[Bicycle Bob]

^^ When silicon took all the drudgery out of math, there was a real danger that people would use their calculators when buying credit, insurance, and other shell games. Learning how to turn everyday situations into equations is not hard, but as shown above, the results can be amazing. One friend stayed car-less and owned a house in Ottawa free of debt at 29.
To keep the economy booming, calculators were regarded as not reliably available, and math instruction turned to extremely arcane number theory, of interest to perhaps .1% of grads. This, quite predictably, persuades most students to ignore numbers. Half of them can't even calculate their pay, and so few bother that there are now major scandals about years of wage theft.