marshmallows

It seems to me that what you want to teach the kiddies is saving and frugality, and I couldn't agree more with you.  But it's a pretty simple message don't you think?  I mean don't you think that everybody knows that if they spend less they will be better off?  But they spend anyway because they want whatever they want right now.

Seems to me that we have discussed the marshmallow experiment before, but I don't remember what we said and it's pretty short, so I'll tell it again.  Kids are handed one marshmallow and if they can hold onto it the kindly experimenter will come back in five minutes with another marshmallow and then they will have two, unless they have eaten the first one in which case they get nothing.  About half the kids can wait and about half can't.  They tracked these kids over a number of years and the ones who didn't eat the first marshmallow did better in life.  These are pretty little kids so I expect a lot of it is genetic.

So my thesis is that you can teach kids thrift but you can't make them practice it.  And anyway our economy depends on it.  Aren't They, and I think I mean They here, always telling us that the problem is that consumer spending is down and that's a problem.  Well not always, sometimes They are telling us that we are not saving enough.  And as Beagles has pointed out on numerous occasions, what They are really always doing is trying to make us do something and it behooves us to figure that out and do the opposite, so maybe it's best to leave Them out of it.

But you know that money skinflints like the two of us save to buy our investments, if we are going to make more of it we depend on people buying the crap our companies make, and the more they spend the better we do, so that if everybody was a skinflint we wouldn't be getting much return on our investments.

I will take issue with your reference to your: the way the schools are run now

I think back to the way schools were back in the day, almost everybody learned how to read.  Actually I don't remember anybody not being able to read, but i guess they were shuffled off early.  And most of us learned arithmetic, and a smattering of where France is and who was our first president.  I didn't like high school because of its authoritative nature, but I guess I learned enough stuff there.  In short I would say I learned enough to start out in life at 18.

I can't speak to the current day high school, but my experience with kids in elementary school who were on a little lower level of the economic scale than we were in our day, was pretty good.  Almost all of them learned to read, probably the same amount as us learned arithmetic and they knew were France was and who Washington was. 

I never understand where this whole theory of our schools are going to hell comes from, it's just assumed to be common knowledge but I haven't seen any evidence of it.  One thing different in our day was, as we learned from that book, that not much effort was made to educate black kids, and if they didn't learn much, none of us white folk minded that much.  Now we are trying to educate everybody and the poor kids drag the average down.   

I did stay up late, it was almost ten when I retired with a smile on my face over the triumph of Trump and the downfall of the GOP.