Financial Literacy Education as Risk Management for Capitalism

• In Event: Rethinking Education, Labor, and Subjectivity

Abstract

In the wake of the 2007 financial crisis, numerous governments and non-governmental organizations have advocated for mandatory financial literacy education (FLE) in schools, educationalizing financial risk. While most FLE research is ‘neo-positivistic’, privileging a depoliticized, expansionist and positivist conception of science (Kincheloe, 1991), a number of FLE researchers have pointed to the dubious efficacy of this risk management strategy (Erturk et al., 2007; Willis, 2008) and its occlusion of structural inequalities (Arthur, 2012; Carr, 2012; Pinto & Coulson, 2011; Williams, 2007). This paper seeks to contribute to this critical FLE literature by analyzing how the recreation of financially literate and illiterate subjectivities in financial literacy texts (curriculum documents, policy documents, speeches, newspaper articles and television shows) support the shifting of capitalism’s political risk to those marked financially illiterate.

The first of this paper’s three sections presents the recent financial literacy literature, highlighting the assumptions and aims of both neo-positivistic and critical FLE approaches. In the second section, I present the findings of a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010) of FLE texts’ construction of the financially literate subject as a responsible debtor and an entrepreneurial investor. I argue that FLE texts’ presentation of debt and investment as individual moral obligations and financialization as apolitical support a financially literate subject who holds a privatized ethics: a monetary debt to the past and a duty to invest for the future, both of which support the present’s political economic practices and relations, minimizing capitalism’s political risk by individualizing risk and collapsing the future into the present (Lazzarato, 2012).

The third section of this paper utilizes insights from Lacanian theory to argue that the financially illiterate subject operates as both a fetish (Zizek, 2009) and a ‘dustbin for disavowal’ (Hevey in Shakespeare, 1997), muting capitalism’s political risk by promoting and diverting affective dispositions (enjoyment and anxiety) in ways that support, in the name of fiscal responsibility and stability, the remedial training and punishment of those marked financially illiterate. In this section, I make a case that we ought to be aware of the affective and unconscious ways texts can be used to support the transference of political risk away from capitalism and onto those marked financially illiterate. In doing so, this paper seeks to make a contribution to the growing critical financial literacy literature by illustrating how our affective, unconscious dispositions are mobilized to support FLE’s ‘symbolic fix’ for the political risks generated by capitalism.

Author

• Chris Arthur, York University