The financial literacy industrial complex
&gt; You probably don&#x27;t remember learning much about money or finance in high school.<p>I do.<p>&gt; A 2014 meta-analysis of 169 papers and 201 studies, however, found that &quot;interventions to improve financial literacy explain only 0.1% of the variance in financial behaviors studied&quot; — and that low-income students had even weaker correlations.<p>That&#x27;s because only two kids in a class of 40-ish were paying attention.  It&#x27;s the same two kids who were paying attention in science, math, literature, history, etc.  That asinine argument can be made about education itself.  Nobody is paying attention and actively prides themselves in not learning and never reading a book in their lives, that&#x27;s the problem.  That doesn&#x27;t mean it &quot;doesn&#x27;t work&quot;, and that you should short change the students that actually want to participate.<p>It certainly helped me get out of poverty.  The only people I&#x27;ve ever heard argue against this (until now) were people who actively wanted me to fail in life because they couldn&#x27;t imagine themselves understanding it ever since they were already financially illiterate adults.<p>I took the lessons and the beatings so that I wouldn&#x27;t have to continue taking the beatings later in life.  The small fraction of students that you end up teaching actually do appreciate it.