Sorry to chime in late on this. Andrea, I enjoyed the book, and read with particular interest the sections on financial literacy. I've observed and participated in some of these efforts over the years, and had a somewhat similar reaction. As you note, most of the efforts to promote financial literacy in primary and secondary education are sponsored/underwritten by financial services companies, who, as a group, have proven themselves to be unfamiliar with the basics of financial literacy. And their goal is not so much to teach kids how to be really smart consumers of financial products as to just be consumers. For example, it's doubtful volunteers from a mutual fund company would be telling high school kids that actively managed mutual funds are pretty much a waste and that the best way to invest in stocks is through low-cost index funds offered by the likes of Vanguard.

As I read the book through my lens as a financial/economics reporter, another thought continued to pop up. You discuss at length the technological and sociological factors that lead people to question less, to demand not just answers but the reasons behind the answers. There's a big economic factor here, too - not so much the financial forces at play but the whole culture of finance and markets that dominated the U.S. for the last 30 years or so, and, to an alarming degree, still does. Thomas Frank calls it "market fundamentalism," the notion that the market tells us what the answers are with the outcomes it generates. We operate in a world of constant measurement - page views, stock prices, polls, college football rankings, Amazon.com best-seller lists. In this world, information is continually processed to provide a consensus on what people, society, the world "think" about a given subject. The answer we get is frequently boiled down to a simple number, percentage, or probability. What's IBM worth? Who is the #1 female tennis player? Which candidate will win a particular congressional election? How much will the economy grow in the third quarter? It's been tough to argue with the "answers" thus given, in part because - whatever appropriate misgivings we have about the notion of an efficient market - there has been a broad consensus that markets are good at figuring things out, and that the mechanisms that produce these answers are somehow neutral observers. All the stock market does is process the opinions everybody in the world has about a particular stock at any given moment. This is a bedrock assumption of economics. And we've just gone through an era in which economics and economists were ascendant. From Alan Greenspan at the Fed to Steven Levitt and Freakonomics, economists have been telling the public at large how to think about all types of issues, and how to think about the way answers are generated. Why ask why when you've got the market?

Of course, the debacles of the past year, the multiple market failures, the rise of problems for which the markets don't seem to be able to generate answers, have taken economists and market fundamentalism down a couple of notches. As we muddle through the post-crisis landscape, here's hoping we stop blindly accepting the outputs markets produce as "answers."