Comment by kome
18 days ago
The push for financial literacy as a panacea for systemic economic instability is a neoliberal sleight of hand. It’s a moral cop-out, allowing institutions to pathologize poverty while absolving themselves of designing systems that prey on human behavior.
Consider retirement: we dismantled pensions, replaced them with 401(k)s, and now blame individuals for not magically becoming Warren Buffett. Or student loans: we tell 18-year-olds to “shop around” for degrees as if education is a commodity, not a societal investment. Healthcare? “Just be a savvy HSA optimizer!” Meanwhile, the system is a Skinner box of late-stage capitalism—overdraft fees, algorithmic rent hikes, predatory loans—all while whispering, “You should’ve read the fine print.”
Behavioral economics has shown we’re not rational actors. Yet the system demands perfect foresight: save exactly enough, borrow exactly enough, die just before your 401(k) runs out. When people fail (and they do, because life is stochastic), we scold them for not being “literate” enough, rather than asking why basic survival requires a PhD in personal finance.
This isn’t empowerment—it’s exploitation gaslit as morality. Countries with robust social safety nets don’t obsess over teaching kids to day-trade; they structure defaults that work for humans. Financial literacy has value, but weaponizing it to justify atomizing every risk onto individuals? That’s not education. That’s a rigged game wearing a meritocratic mask.
Great point. I saw a short YouTube video the other day in which a lady was describing how saving $100 a month and investing it in an index fund would turn into $1 million after 50 years or so...
The numbers seem to add up but this strategy all rests on society's ability to maintain what has been the biggest legalized economic ponzi in the history of mankind... Plus, it doesn't factor in inflation. A 10% annual gain means nothing at all if real inflation is 10%. Note that the inflation compounds as well!
There are all these risks and dysfunctions that are covered up and simplified down in the language. Whenever you're discussing long term events and you say the word "dollar", you're talking about an extremely vague depreciating unit... It's not a term that's fit for discussing long term events. Dollars might not even exist in 20 years. All fiat currencies in history have gone to 0... Literally hundreds of them across different civilizations. USD has only really been a fiat currency since 1971... It's not that long ago and it has lost most of its value since then.
Now it seems to be held together by sheer insanity; psyops, shady international organizations, geopolitical machinations, massive-scale coercion and deprivation of opportunities through regulations, weaponizing taxpayer dollars against taxpayers... Always accompanied with gaslighting of course. We have fraud disguised as aid, sin disguised as morals.