The financial literacy stuff is pretty interesting. Take Schwab, for example - if I follow the easiest to access and lowest effort version of their advice, I'l

The financial literacy stuff is pretty interesting. Take Schwab, for example - if I follow the easiest to access and lowest effort version of their advice, I'll probably save a decent amount, hold too much of it in cash, but be able to retire at a standard of living similar to what I'm used to at about the time people "normally" retire. They'll make some money off of me lending the cash I held too much of. But it probably amounts to maybe retiring a couple years earlier or later at most, and if minimizing retirement date was the #1 most valuable thing to me, a) I'd identify that my early to mid-career saving rate makes the most difference, and b) look for more sources of information than Schwab. (Which is too say non-optimal advice is not specifically bad advice. Particularly when considering human behavior.) If we apply that to financial education run by Schwab, they're probably identifying that their biggest growth opportunity is getting more people to invest through them, hopefully keeping enough cash liquidity to improve their lending business. (Encouraging an emergency fund to be held in cash through their money market accounts, and getting tons of people to use that over standard checking would probably be great for them.) But there's an important pre-qualification: You have to financially be in a position to save and invest money for any of this to matter. Someone can't really be in a paycheck-to-paycheck trap or inescapable debt trap, they need to be out of it. Because it doesn't matter if you know that debt is bad when you're facing eviction or about to miss work because your car broke down. If someone has an unfortunate socioeconomic background, emulated the adults around them, stumbled out of high school, and are working minimum wage jobs, they didn't need financial literacy. They needed something like different education, nutrition, parenting, rewards structures, or who knows what. Presumably even something like getting pushed into a trade like a plumber or mechanic would pay more dividends than any particular financial knowledge about avoiding debt or saving. Where financial knowledge can help is people who are already in a position to generate income and assets, but have made bad decisions. Whether it's someone with upper class connections but an art degree and college debt, or a teacher who went into debt on a home renovation or car purchase. And this is what marketing financial literacy is about: the realization that being a less crazy Dave Ramsey can drive business to your financial service company. And that if that works out, your customers will be very loyal. Which is to say, it shouldn't be surprising that financial literacy education on average isn't super helpful at reducing poverty and such.