Free Republic

The bad news: Women are falling far behind men in financial literacy. The even worse news: Men apparently don’t know much about the topic in the first place. ... The authors surveyed people in the U.S., Germany and the Netherlands, asking three multiple-choice questions. In the U.S., only 38% of men got all three questions right. The American women did even worse, with only 22% scoring three out of three. The other countries showed a similar pattern. Here’s one of the questions: “Suppose you had $100 in a savings account and the interest rate was 2% per year. After five...

Well, she may claim to not know who Jonathan Gruber is, but she sure did get a copy of his talking points. Discussing Obamacare with a USA Today reporter, former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius blamed many of the law’s problems on the fact that Americans lack her sophisticated understanding of insurance: Still, Sebelius didn’t dispute the point that many Americans don’t fully understand how health insurance and the Affordable Care Act work, including the trade-offs involved in expanding coverage.“A lot of Americans have no idea what insurance is about,” she said. “I think the financial literacy...

Americans don't understand debt, which may be one reason that they have too much of it, according to a survey released Tuesday. The survey presented 1,000 people with a hypothetical scenario about credit card debt and asked them to compute how long it would take to pay it off. Only 35.9% of the 1,000 respondents could figure out how many years it would take for the amount they owe on their credit cards to double. A full 18.2% did not know how to respond and 31.9% of those surveyed over-estimated the timeframe. The survey by Harvard Business School and Dartmouth...

Americans don't understand debt, which may be one reason that they have too much of it, according to a survey released Tuesday. The survey presented 1,000 people with a hypothetical scenario about credit card debt and asked them to compute how long it would take to pay it off. Only 35.9% of the 1,000 respondents could figure out how many years it would take for the amount they owe on their credit cards to double. A full 18.2% did not know how to respond and 31.9% of those surveyed over-estimated the timeframe. The survey by Harvard Business School and Dartmouth...