Responsibility, Please
There is no doubt that crafting words sometimes is the best way to alleviate liability in a corporate setting. I do it all the time. But I have to say that I love the way that Google, Feedburner, Squidoo and other companies use succinct, plain English when communicating ideas to users. There is functionality in brevity. I have to take some exception to Jeff Barson’s post on simplicity, however. We cannot dumb down investment vehicles, loans, credit cards, and legislature to appease the lowest common denominator. In some respects it is simply enabling. There is nothing wrong with expecting people to educate themselves on adult matters, especially regarding finances. Perhaps a general lack of understanding and overall financial familiarity contributed to the current economic crises. I mean let’s face it, over the years the number of people over-leveraging themselves into homes and credit cards was fiscally unhealthy. In post WWII society, only so many homes held their savings in stock based equities. Over the 80’s and 90’s a tremendous amount of dormant wealth found its way into the stock market through boutique financial managers. Your grandmother probably didn’t do much investing in the 50’s, but by the 90’s she most likely had a few hundred shares of her favorite blue chip. This effectively inflated the market. Adults have a responsibility to educate themselves. Nothing pains me more than a college student who doesn’t understand stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. These are the same people who give little in depth thought to interest rate consequences and put zero percent down on ARM loans. No surprise that people under 25 make up the fastest growing age range for bankruptcy filings.
