Then we can focus on what area the person can best contribute in. Not everyone is going to suited for a job in programming or mathematics, or STEM as a whole.
I'm a huge fan of "Your Money or Your Life" and by extension the Financial Integrity program, which advocates for people to rethink their relationship with money as well teaches people how to make income regardless of employment status.
What I don't think works so well is teaching everyone to be good at money management. Ignoring the other possible contributors to being very poor (culture, prejudice, whatever), there is undeniably a component due to intelligence. We should thus expect some portion of these very poor to be incapable of managing money, no matter how much they have, and a better policy would be to manage their money for them. This already happens for some mental hospital patients that are out in the real world but need support for medication and housing and food, and if you give them too much unrestricted money instead they'll just buy a PS4 or something else that's shiny and the money will be gone, they'll have to sell their PS4 in a few months to keep paying the rent, and then a while later they'll be evicted due to non-payment. Better to give them a smaller amount of unrestricted money on top of the other aid, but in my experience the same spending patterns emerge (that is, spending it all), very few save, or save beyond what is necessary for a particular shiny toy. There is also a disincentive from getting a job that pays too much income, because their benefits are based on income-received and can be taken away very quickly, but that's another issue. My point is that such individuality-invading money-management could probably be beneficial for more than just the mentally ill, but it will be immediately dismissed by people intelligent enough to manage their own money and who wouldn't be affected by this as nanny-statism.
I don't have any data on this, but it's my hunch about why there's so much economic resentment these days.
Depends if they work in a unionized industry.
"If you break your arm, what percentage of your income will be consumed by medical costs?"
In most industrial countries, including the US after the ACA, very little, because of health insurance.
"there's so much economic resentment these days."
That's inequality. When everyone around you is poor, except for a few rich folks you don't see often, it's not as big a deal. When you're constantly exposed to the things you don't/can't have, that can lead to resentment.
This goes back to your first sentence: "Although almost everyone is better off in material terms than they were two generations ago, I fear that the level of wealth required to live a "comfortable" life may have outpaced that increase."
In the US, Median Income peaked in the 1970's and has been flat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
The poor (in the U.S. anyway) are relatively worse off than they were 2 generations ago - the bottom 50% have seen very little growth in income in 50 years, while the top 50% have grown a lot more. http://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/chartbook/Income%...
Not all countries are as bad as the US, particularly Canada or Europe, because they have strong redistribution systems (health and social insurance, etc.). But the trends aren't great.
Not if all your resources are sucked by insane rent / housing prices.
Work has never been easier in the US than it currently is. Record number of office workers, minimal number of farmers, factory workers, and manual labor in general.
If you're ok getting about the minimal wage for some gardening, or house cleaning, or trash removal, you probably have good chances (e.g. you'll outcompete an illegal Mexican immigrant by just knowing the language well).
Machines increasingly obviate jobs that don't require qualification. On one hand it is nice because humans need to do less and less dirty, mind-numbing jobs. OTOH being a traveling beatnik sucks more and more.
Several years ago I worked on a farm for a few months helping out a relative. It was exhausting work, but I found it much easier than some of the programming work I do as a living.
As for the people in the poor countries, they're getting richer because of this process, to an extent that the capitalists have to move their cheap labour manufacturing further and further - just see the trends in textile, for example. So it's all levelling, I would not worry about this particular aspect.
It will happen over time. Levelling is an unavoidable consequence of the globalisation.
> new types of software-enabled currency and exchange
Yes, this can be quite a game changer, may even remove the banks from the picture entirely, but, again, it all will need time.
There is this huge realization that computers and by extension reality does not care about what's in your head only what is. You can argue that Math has similar levels of precision, but once people start getting partial credit some of that harshness is lost.
That said, I don't think school should overly focus on directly useful skills or even what people studied in the past. How many lifetimes of highschool sudents where wasted learning how to identify and name Regular Polyhedra?
Don't get me wrong I think we could just teach LOGO or other pure educational language for a few months. The goal IMO should be critical thought not jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)
She had a BA in Chemistry, not because she was good at it, but precisely because it wasn't a strength of hers. Her teachers had the opinion that if she "tough enough to major in her weakest subject, she'd be tough enough to weather whatever life threw at her". Considering her achievements later in life, I think there's some merit to those thoughts.
The ability to question everything you read, hear and learn in search of the truth (what is), or, most likely, of more accurate or useful representations of it, is not dependent of your math or even science knowledge.
At the end of the day, intellectual curiosity and a willingness to understand things are what you need to get ahead.
Math and science are, like it or not, the most effective tools we've cooked up to understand the world.
Do other countries teach much about personal finance in High School or even College? I think this is one area that is lacking in US curriculum, at least when I graduated high school a decade ago. Sure I could budget a project but was I able to make informed and responsible financial decisions in my early/mid 20s?
Students need to know the burdens that student loans are going to put on them after school ends. Parents may not know or remember what it was like to be a college kid trying to make ends meet. I saw many kids take heavy loans to live somewhat comfortably. Once they got "adult jobs" they still cant make ends meet after graduation due to loan repayments.
Even the Silicon Valley startup crew tend to pivot wildly away from their "any one can make it" mentality once they start growing to "well, I want someone with a degree".
Hell, my current company is hiring a nightshift person and the main requirement seems to be "Linux knowledge, has a degree". This is a job which basically burns people out after a year guaranteed.
Student A:
Spends high school getting good grades and receiving an allowance from his parents.
Attends an expensive private school.
Takes out hefty loans to pay for school and the same standard of living he enjoyed with his parents.
Has little financial help from his parents who figure that the student loans cover everything.
Graduates with $70,000 in debt, unrealistic ideas about the standard of living he "needs", little understanding of how to manage his finances and plenty of fear to make him avoid the problem, and is unable to afford either that standard of living or his debt repayments.
Spirals into deep debt for many years.
Student B:
Works part time through high school and has money saved for tuition.
Takes out a small student loan to cover remaining expenses.
Continues to work weekends so has a small amount of cash flow.
Goes to a cheaper state university and gets used to the idea of living on rice and beans and keeping their clothes in milk crates.
Graduates with perhaps $10,000 in debt, a good handle on their finances, an inexpensive lifestyle, and a solid plan for paying off the debt within a few years.
Continues to wealth and prosperity.
How much poverty and bad decisions could be prevented if more students took route B instead of route A? Do you still think it doesn't matter if we teach them financial independence or not?
Pray to god that you and your children have long lives. Whatever comes afterwards , we can endure.