Financial Education: World Bank Wants Money Conflict on TV
Money themes in the movies are fairly common; from the Jimmy Stewart classic It's A Wonderful Life to Eddie Murphy's Trading Places to Wall Street with Michael Douglas.
There's a good bit of it on TV too:
· Seinfeld George Costanza showed us that the cheapest option could also be the most expensive one in the long run. He bought discounted wedding invitations that killed his fiancé with contaminated adhesive.
· Friends Joey showed us the downside of splurging after a windfall. He landed an acting job on the soaps and ran up his credit cards and moved into an expensive apartment only to wind up in a deep hole when his character fairly quickly got killed off and Joey no longer had a job.
· Modern Family In this exchange with daughter Haley, Claire showed us the value of putting your kids on an allowance and not bailing them out:
Haley: "Hey mom?"
Claire: "Yeah?"
Haley: "Can I have forty dollars for lunch?"
Claire: "Forty dollars?"
Haley: "I also need a book for school."
Claire: "A book?"
Haley: "I want a dress."
Claire: "Do you have any idea what a bad liar you are?"
But the hands-down winner when it comes to financial education as entertainment is a gem from the venerable Cosby Show. Below is a four-minute vintage video that I guarantee you will love. Try not to focus on the concept of a $400-per-month apartment in Manhattan. That's the only aspect of this scene that is dated:
Why all this ruminating over what amounts to financial literacy training on TV and in film? The World Bank is now researching the effectiveness of financial education through entertainment, seeing more personal finance themes in the soaps and maybe even Reality TV as one way to raise awareness of common money problems.
The organization is holding a conference on the subject later this month in Washington D.C., where one of the featured speakers will be Lewis Mandell, a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute and long-time advocate of financial education. The conference will explore how to "creatively use commercial entertainment media (TV, radio, film) and new media (cell phone apps, SMS, social media, blogs) to achieve better outcomes in finance" and other areas.
The storylines in any educational entertainment will have to be interesting or funny, like Cosby, but probably more thoroughly explored than they were in Seinfeld, Friends and Modern Family. "Nobody is going to stop, in a medical show when this woman is having an affair with three doctors, and put equations on the board showing compound interest," Mandell says. "But you may want to show somebody who's just made choices of taking on large amounts of debt and then they lose their job or get divorced and now the whole world descends on them."
The idea is to make a financial point through an emotional story. "You could show somebody's mother who has worked hard all of her life and no longer has the physical stamina to keep working in her 70s, like a lot of people," Mandell says. "But she never put aside any money for retirement. How does she exist in today's society? Does she move back in to the damp basement of her daughter's home?"
Such storylines may be just as compelling from an entertainment point of view as, say, much of the cops, docs and lawyers junk on TV. And it would have the beneficial effect of showing the consequences of poor financial decisions. That's the hope anyway.
Photo of Modern Family cast courtesy Bravo
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Daniel J. Kadlec is an author and journalist whose work appears regularly in Time and Money magazines. He is the former editor of Time’s Generations section, which was written and edited for boomers. Kadlec came to Time from USA Today, where he was the creator and author of the daily column Street Talk, which anchored the newspaper's business coverage. He has co-written three books, including, most recently, With Purpose: Going from Success to Significance in Work and Life. He has won a New York Press Club award and a National Headliner Award for columns on the economy and investing.
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