Affluenza Topics
Chapter 2 - A Rash of Bankruptcies
- From p. 19:
"Say you spend $2,000 on a typical credit card (at 18 percent
interest), and make minimum payments to pay it off. It will take you
eleven years, and you will end up paying double the original price.
And that's if you never buy anything else with the card."
- Math problem:
The formulas and algebra needed to verify this are a little bit more
involved than our formulas for exponential growth, but are fairly
similar. They did not list the minimum monthly payment for the
card, but when I took it to be $35 I got 130.7 months or 10.9 years as
the time to pay it off and 130.7*35=$4574.50 as the total payment
amount.
- Proposed solutions:
Chapter 1 - Shopping Fever
- From
p. 13: In
1986 the number of high schools and the number of shopping centers was
about the same, but in 2005 the number of shopping centers was
46,438, more than twice the number of high schools, which was 22,180.
- Math problem: According to an Allcountries
web site based on the U.S. Census, the number of shopping centers was
28,496 in 1986. Assuming exponential growth, find a model for the
number of shopping centers t years after 1986.
- Proposed solutions:
promote education over shopping and spending money
choose carefully what to spend and what to spend it on
buy used products rather than new ones when possible