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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

This should be taught in high school. It's amazing that high schools teach nothing about how business works in a market society.

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Probably depends on where you go to school. My high school was in the middle of a pre-trump era industrial region of WI. High school was teaching us the basics to go work in a factory.

However I did learn to read, and a book on the bare basics of accounting is like 200 pages.

When you say "pre-Trump-era industrial region", do you mean that there is now more industry there, or less?

There were many small manufacturers, and I think 2 very large ones near me. When I was around 13 I think, one of the big ones closed down, and many of the small ones followed soon after. It went to Democrats every year (but the margin was dwindling over time). 2016 it finally flipped completely. I think there is a trickle of new things coming back, but I don't think it is correlated with Trump in any way. I describe it as pre-trump because, at least to me, I get a very vivid picture of a region with a long history of successful industry that's dried up, and the only thing people have left in the area is retail and healthcare.

To be fair, the sort of people who used to live there then are not of a kind with the variety that live there now. Most of those who could leave — undoubtedly like yourself — did.

Accounting is just arithmetic, some jargon, and some rules. There's nothing hard about it. There's no reason high school can't teach it to ordinary students.

Yeah, the basics are important. And it doesn't matter if you're a CEO of a top 500 or self-employed.

In the end, accounting means: how much are you earning, how much are you spending and how much taxes do you need to pay

Three things schools should teach everyone:

1) Finance management

2) National and international law

3) Privacy

Most people don't even have basic finance skills. And you want them to learn how to read balance sheets and accounts? :)

The two are really the same. Balance sheets and accounts are the standard way of managing finances.

I kinda get tired of otherwise educated people having no idea what the difference between profit, revenue, margin, wealth, and income are. Also, the ones that exhibit such ignorance correlate with those who have disastrous personal finance behaviors.

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