Convenience Tech’s Impact on Thinking and Class Gaps

Name: We Are All Getting Dumber... Some Faster Than Others
Uploaded: 2026-04-30T14:28:54+00:00
Duration: 16 min 47 s
Channel: How Money Works
Description: Summary and key takeaways on Convenience Tech’s Impact on Thinking and Class Gaps, covering The Convenience Paradox Modern technology eliminates friction

How Money Works

Apr 30, 2026

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16 min video

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Modern technology eliminates friction, often erasing the process of learning basic concepts. Earlier shifts, such as GPS replacing city directories, still exposed the “plumbing” of tasks; today’s tools hide that plumbing entirely. The market overwhelmingly favors “easier” over “better,” and every layer that once taught people to think through unfamiliar problems is quietly removed and sold back as progress.

Evidence of Decline

The Flynn effect, a century‑long rise in measured IQ, has stalled or reversed since the mid‑2000s in Denmark, Finland, the UK, and Germany. In the United States, reading scores have fallen the most since 1990, while math scores dropped 15 points across OECD countries between 2018 and 2022. The decline spans ages; older populations also show signs of cognitive erosion.

Mechanisms of Erosion

Finance – “Buy Now, Pay Later” products separate users from spending decisions, boosting revenue while weakening financial judgment.
Education – The “iPad Kid” phenomenon and remote learning widen the gap between disciplined students and those who use technology for distraction. Over 86 % of university students now use generative AI, and more than half admit to cheating with it.
Hiring – AI‑generated applications flood the market, and AI filters screen them, removing human judgment from employment decisions. This hiring arms race creates a feedback loop where machines write and evaluate applications, diminishing the need for human critical assessment.

The Future Outlook

Wealthier households can opt out of the convenience economy through private tuition or phone‑free schools, deepening the class gap. AI is marketed as a cheap substitute for teachers and junior workers, and a cost‑free chatbot will always win the line‑item fight against a salaried human teacher. Market incentives make it nearly impossible for individual companies to reintroduce friction without losing to competitors, compounding the erosion of problem‑solving muscles across society.

Takeaways

Frictionless technology removes the learning process that builds basic problem‑solving skills, favoring ease over depth.
The Flynn effect has stalled or reversed in several developed nations, and recent test scores show sharp declines in reading and math.
Financial products, AI‑driven education tools, and automated hiring all separate users from decision‑making, weakening cognitive engagement.
Wealthier families can bypass the convenience economy, widening the class gap as poorer students rely more on low‑friction, AI‑powered solutions.
Market incentives reward frictionless products, making it difficult for companies to reintroduce challenges that nurture critical thinking.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does removing friction in technology reduce problem‑solving skills?

When tools provide instant answers, users skip the mental effort of figuring things out, causing the “figuring things out” muscle to atrophy. This reduces exposure to ambiguity and troubleshooting, which are essential for developing robust problem‑solving abilities.

What evidence shows the Flynn effect has reversed in recent years?

Data from Denmark, Finland, the UK, and Germany indicate that IQ gains have stalled or declined since the mid‑2000s, ending the century‑long upward trend known as the Flynn effect. Parallel drops in PISA and NAP scores reinforce this reversal.

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Helpful resources related to this video

If you want to practice or explore the concepts discussed in the video, these commonly used tools may help.

Physical Paper Planner For Productivity Recommended

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Analog Board Games For Logic

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Mechanical Drafting Pencils And Paper

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Have we made things too convenient for 
ourselves? It sounds like a dumb question,  
but the user-friendly, experience optimized, 
child-safe, seamless, frictionless, forgiving,  
and intuitive world we have built around ourselves 
may genuinely be undermining our ability to learn  
basic concepts, take basic responsibility, and 
even hold down a basic job. Multiple studies on  
different areas ranging from personal finance to 
career skills down to basic critical thinking have  
highlighted this trend. And unfortunately, it only 
seems to be getting worse. Modern technology has  
undoubtedly made our lives more convenient. But 
that isn't necessarily the problem just by itself.  
And while it's easy and honestly a little bit 
funny to point at the kids these days with their  
iPads and their 67s, this by itself is really not 
that different from what every generation has said  
about every other generation that came after them 
since the industrial revolution. Not many of you  
watching would know how to use a city directory 
to plan out an unknown route because almost all  
of us have a perfectly up-to-date GPS sitting 
in our pocket at all times. There is arguably no  
real difference between that and people from the 
early 1900s not knowing how to start a fire with  
sticks. In both cases, modern technology had just 
made those skills irrelevant. So then what's the  
difference today? Well, that's what researchers 
are trying to figure out because, well, there  
really is something different today. And there are 
some theories that are each worth understanding.  
But there is also the problem of what these tools 
are actually trying to achieve. Does Facebook  
actually want you making real connections? Do 
dating apps want you to find healthy compatible  
relationships? buy now pay later, making informed 
financial decisions, Khi understanding statistics,  
Robin Hood beating the market, or well, yeah, even 
YouTube giving you the content you were looking  
for rather than the entertainment they mindlessly 
serve you. In a fight between easier and better,  
it does feel like the market is overwhelmingly 
favoring easier. And then of course above all  
of these today there are AI tools that almost 
certainly have the ability to augment and enhance  
real thinking and productivity but are almost 
universally being sold as a cost-effective way  
to just replace it. The tools that we have used 
to make our lives easier have become exponentially  
more complex while the tasks they are enabling 
have become extremely simple by design.  
So on top of all of this, we should probably 
also ask ourselves, what happens if we pass  
down a world that future generations are too dumb 
to maintain? Literally tens of millions of kids  
who may never catch up. And so this has to be, you 
know, for me it's like a national emergency. I'm  
working. I'm trying to get it back so that we can 
have this be. Look at that. Look at that angle.  
Some folks have been trying to push forward 
these kinds of financial markets for years,  
but it never happened. You know, how did you make 
this work? Right now, you need various accounts  
to trade across all these markets. was a continued 
downturn that accelerated during the pandemic with  
little signs of slowing down. Now, here's some key 
takeaways that I found in this study. 72% of teens  
say that they often or sometimes feel peaceful 
when their phone less. When you use Apple Pay,  
that's real money. That's true American dollars. 
Okay, so before we get into exactly how we are  
conveniencing ourselves into being big dum 
dums, we should probably address whether this  
is even real or just the same intergenerational 
bickering that has existed forever. Because, well,  
for most of modern history, it really has just 
been a baseless complaint. Every single generation  
since the industrial revolution has looked at 
the next one and decided that they were softer,  
lazier, and less capable. And every time they 
have been largely wrong. Through the entirety  
of the 20th century, measured intelligence across 
the developed world actually rose by about three  
IQ points per decade in what psychologists call 
the Flynn effect. Sure, we stopped learning how to  
run a printing press, but we built computers that 
gave us access to an almost infinite library of  
knowledge, and we got smarter in the fields that 
counted. This trend had been seen in pretty much  
every country that had industrialized until very 
recently. Since about the mid 2000s, researchers  
in Norway, Denmark, Finland, the UK, France, 
Germany, and the Netherlands have all reported the  
Flynn effect either stalling or reversing. Here 
in America, the National Assessment of Educational  
Progress has shown the biggest decline in reading 
since 1990, and the first ever score drops in  
mathematics for school age students. And the most 
recent OECD PISA results showed math performance  
across the developed world falling at a rate that 
had never been measured before. So, for the first  
time in the history of actually measuring this 
stuff, generations really have started getting a  
little bit dumber over time. And some generations 
are getting dumber much faster than others. Now,  
the immediate reaction to this trend is to blame 
the screens or the kids. But we aren't just  
getting dumber generation to generation. As time 
goes on, even older people who weren't raised on  
a diet of cocoa melons and skippy toilets 
have also developed a case of the stupid.  
This becomes especially fascinating albeit a 
little scary when you consider the environmental  
factors we are not dealing with today like leaded 
gasoline and whatever passed for painkillers back  
in the day. So there is a little bit more 
going on here and there is no silver bullet.  
There are however multiple headwinds that 
should at least be considered in parallel.  
The first is that a lot of the modern technology 
that has been rewarded in the marketplace has  
not really expanded human capability. It has 
just removed friction. And removing friction  
very often removes the very thing that was making 
people capable in the first place. Take something  
as simple as balancing a checkbook. Almost 
nobody on this side of 40 has ever done it.  
And nobody is mourning that particular chore. But 
manually reconciling every transaction against a  
paper statement forced people to actually look 
at every dollar they had spent. Modern payment  
systems do the exact opposite of that and they 
do it by design. Something like buy now pay  
later is specifically engineered to separate a 
person as much as possible from their spending  
decisions because the whole business model is to 
reduce the friction of consumption. Now we know  
this is not just a simple anecdote because these 
companies use it as a selling point when they are  
trying to sign retailers up to work with their 
platform. So, they really aren't even trying to  
hide it. Theoretically, you could export all of 
your transactions into an Excel sheet at the end  
of the month and do a proper review, but let's 
be honest, nobody uh claomaxing their Coacella  
weekend is actually doing that. Apparently, this 
is a thing. Anyway, there is a very good reason  
why ease has become more desirable to investors 
than capability. The tools we have built to make  
our lives easier have become extremely complicated 
and extremely expensive to produce. Which means  
for them to pay for themselves, increasingly their 
audience has needed to become the product rather  
than just the user of the tool. User-friendly 
and innocent looking payments mean less thinking,  
more spending, and ultimately more revenue for the 
companies designing them. Facebook, Tik Tok, and  
yes, even YouTube are not really tools of social 
connection or entertainment. They are tools to  
harvest attention and are clearly working. And a 
lot of other modern tools have been designed to be  
user-friendly at the direct expense of versatility 
or practical application. Kids who have grown up  
with computers their whole lives often have less 
of a clue how to troubleshoot basic problems or  
even print a document because the tablets they 
grew up on were designed to hide the plumbing  
behind a clean interface. Now, none of this is 
inherently a bad thing. Convenience is good and we  
shouldn't be manufacturing difficulty just for the 
sake of it. But being able to simply figure things  
out, adapt when something doesn't work perfectly, 
and take basic responsibility for our own actions  
is a huge part of the value that humans currently 
bring to the workforce, the economy, and society  
in general. When every tool we interact with is 
designed to require less of us, it should not  
be a surprise that we end up having less to give. 
And the consequences of that have already started  
showing up across three distinct areas of the 
economy, each worse than the last. So, it's time  
to learn how money works to find out what happens 
when we build a world too convenient to get out  
of. Speaking of convenience, the reason every 
app, every checkout page, and every subscription  
button feels suspiciously easy these days is 
not an accident. It's marketing psychology,  
and the people who study it know exactly which 
buttons in your brain to push. If you want to see  
how all of this gets made, the team at HubSpot 
put together a free guide called the science  
of marketing psychology. And it breaks down the 
actual cognitive biases that companies use to get  
you to click, buy, and come back. It walks through 
stuff like anchoring, loss aversion, and the decoy  
effect, which is the reason why there's always a 
medium popcorn priced weirdly close to the large  
one. What I like about it is that it's not just 
a list of tricks. It explains the research behind  
why these things work on us, even when we know 
they're happening. Whether you run a business,  
write online, or just want to understand why you 
keep buying things you didn't plan to buy, it's  
worth a read. You can grab it for free at the link 
in my description or scan the QR code on screen.
Okay, so these incentives have been quietly 
rewarding the easier is better model for decades  
now, and the consequences are starting to show 
up in a few places we really can't afford them.  
And the first of those is in the workplace. 
Younger generations are according to more or  
less every industry survey over the last 2 years 
struggling at work. A survey from intelligent.com  
last year found that 47% of managers cited a 
lack of initiative as a serious problem with  
recent hires. And nearly 4 in 10 employers 
said they now actively prefer older workers  
over recent grads even after accounting for 
the expectation of higher salaries. Now again,  
every generation of managers in history has 
complained that their new hires are soft,  
but the specific nature of the complaint this 
time is different. These workers have spent  
their entire lives being coddled in the role of 
student and consumer, which meant every awkward  
decision was handled for them long before they 
ever had a first day on the job. Both of those  
roles have been aggressively re-engineered over 
the last two decades to remove every possible  
moment of ambiguity. Teachers grade on rubrics 
that are published in advance. Learning apps  
tell people exactly which button to press next. 
Dating apps remove the awkward human element of  
approaching someone in person. Food delivery apps 
remember your order. And investment apps round up  
your spare change and invested on your behalf. 
Unironically, many consumers report feeling  
overwhelmed by the choice of what piece of content 
to watch on their preferred streaming service. So,  
they just give up and go back to scrolling through 
content that is picked for them. And I mean,  
I personally want to sound superior to this 
point, but I have absolutely done this myself.  
Every single one of these improvements has 
quietly removed a moment where a person used to  
have to stop, figure something out, and decide for 
themselves. Then on day one of their actual job,  
somebody hands them a task with no rubric, no 
tutorial, no autoplay, and no obvious right  
answer, and asks them to go and figure it out, 
which feels like a character flaw right up until  
you realize it's the exact behavior their entire 
upbringing rewarded. And the really awkward bit  
for employers is that being genuinely good 
at just figuring things out is genuinely one  
of the most valuable skills anybody can bring 
to any career. It is the exact thing managers  
have usually trusted humans over software to do. 
Because software by its nature still struggles  
with a problem it hasn't seen before. Although 
unfortunately if the studies are to be believed,  
we are simultaneously getting worse at this 
while the clankers are getting better. But  
more on that later, which brings us to the second 
problem, and it starts much earlier than anybody's  
first job. The iPad Kid meme has started being a 
measurable phenomenon. Across the developed world,  
there is a clear trend of declining, but more 
importantly, diverging test scores. The OECD's  
latest piece of results showed that math scores 
across its member countries fell by roughly 15  
points between 2018 and 2022. That was the single 
largest consecutive drop since the test was first  
administered. Now, even though this did fit into 
a longerterm trend, the larger than average drop  
could have been written off as one-time effects 
of COVID teaching from home. But the concerning  
detail was that these test scores didn't fall 
evenly. The NAP found that the top performing  
students largely held their ground while the 
bottom performing students fell off a cliff,  
suggesting that the convenience economy isn't 
dragging everybody down equally. It is dragging  
down the kids with the least ability to push back 
against it. The remote learning shakeup didn't  
affect all students equally either. For advanced 
and already disciplined students, it was largely  
fine. A quiet room and a laptop let them learn 
at their own pace without classroom distractions.  
For underperforming students, well, it gave 
them much easier access to Fortnite instead.  
User-friendly and highly engaging technology is 
generally hard to snap yourself out of, even for  
fully grown adults who should in theory have 
better self-control than a teenager. Actually,  
removing these distractions takes either serious 
self-discipline or serious parental discipline.  
And for a lot of households, that second one is a 
luxury they simply cannot afford. A single parent  
working two jobs is not going to police screen 
time the same way a wealthier household can when  
they can afford a stay-at-home parent, private 
tuition, or a school that has banned phones  
entirely. So, the class gap compounds. Wealthier 
kids are more likely to end up in environments  
that still make them figure things out. Everybody 
else is more likely to end up in environments  
explicitly designed to never ask them to. And 
then on top of all of this, we have AI, which  
is the third and probably the biggest of these 
compounding problems. In theory, large language  
models are a genuinely powerful learning tool for 
a disciplined student or professional. They can  
explain a concept a dozen different ways, simulate 
tutoring, and take a lot of the drudgery out of  
real knowledge work. Sure, they like to make a lot 
of [ __ ] up on the fly, but so do regular human  
educators, and some models can be asked to provide 
sources and citations along the way. In practice,  
well, that's not really how most people have been 
using them. The Digital Education Council's 2024  
survey found that 86% of university students now 
use generative AI in their studies and separate  
research from best colleges found that more than 
half of them used it specifically to cheat an  
assignment or an exam. Teachers trying to catch 
this are fighting an arms race they are quietly  
losing because the detection tools are themselves 
wrong enough to be effectively useless in a  
disciplinary setting, which has led to an entire 
cohort of students passing through school without  
ever doing the exact activity that used to build 
the figuring things out muscle in the first place.  
And the job market has gone through a mirror image 
of the same thing. Applicants use AI to fire off  
hundreds of customized résumés and cover letters 
a week. Employers respond by running their own AI  
filters over the resulting flood of applications, 
rejecting most of them before a human ever sees  
them. The end result is a hiring process 
where a machine is writing the application,  
another machine is reading it, and a real human 
is just getting a polite email saying, "We have  
decided to go in another direction." And while all 
of this is happening, AI is being sold to schools  
as a cost-effective way to replace teachers and to 
companies as a cheap way to replace their junior  
workers who would on a normal career path have 
been the ones actually doing the work that teaches  
people how to figure things out. Every layer of 
the system that used to teach people how to think  
through an unfamiliar problem is being quietly 
removed and sold back to us as progress. Now,  
there is an obvious fix to almost all of this. You 
could put friction back in harder curricula with  
no open book policies. Phones out of school, 
real consequences for AI cheating, hiring  
processes that involve an actual human reading 
an actual piece of work from an actual candidate,  
financial products that actually make you look 
at what you are spending before you spend it, and  
programs that prioritize functionality over ease 
of use. Almost none of this is going to happen,  
and the reasons why are not mysterious. The market 
rewards the frictionless product and any single  
business that tries to add friction back in loses 
instantly to a competitor that doesn't. Parents  
cannot win a technology war against companies 
with literal billions of dollars and teams of  
behavioral scientists engineered specifically to 
keep their kids engaged. Regulators who, to put  
it generously, are at least a generation older 
than the technology they are meant to regulate  
have no real framework for any of this. but that 
there is a school system that's going to start  
um making sure that first graders or even preks 
have A1 teaching, you know, every year starting,  
you know, that far down in the grades. And that's 
just a that's a wonderful thing. And budget cuts  
to public schools mean that every education system 
is leaning harder into AI, not less, because  
a chatbot that costs nothing will always win the 
line item fight against a human teacher that costs  
a salary. From the market's point of view, things 
are already working exactly as intended. And if  
you want further proof of that, go and watch 
this video next to find out how we are slowly  
becoming unemployable. And don't forget to like 
and subscribe to keep on learning how money works.

Heimler's History

May 01, 2026

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Evidence of Decline

Mechanisms of Erosion

The Future Outlook

Takeaways

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