Learning to fail: resilience and the empty promise of financial literacy education

Abstract

The requirement to build economic resilience in people has become a concern for the UK Government, regulators, and the financial services industry. Transposed to the realm of financial literacy education (FLE), the resilience doctrine performs particular effects in relation to the naturalisation and individualisation of financial market relations. At the same time, it tends to speak of the inevitability of market failures and crashes. I argue that based on these features, the effect of the resilience doctrine is to mask the “empty promise” of FLE programmes: the irreconcilable gap between the empowerment discourse surrounding what such agendas are meant to achieve for ordinary people and the latter's actual success in securing their security and well-being through financial markets. The paradoxical element of resilience talk is that it at once serves to further legitimise financial education attempts, while providing an opportune reason for failures judged even on its own terms.

Keywords:

• resilience
• financial literacy education
• financial capability
• economic citizenship
• mass investment culture
• neoliberalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Janine Brodie, Adrienne Roberts, Alex Sutton, Matthew Watson, and participants of the workshop “Financial Resilience in Light of the Crisis” (sponsored by the British International Studies Association International Political Economy Group, as well as the University of Warwick's Department of Politics and International Studies and the Institute of Advanced Study) for their comments on earlier versions of this article. I also thank three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and advice.

Notes

1 It is not my intention in this article to define precisely the status of “resilience” in the social world. Whether it be a “doctrine” (Evans and Reid 2014), “concept” (Reid 2012, 71), “ideology” (Chandler 2013), “agenda” (Neocleous 2013, 7), kind of “talk” (Thompson 2011, 415), “language” (O”Malley 2010, 499), “buzzword” (Joseph 2013, 51), or “complex rhetorical process” (Flynn, Sotirin and Brady 2012), I am interested in what resilience does in financial literacy education agendas, broadly understood. “Doctrine” and “talk” are provisionally used interchangeably for convenience.