Personally I find the youth of today shockingly ill-informed about basic economic facts and matters of personal finance. It is way to easy to get over your head in debt. True people may blame the institutions that let them do it so easily but what about personal responsibility. You know what your income is. You should know how much you can afford to pay toward loans and credit card debt. Yet I keep seeing young people, fresh out of high school or college go nuts with their Visa/MC/Discover and simply don't think about the things they buy. I had one young friend forced to face this when he couldn't get approval for a used car loan he desperately needed (we are talking bailing wire and good intentions was keeping his current car running) because of his mounting credit card debt due to his Amazon/iTunes habit. He was forced to take a 30 hr/week part time job, sucking up his nights and weekends, so he could wipe out the credit card just so he could get that loan. Sure he had a thousand CDs, a hundred anime series as well as a great movie/TV collection on DVD and a mounted broken Narsil but he couldn't drive them to work. So he became responsible, took classes, got a better job, learned to save for a rainy day.
This issue has always been one of the most ironic ones in the modern age.
It's very easy to blame the individuals. But did you ever ask WHY so many people are ill-informed about basic economic facts and personal finance? First of all, we live in a business-centric society. This is an age where a government regulation on soft drink size can create more rage in its citizens than the chipping away of our private lives. Business is being treated as more sacred than general life. I'm not going to make an argument for or against that. I'm just using it as an example of just how high a pedestal Business has been placed on.
I'll simplify what you said about the ill-informed and ask it in the form of a question. "Why are people so stupid now?" Simple. It's good for business.
Think about it. If you want to profit from selling a product to the masses, who would you be more confident in selling it to? A nation full of penny-pinchers? Or a nation full of impulsive spenders who don't have a clue how much they can afford to borrow? Obviously, you're going to get more sales with the latter.
With the exception of a handful of necessities, business isn't about giving somebody something they want. It's about making somebody think they want it and then giving it to them. Most commerce is
dependent upon consumers who buy before they think.
Of course it didn't start out that way, but the trend has always been there. Con-artists have always been searching for the suckers. Every advance in mass-communication has done its part to create more of them. Whether or not this was an intentional process, I'm not sure. But it's a sad truth that fools are the easiest to sell to, and that makes them the most important demographic. Now, factor that into entertainment. All entertainment relies on sponsors, and that means advertising. But sponsors want their ads to be accessible to the people who are most likely to buy the product. And who is that? The suckers. Therefore, entertainment that is most attractive to suckers, is most likely to draw in sponsorship. And as we all know, whether we like it or not, the behavior of humans is heavily influenced by entertainment. See where this is going? The age of fools is self-perpetuating. We've created a media-driven world that encourages us to be stupid. We just reached an unbelievable new level of this with the introduction of reality shows. The 'celebrities of the future' are people the likes of the cast of Jersey Shore and the Kardashians. Not only is it trendy to be stupid and impulsive, we're now being taught that it's a viable road to fame and success. Sure one could argue that entertainment has always had idiots, but we always knew it was scripted and staged (except for pro-wrestling). Now we're having it shown to us through the Blair Witch lens, and we're being told it's real life. It's going to get even worse in another couple of years, when computerized eye wear devices such as Google Glass enter the market, enabling corporations to subtly program us during every minute of our daily lives, and not just when we're in front of a computer or a television.
But that's just the media aspect. We've also been made dependent. For instance, try to find a public school that still teaches home economics, or wood shop. My father's old high-school in NYC even had a metal shop and a garage for teaching auto-repair. You'll have a hard time finding any of this now, at a time when less parents are around to teach their kids practical skills than at any other time in history. It was once all considered mandatory knowledge. It was a society where people were expected to help themselves. Today, the opposite is true. Even if we had the skills, we probably wouldn't have the time for them (too much of our time is swallowed up by even mundane things). But businesses don't want us using those skills anyway. they don't want us fixing cars ourselves. They want us to pay someone else to do it for us. They don't want us making our own clothes. If we made our own clothes, where would fashion lines be? They don't even want us to know how to patch a hole in our pants. They'd rather we throw the thing out and buy a new one. If we grew and made our own food, they couldn't sell us pre-packaged goods stuffed full of preservatives and addictive substances like MSG. But most importantly, they don't want us worrying about finance. They want us to be impulsive. If we go broke afterward, it's not the concern of a business. They made their sales. This is the price of business having no conscience.
Only now, now that all of this has contributed to people being lazy and dependent upon government safety nets, have the businesses really started to complain. I don't know if people just didn't realize that all of this would eventually come full circle, or if they just didn't care. Either way, this was engineered. They're reaping what they've sown now. People became dependent upon corporations to provide everything. And now that they're out of money, with no understanding of how to help themselves, they've turned to the government for help.
If this is to ever be reversed, Businesses need to understand how much power they really have over society, and take some actual responsibility for it. Because whether they like it or not, powered by the media, they actually have more control over the ebbs and flows of society than government. Oh sure, government can be a mad dictator if it wants, force us to do or not do things, but it's advertising that tells us what we think of it.
