By: Drona Gaddam
Drona Gaddam is a rising senior at Phillips Exeter Academy with an interest in macroeconomics. He is the founder and host of The Real Returns Show, an economics radio program that hopes to promote awareness around economic and civic systems. With this series, The Economy We’ll Inherit, Drona hopes to highlight topics relevant to the next generation entering the economy, with a particular focus on innovation and education.
Over the last several years, financial literacy has become one of the most prominent answers to the question of how to better prepare young people for economic life. As of 2026, 39 states require students to take a personal-finance course before graduating from high school, up significantly from just a few years ago, and more than 13 million students are expected to have access to financial education under these requirements.
The logic behind this movement makes sense, and research suggests that these lessons matter. Before students start earning or open credit cards, they should understand concepts such as budgeting, credit, taxes, and saving. The OECD’s 2022 financial-literacy assessment found that students with stronger financial literacy were 72% more likely to have saved money in the previous year and 50% more likely to compare prices before making a purchase than low-performing students, showing that financial knowledge is closely tied to better everyday financial habits.
But through my experience hosting The Real Returns Show, I have increasingly noticed a different gap. I started the program in middle school largely talking about financial markets, but conversations with economists, policymakers, business leaders, and listeners gradually pushed me toward a broader question: how useful is knowing how to handle your money if you do not understand the systems shaping your opportunities?
A discussion about inflation and how it could impact one’s savings, for example, becomes much more useful once someone understands what the Federal Reserve is trying to accomplish by raising interest rates. A conversation about artificial intelligence and employment becomes easier to evaluate once productivity, labor demand, and technological substitution are clear. And even concepts like antitrust, which are not typically covered in personal finance curricula, can still have major effects on everyday economic life.
Understanding the System Around the Decision
When it comes to budgeting, for example, students may be taught to respond to inflation by changing what they buy, but understanding why prices rose may require thinking about supply constraints, consumer demand, or monetary policy.
The value is not simply knowing the definition of inflation or productivity but instead being able to see how different pieces of the economy interact. Interest rates affect borrowing, which can influence investment, hiring, consumer spending, and, ultimately, one’s personal budget. Similarly, productivity affects how much an economy can produce and, over time, the wages firms are capable of paying.
Students do not need to construct economic models or memorize the mechanics of monetary policy. They need enough of a framework to recognize the incentives, institutions, and tradeoffs behind the outcomes they experience, a way of thinking that Economics for Everyone encourages. The National Assessment of Educational Progress found that more than two-thirds of twelfth graders said their economics coursework helped them better understand the forces shaping the U.S. economy, with students specifically connecting what they learned to current events and public policy.
Making Complex Systems Comprehensible
Conversations that initially seem technical often become much easier to follow once a few underlying mechanisms are explained. My economics-focused radio show operates with the belief that listeners do not need to become economists to understand a debate; they simply need enough of a background to know what questions to ask.
That framework can dramatically change how someone processes economic information. Hearing that the Federal Reserve raised interest rates is much less useful if an interest rate is simply another number in a headline. Once someone understands that the Fed is attempting to influence borrowing and spending across the economy, the same announcement becomes connected to mortgage rates, business investment, hiring, and inflation. The listener may still disagree with the Fed’s decision, but they can at least understand the chain of reasoning behind it.
The same is true when I interview guests about issues such as antitrust or technological change. A conversation about whether a company has too much market power can quickly become buried in legal terminology or industry-specific details. But once competition, and its benefits, is established as the underlying question, listeners have a way into the debate: How many alternatives do consumers actually have? What prevents new firms from entering? What happens to prices or innovation when competition weakens? With artificial intelligence, explaining concepts such as productivity and substitution provide a similar starting point for thinking about whether a new technology will replace certain tasks, make workers more productive, or create demand for new kinds of work.
What these examples have shown me is that accessibility is not necessarily about stripping complexity out of an issue. Simplifying a debate too aggressively can remove the mechanisms that connect cause and effect and, further, can lead to more overgeneralizations. The more useful approach is to identify a small number of concepts that organize the complexity.
That distinction becomes especially important when economic questions move into public debate. The pressures of politics and media often compress complicated issues into simple claims, even when the underlying economics resists a single conclusion. Being able to preserve that complexity is therefore imperative from a civic perspective.
Economics as Civic Literacy
Elections routinely involve arguments over inflation, trade, deficits, wages, regulation, energy, health care, and employment. Nearly every major economic policy requires some judgment about incentives, costs, benefits, and tradeoffs. Yet these debates are often presented as competing conclusions rather than competing mechanisms.
One politician says that a tariff will protect American workers, and an opponent argues that it will raise consumer prices. Economic literacy allows someone to move past those conclusions and ask who benefits from protection, who bears higher costs, and what tradeoffs policymakers are accepting. In the best way possible, economics often makes policy debates harder rather than easier: it forces people to acknowledge competing effects.
Economic literacy therefore creates a different kind of independence. Instead of relying entirely on the interpretation offered by a politician, commentator, company, or even an economist, someone has enough of a means to examine the argument themselves. Citizens need these tools as they are deciding the policymaker and thereby the policy themselves.
Looking Ahead
None of this is an argument against financial education but rather an argument against it being the end point of economic preparation.
Action on this claim may not look like requiring another full-year economics course or asking students to master complicated models, perhaps systems thinking can be built into the economic questions students already encounter. The objective is not greater breadth but helping students see the relationships behind outcomes that might otherwise appear disconnected.
Young people, and, more broadly, citizens in general do not need to have an immediate answer to every debate, but they need to recognize what is driving the debate, what questions remain unanswered, and where competing claims differ. And while this article has focused on young people, that need is hardly limited to them. The same frameworks can help anyone make sense of arguments they encounter, and, in an environment of increasing polarity and misinformation, that ability is more important than knowledge of any particular issue.
Sources:
Council for Economic Education 2026 Survey of the States: https://www.councilforeconed.org/survey-of-the-states/
OECD PISA 2022 Financial Literacy Results: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-iv_5a849c2a-en.html
2012 National Assessment of Educational Progress Economics Results: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2012/2013453.aspx