Tune in to watch any major sporting event–football, hockey, basketball, women’s softball, etc–and you will be buried in a deluge of invitations to wager from Draft Kings and other companies.

And millions are accepting the invitation. One American adult in five is participating, wagering nearly $11 Billion.

(Journalists are trained to ask “Cui bono?” Who benefits? I will come back to that.)

If you check sports schedules on the ESPN App, you learn who’s playing, who’s favored, the betting line, what the over/under is, and more. In short, everything you need to know to place your bets!

Anyone with a smart phone can place bets, 24-7, and millions are, including a growing number of young people. “People in their early 20s are the fastest-growing group of gamblers, according to recent research. And many kids are starting younger than that. Nearly two-thirds of adolescents, ages 12 to 18, said they had gambled or played gambling-like games in the previous year.”

No secret why professional sports leagues and mega-wealthy owners like Jerry Jones, who owns football’s Dallas Cowboys, and Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, are all in with gambling: They know a fundamental truth: most Americans–particularly young ones–are financially illiterate, or close to it. They know that, while gambling is a sucker bet because the house always wins, investing in gambling seems to be a license to print money, given the number of suckers (i.e., undereducated people) in the audience.

The old saw, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” is incomplete. Add “…and we don’t do enough to teach them about money.”

Kristina Vorndran, writing in the Harvard Kennedy School publication, asserts, “Millennials and Gen Z want financial education, and 88% of adults support mandatory school courses on financial literacy.[iii] In response, 26 states now require high school personal finance courses, up from just 7 in 2019.[iv] Utah led the push for financial literacy in 2003 with its General Financial Literacy Program, but it took 18 years for over 10 states to follow suit. Now, just over half of the states require financial literacy for high school graduation, still leaving gaps, especially in underserved communities.”

The organization WalletHub surveyed financial literacy in our 50 states and concluded that Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Virginia do the best job of teaching financial literacy. Worst, they say, are Arkansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Alaska, and Louisiana.

Here’s another interesting source: https://www.theapef.org/

About a dozen years ago I was visiting elementary schools in Japan, and in a couple of classrooms the teachers had given students the super-market inserts from local newspapers. Students were told they had a certain amount of money and had to buy enough food for their family for a week. No ‘right answers’ but lots of good discussion.

I know teachers who ‘gave’ their middle school students an (imaginary) monthly budget–but not enough money to pay for everything they wanted. Again, no right answers, but lots of learning.

About 25 years ago the great Johns Hopkins economist Arnold Packer and I created a curriculum for Baltimore public high schools, with the goal of raising achievement levels in math and English. (We didn’t think about it at the time, but we were teaching financial literacy!)

Here’s how our curriculum worked: Small teams of students created businesses in an imaginary shopping mall. They had to choose a product, figure out where they would get it wholesale, what they would charge, what kind of storefront they would rent, how many employees, salaries and benefits, advertising, loans and interest rates on those loans, and so on. They also had to develop a business plan…and then present it in person to real, honest-to-God business people.

We helped train English and math teachers to use the curriculum, and we persuaded (with $$ from a Department of Education grant) some high schools to adopt it, which required changing schedules to allow for team-teaching and extended periods.

Because in every participating high school, not all English and math teachers were involved, some students got our curriculum, and some did not. A pretty cool research study because they all had to take the Maryland state tests.

Guess what? Our kids showed dramatic improvement in both subjects, far outperforming those in traditional English and math, and not just once but for a couple of years running.

But guess what happened next? The high schools abandoned the curriculum, saying that schedule changes were causing too much disruption, or team-teaching was too much work, or it was making the regular teachers look bad. (Oh, and our Department of Education grant was used up.)

What have I learned? That we as a society do not care enough to see that all kids get real opportunities to learn how money works, or to create and produce real knowledge. It’s cheaper to do drill-and-kill, and it’s easier and cheaper to give kids multiple-choice tests–even though nothing in adult life resembles a multiple-choice test.

So let’s ask that fundamental question, “Who benefits from widespread financial illiteracy?” In Christ’s time, it was the money lenders in the temple. Today, it’s pretty much the same crowd, offering bitcoins, expensive college loans, ‘free’ chances to bet, etc etc.

The losers aren’t stupid, however. At some point at least some of them will wake up and realize that they are being duped. That may happen in the November elections….

While most states now require some sort of financial education, it’s clearly not working. Parents and everyone else who wants a healthy society need to demand that public elementary schools develop dynamic curriculums that teach kids how money works, even when that means critiquing capitalism.

Will that happen? Wanna bet?