I've been told there's tons of money in education! But the insight is the edtech stuff that makes money does not sell education. B2b up-skilling platforms for example sell the promise of higher earnings. Food safety, HR training sell compliance. College prep sells college acceptance, and so on.
The people with the foresight to pay for financial literacy will very likely already be financially literate.
I'm conflicted.
Btw, there's also money in actual learning things, look at eg music classes adults take just for their own sake.
(Of course, you could say that a guitar teacher is selling 'getting laid'. But that's perhaps going a bit too far.)
This is what they sell, but it's outdated since the 50s and millennials+ have slowly realized it was largely false promises. (both sides are to blame just to be clear)
If that were the only thing, yeah I could see it being a hard sell.. especially as costs have gotten a lot higher than when I went to university at the beginning of the millennium. But add in the peer network and the ease of making friends because of repeated random encounters.. and I think it's still worth it.
The whole "companies expect a degree, at least to show that you can finish a multi-year effort" was always an afterthought for me.
You can get that access without paying tuition. Just show up and talk to the professors. They (most likely) won't kick you out.
If you knew exactly what you wanted (needed) to talk about, I don't think you would have an issue. You could always pay them to consult if the topic wasn't too boring.
However...
At least in the olden days, going to the class and listening to the professor's take on the subject could help you make connections that you wouldn't make in another context, or on your own. In current days, maybe you make those connections by watching YouTube videos. I (vaguely) remember a very interesting post by someone who said when they watched Talk Y at 2x speed, it seemed mediocre, but later they watched it at 1x and started making all sorts of connections from it.
I think that's one of the benefits of college. Experiencing life at 1x, with time to make the connections and do the creative thinking.
The creativity can also come from talking with your colleagues (fellow students).
No, I mean you can literally read the same books and attend the same lectures as tuition paying students.
You can ask a professor if you can sit in class (even if you are not a student). Most will be overjoyed that someone is actually sitting in class just to _learn_, instead of just for the piece of paper at the end.
Now the more controversial stance is we can't say this earning power is causal. That's why specifically I said people buy the gateway ticket into these higher earning jobs. It's self-perpetuating.
I can't disagree with the data, what I can say is people that out-earn non-college people is not _because_ of college. The population represented by non-college goes really down really deep for large variety of socio-economic reasons let's just say.
My call out is when we think about changing outcomes for underserved groups of people, there's a hard reckoning that comes.
For example I dabbled in "teaching people to cook". It's one of the most transformative skills. After some months my takeaway is that people that pay for learning to cook aren't paying "to learn", they already know or want to get better or quite bluntly pay for food-porn, edutainment. There's thousands of published cook books of all forms. The barrier isn't lack of materials/content.
A person goes from zero to 1 learning to cook due to necessity, not my online saas course. Btw saas can work, people make a killing; but they're paying for network and "influencer" access, not cooking content.
Right or wrong, that’s the aesthetic now.
Some clear requirement like "5th grade math" would be more appropriate.
I am not questioning that one can learn enough to pass the lessons, but often times, lessons fail to prepare for the real world.
I personally consider myself to be quite keen in the areas of financial literacy compared to most people. To be honest, I owe most of what I learned to two things:
1. Being addicted to Runescape in my youth back in the early 2000s. I am dead serious too. For a boring grindy point-and-click adventure, the game really had a lot of real world lessons packed in to it -- predominately to much of the game's economy depending on interactions with other players at the time.
2. Some unpleasant experiences growing up, but I do not feel like those had as much as an impact as #1, oddly enough.
One important point about the game is that I had stake in the game, so to speak. I put a lot of (wasted) time and (wasted) effort into the game in order to earn more and more fake, virtual currency. However, that in-game currency, at the time, had a lot of value to me. Every decision I made with the in-game currency had to be calculated and tact. "How do I earn enough for <x>?" If I spend <y>, I can afford <z>, but won't have enough for <a>" And so on.
I feel like in a lesson on a platform like EconTeen might lack that "stake" or "value" that MMORPG resources or real world money has. I am not trying to say EconTeen is a subpar product or anything like that. I am just thinking about myself, once a teenager, and I know I would have learned just enough to make it through these lessons as fast possible so that I may return to my video game as fast as possible.
You’re right. It wasn’t until I had any kind of real money that I had to actually learn financial literacy. I learned it as a kid but had completely forgotten because I grew up poor.
Listed Curricula: Budgeting • Saving • Banking • Credit • Investing • Insurance • Taxes • College Finance • Career Planning • Entrepreneurship • Economics • Consumer Rights
This is so broad that the important parts won't have sufficient detail to understand the foundations. I can almost guarantee you they won't have talked about fiat currency, or inflation aside from the macro perspective which won't connect to anything at the individual level (Micro).
If you want your kids to understand finance and by extension money you start with Mises on Human Action, then The Theory of Money and Credit, then Menger/Hayek, a review of Adam Smith's 5 volume set, and later Socialism.
One would think that a discussion about teaching teenagers would focus on teaching them a broader view instead of tunneling them in one specific direction that happens to antagonize socialism and then only at the end teach them about socialism. That sounds eerily close minded.
I have different reasons for disliking socialism, reasons that are far more banal and simple to understand that don't even involve economics. I don't need an "economic calculation problem" that applies against market economies just as much as it does against socialism, etc.
The funniest part about Austrian economics is that Austrians (the nation and their people) practiced Austrian economics all the way until the beginning of world war two, at which point the Austrian economists got kicked out by an Austrian and fled to the US.
Austrian Economics which was previously just more classically called "Economics" prior to Keynes and the 1960s does just that following a first-principled approach, whereas the current state of academia for Introductory Economics does not, and instead creates a blindspot with contradictory material meant to confuse in a by-rote teaching strategy that fails objective measure in most cases.
We are talking about economics, and economic systems, its important to understand how such systems have previously failed. Facts don't antagonize opinion aside from when that opinion is wrong and must be discarded; it may antagonize the person who doesn't want to discard such an opinion. The facts are simply just the facts and they hold a supreme position in rational decision-making and related reasoning which is most accurate when based on objective facts (philosophy's metaphysical objectivity/identity/definition), regardless of individual personal belief.
The economic calculation problem is certainly the one that gets the most fanfare because quite a lot of the smaller still un-solveable problems eventually culminate in it with the chaotic whipsaws described, but there are many others mentioned in those 22 chapters; especially for the variants like Syndicalism, or surrounding logistics or transportation that are equally damning as well towards failure. Basic rational thinking says you don't want to use systems you know to fail in a way you can't control, perceive, or measure (after-the-fact i.e. hysteresis).
Its not antagonistic to Socialism unless you consider Socialism a devout belief, in which case I'd ask why one believes in something that isn't true and causes destruction for everyone; by definition believing and striving towards something that isn't true blindly is delusion, or non-hyperbolic evil (whichever you prefer, blindness leads to destructive acts which are evil acts).
The objective facts are what matter, and while many of the things that are now associated with Socialism in the common mind are quite right to aim for, they are hard problems and not solved, and it must not be done so blindly or in a way that will destroy oneself, their children, or their legacy/future as people of the money-printer seem to ignore. Cascading failure problems are the most difficult problems to tackle.
The facts are simply that those failure domains exist, and remain unsolve-able because of mathematical properties in the dynamics, and once the circumstances are created, there is very little control to avoid the downsides which is why it should be learned objectively; and any form of money-printing eventually over the currency's lifecycle will collapse to non-market socialism in the ways described, which is a worse problem when your population is at a level where the chaos of order breakdown causes Malthusian reversion by Catton.
If your food production suddenly fails from something that is generally predictable (having foreknowledge of these dynamics), and you can only grow enough to feed 1/5th of the global population, who decides who lives among the Nuclear powers? Combined the countries involved make up more than 1/5th of the global population.
> The funniest part about Austrian economics is that Austrians (the nation and their people) practiced Austrian economics all the way until the beginning of WW2, at which point economists got kicked out by an Austrian and fled to the US.
That is misleading. Austria was occupied and Annexed by Germany during the Anschluss of 1938 and the leadership that remained were loyal to Hitler throughout the War. The economists, academics, and the like all had people flee to the US during that War. The communists found a great friend in Keynes, but today the intelligent and educated know the errors of Keynes.
It would be a clear misrepresentation saying that they were kicked out by Austrians, when your home state is annexed by a Fascist State, and the material in question applies specifically to Statism or Central Heirarchies of which Fascism and Communism both apply by structural definition.
There is a reason quite a lot of those papers weren't published until well after WW2.
With so many subscriptions for everything these days, I'm turning back to good old books to educate the kids. You pay once, they don't disappear after reading unlike in Fallout games, so you can reuse them with all the kids :). Helping them enjoy reading early really makes a lasting difference!
Source: gave up on the process. It seemed the larger the bureaucracy, the lower the conversion rate.
As a parent, I find the landing page to be opaque and not something I would plunk down my credit card number for. Are the lessons videos? Chatbot interactions? Homework questions? How will I know if my child is learning anything? Unless I heard from a trusted friend that this was great for his kid, I would not sign up.
This is going to be Hacker News till the crash, huh. We're hitting the "stock tips from shoeshine boys" stage of the bubble. Thank God my money's in real estate.
This looks like a pure money grab, vibe-coded in the shortest possible time with, likely, vibe-generated study material.
I dunno if you're joking (or only semi-serious), but, TBH, the largest number of "how to grow your business" courses are all based on how the author/presenter grew a business around a book/video/content called "how to grow your business".
A good example of this is the "Stacking the bricks"(sp?) thing. I looked into so many of these paid courses, and the only experience the author is demonstrating is "how to make money teaching a course on how to make money".
There's an entire, almost incestuous, industry around this, with each "business-person" referencing other business-people's success stories using their "how to grow your business" course in their own "how to grow your business" course, with testimonials from course-completers who made some money out of their own "How to grow your business" course.
From the outside, it looks almost looks like a pyramid, but on closer inspection it appears to be undirected cyclic graph.
[EDIT]
I expect all this to collapse soon, as the cost of producing this useless material is now approaching zero. This means that the participants in this network can now each "produce" new material on a minute by minute/hour by hour basis. When the production of a product is close to zero AND the utility to the consumer is also zero, there is no way for anyone in this network to make money anymore, because the new entrants will be so overloaded with choices (millions of different courses to choose from) that they may never enter the network at all.
Just because it doesn't work, doesn't mean we won't see it everywhere because the cost is still zero.
It's like catalytic converter thefts... Most places cracked down on sales of stolen converters, so there's no money in it anymore, but people still steal them cause they heard you could make money.
I meant the opposite when I said "collapse" - because we will be inundated with it (i.e. it will be everywhere), new entrants will be inured to it and simply not enter.
In the past, these networks had a health influx of new blood on a regular basis. It's hard to maintain this pipeline if every member is producing a 1000 books a week.
Beyond the investment wiki pages, it has other pages on personal finance.
It ranges from a pretty basic level up to more advanced.
Just solid, basic financial information that works for most people.
Thanks for your feedback, and thank you for helping us make EconTeen better.
Chrisjackson4•6mo ago
Most kids don’t get any financial education we’re trying to fix that.
22+ self-paced lessons 25+ real-world tools (budgeting, investing, taxes, careers, etc.)
Our first launch reached 2,500+ students, and we’re now gearing up for back-to-school outreach with teachers and schools.
https://www.producthunt.com/products/econteen?launch=econtee...
https://econteen.com/
I’d love any feedback, harsh or helpful. Thanks!
– Christopher
SoftTalker•6mo ago
We got some, in home economics. Not sure that subject is really offered anymore?
That was mostly around budgeting. What we didn't get nearly enough of was time value of money, and the cost of credit/borrowing.
As a result a lot of people buy a car and it's just a payment. They have no idea what they are paying as a total price. They don't start a 401K because they have no concept how much difference compounding makes if you start saving when you are 22 vs. 50. Then they are upset when companies do stuff "to benefit stockholders" and never consider that they could have been a stockholder.
jncfhnb•6mo ago
They can’t to any meaningful extent.
Compound interest still sucks when you don’t have a meaningful initial investment.
anigbrowl•6mo ago
Some people think companies should have moral obligations toward their workers and customers as well as stockholders and executives.
dsiegel2275•6mo ago
harmmonica•6mo ago
If that option is there I couldn't find it so consider that a single-user usability test or just user error.
jncfhnb•6mo ago
varenc•6mo ago
Also pretty ironic that this site is designed to trick you into paying for a subscription you've forgotten about...but that's the entire subscription/free trial economy of course.
mrangle•6mo ago
I'd be intrigued, but would quickly click away.
You're forgoing the part of the sales cycle where you demonstrate what you are offering. It goes from telling me, briefly, to asking for a credit card.
I rarely to never give a credit card in exchange for a free trial. Not without some type of proof of concept, first.
It's like being asked for a credit card by someone who approaches me on the street and asks me to trust them.
Absent widespread recommendations, If I don't have a better idea of what I'm buying then I won't buy it.
coolandsmartrr•6mo ago