard work for them. That may match up better with your view, if you find personal finance potentially subversive...

[1] https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43057.pdf

(Edited to fix typo: $8b -> $800b)

The trouble is that a simple house hold budget is very very different to that of a sovereign state.

This simplistic approach leads some (some might say most) politicians to sell dubious policies by folksy appeal to peoples perceived knowledge when in fact they are guilty of "Unconscious incompetence"

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