One of the recurring themes of this blog, possibly the central theme, is that we Americans do not know what we need to know about personal finance. For this I blame everybody, the financial advice gurus, the media, the government, a cultural bias against things monetary, and, perhaps most of all, our own lazy 
and childish selves.
If the problem is ignorance, then the obvious cure is education. Why not mandate a high school or college course on personal finance? This is a question I have discussed in passing a few times (e.g. here and here) mostly to point out that things are so bad I doubt we could find enough teachers.
Just to be clear, my only objections to teaching personal finance in schools are ones of practical implementation. In principle, more exposure to the issues of personal finance can only be a good thing. Even a disorganized course taught by a confused teacher could not make the situation worse. Or could it?
There is an outfit called the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy which did a survey of college students in 2008. They found that students who had taken a personal finance course in high school scored lower on a test of financial literacy than those that hadn’t. Oops.
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By far, the most read item this year on Bad Money Advice was Swoopo: Entertaining Yes, Shopping No. It’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to a post really going viral, accounting for about 4% of all page views on this site. No 
doubt it was the first thing many of you ever read here.
So I don’t need to recap what it says. But I will remind you all that I called Swoopo a sort of "commercial performance art in which it is demonstrated just how dumb we really are." But dumb isn’t quite the right word. Irrational is better.
And that is today’s year-in-review theme, that we are all nuts. Not that there is anything wrong with that. It’s just that we aren’t nearly as logical as we think we are.
Back in March I posted on a wonderful new concept discovered by two professors: saver’s remorse. The gist of it is that it is possible to regret saving instead of spending, just as you could regret the reverse. In a better world that would have been an absurdly mundane finding, but in our world it is pretty radical.
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As winter rolls in and the season of office parties fades into the season of empty offices, it is time to pause and take stock. It is hard to imagine that we will be looking back on 2009 as the good old days any time soon, but things could certainly have been worse.
The end of 2009 also marks, more or less, the end of the first year of this blog. So it makes sense to review the year by reviewing the year in the blog. In the next few posts I will be highlighting a few general themes that emerged as the year went on. Today it is the most obvious of topics, The Great Recession.
What set off the GR was best discussed here at Bad Money Advice in a book review I wrote (in two parts) of the probably now forgotten The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It. I meant to do more book reviews when I started this blog.
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Earlier this week I stumbled across a surprisingly on-target quote about what got us into this economic mess from, of all people, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
The failures that led to this financial crisis were many. Banks and investors took on large risks, risks they did not understand. Washington allowed those risks to build up unchecked. And in communities across the country, Americans borrowed too much in part because they did not understand how to save prudently, how to borrow responsibly, and they did not understand fully that pension values and house prices, equity prices will not always rise.
It’s not a perfect explanation. I wouldn’t make the general statement that banks and investors didn’t understand the risks they were taking. Some didn’t, but many understood quite well. And I think Washington was more than a passive observer of the whole mess.
But the blame laid at the feet of Wall Street and the government is mostly pro forma here. What Geithner is saying is that, as it turns out, a widespread lack of financial acumen amongst ordinary folks was at least as damaging as the foolishness amongst the bankers and bureaucrats. In the immortal words of Pogo "We have met the enemy and he is us."
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The other week WalletPop had a post Want happiness? Forget money – get therapy instead in which was explained that money can’t buy happiness, unless you spend it on psychotherapy.
This was based on a study (discussed a little more completely here but not, as far as I can tell, available on the web) done by two British professors. They found that £800 worth of therapy was the happiness equivalent of a pay rise of £25,000.
Alas, this was not experimental science. As much fun as it would have been, the researchers did not choose people at random and give them piles of cash or toss them onto the couch. All they did was find that people who themselves decided to get therapy experienced the same increase in self-reported happiness as those that got a big raise.
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and childish selves.
The Big Picture | Frank Curmudgeon | 
January 27, 2010 5:51 pm | 
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