[mrguyorama]

No, Americans are numerically illiterate.

Which is why all the dumbest Americans insist that "Why didn't they teach us how to balance a check book?", while, well, they were taught that, and every single check book comes with clear and simple instructions for its use

They were also taught how to calculate loan details and the extreme power of how interest grows, but they were too busy crying "Oh this is lame, when am I ever going to use this?"

There's a cult of proud ignorance in the US. People will brag about being uneducated, illiterate, or unable to follow simple instructions.

[xandrius]

Sorry for the ignorance, what what does "balancing a check book" mean? Is that an euphemism or an actual activity?

I can of course look up but interested in continuing the conversation.

[mrguyorama]

"Balancing the check book" refers to the process of running your own log of check transactions using something like https://cdn.wallethub.com/wallethub/images/posts/14483/check... and ensuring that it matches the occasional official balance statement from your bank occasionally.

Don't want to make assumptions about what you know so forgive any overexplanation...

It is about ensuring that you manage your account balance, so as to not write checks that your account balance cannot actually fulfill. Writing a check that you can't actually pay because your checking account is too low is called "Bouncing" a check, and generally costs you money at your bank and the place that you wrote the check, and will often result in those places being less likely to accept a check from you.

A secondary purpose was to ensure that your bank did not pay out a check that you have no record of writing. The check system has almost no protection, so anyone who had ever gotten a check from you could theoretically attempt to create fraudulent and forged checks against your account. You would check your record against the banks to check for this.

You would do this constantly, as in writing down every check you write, and once a month or so, actually doing the math, comparing your record of checks against the bank's record of checks.

I would also consider it a euphemism for "Financial literacy" in plenty of people's heads.

It is without a doubt the simplest possible mathematical task you can have as an adult. It is literally addition and subtraction, and logging every check. Every single American who attends public school until 4th grade has been taught the required knowledge for this task: Addition, subtraction, and the concept of negative numbers.

People say "Schools should teach balancing a check book" as some sort of cry that they think schools should focus on "practical" skills rather than, say, persuasive essay writing or reading literature or learning art.

Those people are demonstrating that they are too stupid to even understand what they have been taught. These same people will sit in math class and argue about how they "will never use this", in reference to things like calculating interest. They will often also say "Schools don't teach critical thinking", openly and proudly ignorant of the hilarity of someone who can't follow very basic instructions that anyone can find in five seconds and often come with the checkbook complaining about not being taught how to think.

Similarly, Americans will complain that school didn't teach them how to "do their taxes", which is hilarious, because for 95% of Americans, your federal taxes are a couple of pages and about 14 lines of numbers you have to fill in, most of them are numbers you copy from another piece of paper, and the rest have literal worksheets to follow.

Most people joke about how VCRs used to constantly have the "12:00" blinking clock because nobody would set them because it's "too hard". As a literal child who fixed this exact issue, it was a single page of instructions, and they were trivial. But for the majority of Americans who like to speak up, it seems like they are totally incapable of following even the most basic of instruction.

Frankly, stupidity is not a moral failing. Nobody chose to be born stupid. But ignorance, especially fixable ignorance, IS. America has a serious problem of people being openly ignorant and thinking their ignorance should be anything other than an opportunity to improve. I think the biggest problem in the USA is how much respect and attention people who demonstrably refuse to learn and are ignorant of pretty much everything get. That's why, for example, you have people insisting that rail transport is impossible in the US because it's too big, despite the fact that we literally built a cross country rail network using public funds when the country was dramatically less populated than now, or how government inherently mismanages healthcare despite about 100 examples of government mismanagement producing better outcomes than we get.

[xandrius]

Cool, thanks for the overexplanation.

I thought checks were things of the 80s or something, in other parts of the world you mostly either have the money or not, so the act of balancing checks wouldn't exist.

Interesting. Is it still that common to use checks as opposed to just a debit card?

[mrguyorama]

My mother kept writing paper checks all the way into 2012. When I worked the local grocery store, she was one of the only people left who made us use the check printer machine.

She's just very conservative with money and relied on inertia to maintain a balanced budget and was averse to change that may cause her to mismanage money, as we were very poor.

Check writing lasted far too long here in the US, for whatever reason, but was somewhat killed in the early 2000s when dramatic increases in gas prices led to gas stations no longer accepting checks as they got so many bounced ones.

The benefits of writing a check: 100% offline. If someone is willing to accept a check from you, there's zero interaction with a third party at transaction time.

Checks take longer to process, so you can take advantage of that by spending money today that you will not have until tomorrow, with zero interest. This also allowed a kind of fraud called "Kiting" where you keep cycling bad checks to artificially increase some balances temporarily, but that was less possible by the 80s I think, as even then forms of electronic settlement existed.

They feel meaningful. It's effort to put together and requires effort to manage your account so you treat it as a bigger event, reducing impulse to spend. Credit card companies sold merchants on the ability to induce more spending, and Debit cards have the exact same feature.

You can give someone a blank check to spend for something without having to do any work with third parties "authorizing" their spend. Good for parents or small businesses, and quite dangerous.

Checks are sociologically neat. Literally just a piece of paper, but they keep up the bargain often enough that we were able to use writing on paper as an entire financial system. They also required an amount of trust and familiarity between transacting parties that isn't really normal anymore. The guy in charge of the local grocery store is some overpaid desk jockey with an MBA tweaking excel spreadsheets of spend and revenue until the graph goes up and to the right enough. 40 years ago that guy was my dad and he knew everyone in the town by name.

I have written a check three times in my life. Setting up a way to accept a debit card is way more difficult than just cashing a piece of paper once a month, so landlords are a big consumer of real checks nowadays.

[reactordev]

This is about as thorough as it can be. Thank you. I was definitely referring to financial literacy. Man, Americans…