Aotearoa / New Zealand

As for it being better to learn “at home” of course it is if the people at home know about that stuff but this comes across as a bit " let them eat cake."

I'm wondering if there's an intergenerational thing here. Teaching people about money doesn't help them avoid loan defaults, but does increase savings. Does growing up in a house where your parents are saving more, influence whether you need loans?

As in, even though financial education doesn't reduce the chances of defaulting on loans, does it reduce the chances of their kids defaulting on loans?

Perhaps you miss the point of what The Conversation is about.

Our mission is to share knowledge and inform decisions.

Inform decisions, not make decisions.

Typically, the stories are written by Academics not Journo's, and often they are written to just present some detail/facts, it is up to the reader to come to their own conclusion. I pretty much always find them informative, though sometimes, as in this one, much of the detail can be found in the papers/details that the story links to.

I think you'll find the point/conclusion in the title.

The Conversation is a platform for academic experts to write their own articles about things they are experts in. The unfortunate truth of science is that science is boring, and any interesting article about science is overplaying the significance of whatever it's talking about.

Academics aren't entertainers, and they know that pretty much no study lets you draw definitive conclusions, so the articles are a little different from what others put out.

They take ages to get to the point, too.

I've read comments longer than this article. It seemed like a quick read to me?

Best thing govt could do is stop blaming people.

I haven't seen the government blaming people?

Companies get to expense their business lunches.

Companies pay tax on profits. They buy a bottle of milk for $2, sell it for $3, and pay tax on the $1 profit. They get to take off the cost of running the business (e.g. rent, electricity, staffing) before paying tax. This all seems fair to me.

Business lunches are part of running a company. But in fact, there are special rules about food and drink that mean in NZ companies can only claim half the cost. So really this is a weird thing to get hung up on since we artificially restrict how much businesses can claim.

They get tax layers to pay for their luxuries and we bail them out when they take high risks.

Can you give some examples?

Govt blames majority when we have inflation

When did they do this?

and then in that same breathe blame the population for not spending enough and causing a recession.

When did this happen? The reserve bank is intentionally trying to cause a recession.

Almost like they have no idea how to run an economy.

Even expert economists have no idea what they are doing, because economics is extraordinarily complex, with many different levers, and chaos theory in full swing.

Bring the price of things down and people will have more disposable income to buy the things they want.

That's not how that works. The more disposable income people have, the more things will cost. It's a basic principle of economics that companies will increase prices to the level the market is able to bear (i.e. how much money people have).

Oh and regulate predatory payday loans and high interest loans. You can educate the populace or you could just do your job and stop illegal scams.

The government has made big strides in this area over the last year or two. Payday lenders have significantly more restrictions than they did previously.

I'm not sure what you just said is really related to the story we're discussing.