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The costs of economic illiteracy

Discussions around financial literacy abound – and slosh over into the role (and track record) of journalism schools NOT teaching reporters how to educate the public. Or that it’s part of their job, to research a story sufficiently to inform and educate. Which is why we get a vibes election about inflation and the price of eggs. See? Sloshy.

En tout cas,  the Financial Times takes a run at efforts in Finlandia to learn-up their young charges with super-positive reinforcement:

Fully 91 per cent of Finnish students take part in a 10-lesson programme, during which they learn how business, the economy and society work as well as how to apply for a job. Finally, they are let loose in the business village for a day to practice teamwork in their work uniforms, buy drinks and food with the money they earn, and even find out what happens if they spend too much and they need to make emergency cash.

…

“The goal in Finland regarding financial literacy is that people make sustainable and value-creating economic decisions,” said Simo Karvinen, a teacher at Lauttasaari High School for International Business in Helsinki. “These decisions are made in various roles, whether as individuals, in households, in businesses, or almost in all activities within society. Therefore, it’s not just about how to manage your own financial wellbeing and capital.”

Anu Raijas, a financial literacy adviser at the museum of the Finnish central bank who led the writing of the national strategy on financial education, said the Nordic country still had more to do, particularly with women and less-educated young people.

Meanwhile, we’re missing flights trapped in circling robo taxis.

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(was) Away

El_ CI

Spent the last fews days in extreme green seclusion, see photo above. One of the only undeveloped barrier islands on the Atlantic coast, Cumberland is decidedly outside of the  20th century framework. Not, however, outside that of the 19th or the 21st, and this may be worth pointing out.

Though it has no paved roads, retails shops, bridges, gas stations, restaurants and a strictly limited population of visitors, CI is not in its native state. It was clearcut in the 17th-18th century and planted with Sea Island cotton. So the massive maritime forests have grown up in the meantime and only appear to be ancient. The ruins of the plantations those cotton crops supported are only a sort of bonus homage to the imperial past the newer forests now shroud.

Not unrelatedly, today it has decent cellphone reception, a generous stash of bicycles in good working order, a climate suitable to many types of citrus fruit trees and sustenance gardening, ample sun, wind and tidal energy resources (all yet untapped, save for a little gardening) and few other distractions for the contemplative figuring-out of new energy sources, cures, sad songs, epic poems, etc. Of course, rising seas may alter the shoreline configurations in the future.

But still, for now, it exists as a kind of future past. Something to consider.

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Southern Distinctiveness

There’s actually a magazine called Southern Distinction around here. Anyway, what do you know about Reconstruction? Via TNC, here’s a series of lectures by Yale professor of history David Blight on the subject that is well worth your time. With so many ideas (should say “ideas”) sure to carelessly thrown around in the race to ‘fix the country’ and be the next white guy to lose to Obama president, Dr. Blight’s lectures put that distinctiveness of yestercentury in a solid context. Almost seems as if, far from being dead, the past isn’t even past.

Watch it on Academic Earth