The Education Most People Never Get

Here’s a question worth sitting with: why don’t schools teach how money actually works?

Most people spend their entire lives earning, saving, and spending money without ever being taught what it is, how it’s created, who controls it, or what the consequences of that control are. The rules of the monetary game are the most consequential rules most people live under — and they’re almost never explained.

This isn’t accidental. Understanding how money works tends to produce questions that are uncomfortable for the institutions that benefit from the current arrangement. Why does the central bank set interest rates? Who benefits when it does? Why can governments run deficits indefinitely in ways that individuals can’t? Where does the money come from?

These aren’t radical questions. They’re basic questions about the system that shapes everyone’s financial life. But asking them seriously leads to conclusions — about inflation as a hidden tax, about the Cantillon Effect, about who wins and loses from monetary expansion — that aren’t flattering to the status quo.

Bitcoin didn’t create these questions. The questions were always there, waiting for anyone who looked carefully enough. Bitcoin made them urgent, because it offered a specific alternative — and alternatives make the existing system visible in ways it isn’t when there’s nothing to compare it to.

The 349 days of this course is, in one sense, just the financial education that should have been available in school. The mechanics of money, honestly taught. The history of how monetary systems fail. The properties of sound money. The first digital implementation of those properties.

Most people will never get this education. You have it. That’s genuinely worth something.

Tomorrow: how to keep learning after Day 365.

— The Daily Bit