OECD Teens lack financial literacy and maths skills for digital economy

I suspect that despite people&#x27;s familiarity with technology, it&#x27;s not just maths that will hold them back in this.<p>I taught 1st year undergrad students in Engineering (mechanical, civil, aerospace) programming between 2014-2019, usually Python and C. We saw a rapid average decline in ability over that period in basic functionality with computers. Really first noticed it in about 2016. As in, being able to download files, move them around in Explorer on Windows or Finder on Mac, understanding nested directory structures, and find them again. There wasn&#x27;t much difference in entry grades or anything between the year groups.<p>I strongly suspect this was largely due to smartphones coming out over people&#x27;s formative years and meaning that they weren&#x27;t using computers as much, so coming into University and going into the workplace they&#x27;d find it much harder. The iPhone launched in 2007 and so these kids entering University in 2016 onwards would have been born in 1998 and so started to be exposed to them from primary education, whereas slightly older kids wouldn&#x27;t have seen them til they were already in secondary education.

&gt; <i>These low-performing students struggled with everyday spending decisions, such as calculating whether buying tomatoes by the box or kilogramme was better value.</i><p>While we know that&#x27;s a more complicated problem than just the arithmetic the article implies, a dark pattern by retailers actively works against the arithmetic challenge...<p>More often than not, when I look at the cost per unit on a grocery store shelf tag, or on Amazon, the retailer will be using different units for different SKUs of essentially the same generic product -- between different brands, and even between different sized packages of the same brand.<p>So instead of being helpful, it&#x27;s a time-wasting diversion from the arithmetic, and also noise diversion cluttering the actual per-package prices.<p>Don&#x27;t tell me that a grocery chain doesn&#x27;t know what kind of product is in a package, nor know that consumers would like to be able to compare the cost per some reasonable unit of that kind.<p>Software didn&#x27;t invent the dark pattern; we just scaled up earlier slimy innovations.

Teens have not had much experience and it takes experience to learn these skills.<p>I think a lot of adults will struggle too. Moving to cashless has made things harder to track, we have more financial products and more complex ones available.<p>I think the solution is probably more adult education and learning opportunities so people can learn as they need to.

&gt;&gt; Across the 14 OECD countries within the 20 nations surveyed — including the US, Italy and the Netherlands — an average of 18 per cent of teens had difficulties using division to handle their finances.<p>&gt;&gt; These low-performing students struggled with everyday spending decisions, such as calculating whether buying tomatoes by the box or kilogramme was better value.<p>I have a hard time imagining how low education standards are.