Comment by bsenftner
18 days ago
I think the problem with "financial literacy" is that it is taught too polite, it never mentions the true fact that our society is filled with professional organizations that use deception to get your money, and the investment world, the contracting world, and the employment world are filled to the gills with unethical players on both sides that are professional liars. They pose as one and deliver another, their entire careers, and get away with it because they understand how to hide their tracks with financial complexity. The majority of humanity falls prey to these predators, and they are in fact a significant proportion of every nation's economy. Every single company that is "hard to cancel" is one of these predators, entirely successfully, and that is thanks to our lack of financial literacy.
I don't think that is really the source of the issues for most people that are bad with money.
They spend more than they earn. They don't earn enough and they spend too much.
It is like blaming Cocacola for people being fat. Yeah they probably have some diffuse structural blame for the situation at a societal level but nobody is forcing anyone to drink a litre of coke a day or to fritter away their money on takeaways instead of investing it sensibly.
Could you blame advertisers for people spending money. Maybe? Do ads even work? They don't seem to work at all in politics so I doubt they do much anywhere else.
> Do ads even work? They don't seem to work at all in politics so I doubt they do much anywhere else.
Is the planet even round? It don't seem to be round everywhere I look so I doubt it is round anywhere else. :)
Please ask an LLM to explain the basics of epistemology to you.
Don't be condescending when you don't even understand the difference between a hypothesis based on a translation of an observation in one field into another, and a firm conclusion based on the same.
Absent all the other evidence we have, hypothesising that the world is flat because everywhere is locally flat would be entirely reasonable.
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> It is like blaming Cocacola for people being fat. > Do ads even work?
Coca-Cola spends four billion dollars a year on advertising. Generally speaking, ad revenues are in the order of trillions. It's hard to claim they don't work.
> They spend more than they earn. They don't earn enough and they spend too much.
Yeah, because Coca Cola (and other "businesses") convince them to spend.
> Yeah they probably have some diffuse structural blame for the situation at a societal level but nobody is forcing anyone to drink a litre of coke a day
Have you seen advertisements at all?
Nobody's forcing people to see/hear them. But they're shoved in your face wherever you go.
> Could you blame advertisers for people spending money. Maybe?
Not even just maybe. You're shortselling yourself.
> They don't seem to work at all in politics so I doubt they do much anywhere else.
You might want to double check how politics use advertisements.
> Yeah, because Coca Cola (and other "businesses") convince them to spend.
It's amusing to see that a lot of people don't believe in ad, because "they don't work on me".
I think that the best lesson school should teach is to learn how to shield ourselves from ads and avoid consumerism. Not going to happen in the US for obvious reasons.
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You can only convince someone with an argument and ads don't have arguments. Cocacola suggests they spend. It plants ideas in their heads. It puts Coke at the top of their minds. But the decision is not Coke's. Coke doesn't make them buy Coke. This is basic responsibility.
>Nobody's forcing people to see/hear them. But they're shoved in your face wherever you go.
So what? You are forced to hear or see all sorts of things in your life. That has nothing to do with whether you are ultimately responsible for your own decisions.
I think that on a societal level we should be talking about what impact these products (ultraprocessed food) have. But that is no excuse at an individual level. It is so easy to be normal: just don't eat crap food, which BTW is far more expensive than cooking your own meals.
>You might want to double check how politics use advertisements.
Hilary and Kamala outspent Trump by huge amounts and it did basically nothing. Lots of research shows that political campaign spending has little or no correlation with electoral success across many different countries.
It turns out that when decisions are important people make their own minds up, ads don't tell them what to think, and politics is important enough if you care enough to vote at all.
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