Jonathan Wroble
Financial Literacy, AI/Digital/Media Literacy ● Co-Founder @ Get A Financial Life NYC, the first money curriculum for New York City
New York City, New York, United States
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In 2024, I co-founded Get A Financial Life NYC, the first money curriculum specifically designed for the 700,000 students in the NYC public school system. We're now working with 50 city schools to deliver lessons on topics from budgeting to work to investing. And through creative collaboration with individual schools, districts, and key leaders in the NYC Department of Education, we've delivered stipends to students, teachers, and community members.
Along the way, I've learned and observed a ton about how kids interact with money. The fact that they don't see physical cash, and what this means for awareness of their spending; the fact that gambling is often equated with investing; the fact that convenience reigns supreme, even when it runs counter to best financial practices. As one high school junior put it: "When it comes to money, all I have is Cash App and my pocket.” I love discussing topics such as:
- Are young girls or young boys better with money, and is social media to blame?
- What is the actual cost of convenience, and is it worth it?
- What's really behind the rise of youth gambling, prediction markets, the creator economy, and crypto?
At the same time, I've become aware of the growing need for AI/digital literacy. I explore questions in my writing related to tech and society, such as:
- What does it means when your "escape" starts taking up more time than the thing—i.e., real life—that you're escaping from?
- What are the impacts of how technology enables and even fuels rampant misinformation, from white lies (like men lying about their height on dating apps) to the Big Lie?
- What role should AI play in the classroom, if any?
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Could the problem with boys be money?
At a time when we hear constantly about the problem with young men—citing their high jail and homelessness rates, for instance—but less in the way of coherent explanations, I hypothesize:
Could the problem with young men be as simple as money?
Look at young women, and you see encouraging financial trends. They're more likely to go to college than boys (which generally translates to a wage premium), less likely to be unemployed, and even out-earn men in 22 major cities. The increasingly female finfluencer landscape promotes habits like budgeting, saving, and reducing debt.
Young men go into more debt than women, invest more but achieve worse returns, and have even been found to spend more. Their social media feeds more likely feature content on investing and wealth accumulation; one study found they were significantly more likely to have bought crypto than women from online advice.
And in the most toxic place, the manosphere, men are mocked if they aren't super-providers—if they aren't making enough to provide luxury for a nonworking spouse and many children. Meaning that the online world, where alpha males display such behavior, and the real world, where women are catching up with and often even surpassing men, are increasingly out of step.
Social media is often to blame. When it comes to money, perhaps it's that case that in general, it pushes bad content to boys while pushing good advice to girls.
Personal Finance: A New World of DON'TS
Personal finance used to be a land of DOS:
- DO get a bank savings account.
- DO get the best rate on your savings.
- DO pay off your debt in order of highest to lowest rate.
- DO invest in an index fund.
It was almost simple, and millions of people dug their way out of the red with feel-good gameplans that could fit on an index card. (Dave Ramsey, arguably the most influential personal finance author ever, still calls his playbook "baby steps." And there are only seven of them.)
Two things have happened in recent history to completely change this landscape.
First, content creators seized on the fact that we respond more to negative information than positive. Cut to the idea that buying coffee or avocado toast will ruin your finances, or that college is a bad deal—oversimplified, context-free bits of financial "tips" that run rampant online. TikTok and Instagram, in fact, have become forums of narrowly differentiated advice for the same basic principles, designed to maximize clicks, attention, and subscriptions at the expense of recall.
Second, the gamification and digitalization of finance has opened the door to a million bad actors, some marauding as above-board financial companies. E-gambling, prediction markets, in-game purchases, loyalty apps, and myriad other financial technologies are constantly at work separating us all (including kids as young as teenagers) from our money, and we need to know to avoid them rather than learn how to interact with them.
And so personal finance is now a land of DON'TS: What NOT TO DO is equally important, sometimes more important, than what TO DO. It's crucial we're all educated, especially our young people, on this new reality.
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