Right off the bat, the problem with financial (il)literacy is that a dysfunctional money system forces everyone to become a part-time money manager.
We can't just provide our value, earn our payday and go happily about our lives. We must actively invest it, max the tax deductions, find high-yield accounts, leverage our meagre equity into real estate holding, invest in XYZ product to beat inflation.
Michael Saylor isn't the most popular character in bitcoin maxi land right now, but this presentation at BTC Prague last year -- excellent! You can't outwork inflation, can't outearn the forces stacked against you:
Financial literacy is thus an extra step, a crucial skill in a broken money world.
Those who don't master it, get fucked -- slowly or not-so-slowly.
Also, actual financial literacy tests -- like that from Finra -- are stupidly easy. And I doubt acing them correlates to making prudent investments/managing one's affairs properly.
https://www.finra.org/financial_literacy_quiz
Recently had a long convo about money and banks and the financial system with a couple in my village. They follow what Nassim Taleb might have called your grandma's rules: spend less than you earn, have no debt, save relentlessly for retirement (our country's pension system is a widespread 401(k)-type thing, so not the shittiest of versions).
They don't do this with any form of financial plan in mind, but follow what the incentives tell them and what their morals/handed-down behavioral traits suggest.
It's the right thing to do in a world of sound money. But we live in a broken fiat money world, where up is down and down is sideways and everyone suffers from money illusion and money blindness (https://aier.org/article/money-blindness-and-money-clarity/). So they end up screwing themselves over.
"But what are we supposed to do with our surplus?" they ask.
They don't have a house, don't wanna take on the debt for one. And the numbers in their bank account, while impressive, on a good year break even with inflation (#737272).
The guy is deep into art, so he asked me "Should I just invest in art?" "Should we just go travel and blow all the money?"
He gets the problem, at some basic non-financial-literacy level. But what to do?
Bitcoin is the obvious answer, of course, but it takes some enormous modicum of hours to be comfortable with it -- let alone overcoming this couple's specific anti-tech/anti-bro biases.
They don't know anything about my life in bitcoin -- I don't throw that shit around too much:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/how-i-talk-about-bitcoin-at-thanksgiving -- so I didn't bring that up.
But over time, I imagine it will come up.
All roads lead to bitcoin.
Oh, and financial literacy is bullshit.
https://x.com/matt_levine/status/775042013876158464
That's today's little money lesson.
Peace,
J