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

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.