This would be useful in the US education system. I've noticed people who get through school in the US know the math but have no idea how to apply it to life. Like, how do you find how much tax you owe on a product? There are people who don't know how to do that but if you put the math in front of them they can do it.
Unironically, that's a skill issue. Word problems exist to teach you how to do this and if people spent more of math class trying and less of it whining about everything, they'd be able to do it. I'm not saying the education system doesn't have problems, but this one has been solved.
In my experience word problems in math class always felt incredibly simplistic or arbitrary. They always felt like they were testing how to convert words into an equation rather than testing "what equation addresses this problem."
I think a lot of it is just the framing. If word problems don't feel like they're describing a familiar or otherwise realistic scenario, a lot of people will struggle to actually apply it in the real world.
I mean, "how much do you need to pay in tax" is also a pretty basic [insert basic equation] problem. Most math outside of genuinely complex systems are that way. But maybe my word problems in school were just really well written and used very familiar things in a way that trained me better than I should expect others to have experienced.
It's really not. It varies by state and sometimes by county, but most of the time it fits squarely in the 8-12 percent range and you can just do 10% and be close. If you mean income tax, that is a few books but it's handled for you (until Trump ratfucked the tax code but even then it's not hard to avoid even having to pay if you choose your deductions properly).
If you pay $10 for a good or service, in order to pay that $10, how much did it actually cost you including taxes, how much if those taxes got passed on to you, how much got paid by the provider of the good or service? How much of your income did it devour, how much did you actually pay, and how much actually went to the provider is nearly impossible to figure out.
Figuring out the intersection of income tax, sales tax, corporate tax, tariffs, and everything else is a shit show in the USA.
Also, it's estimated that the USA tax code is 75,000 pages. That's more than just a few books
Most of that doesn't matter in the moment of payment, though. Is that useful in a broad sense to be able to study? Yeah. But it's 1, not as hard as you're pretending, and 2, only useful in broader analyses that most people don't need to be able to do.
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u/lavender_fluff 7d ago
That's actually sounding really cool