>The big picture: Evidence that financial literacy education works is shaky; most evidence points to it being a waste of time.

"waste of time" is a link that takes you to the research paper from Loyola Law School, which they're using to assert this statement.

I made it just over half way through the research paper, and then I stopped reading. This is a very poorly written, inaccessible paper, and I am left wondering if it's intentionally made that difficult to read. And I wonder if the Axios writer actually read that article or had any skepticism towards its findings.

I'll call out just a few of the issues I take with this "research paper":

>The main points of the chapter are three-fold. First, financial education cannot produce financial well-being in the current marketplace. Second, alternative interventions have the potential to enhance individual capacity for, and reduce marketplace obstacles to, good financial outcomes. Third, even programs that arm individuals with optimized capacities and a marketplace that facilitates individually optimal actions will not be enough to ensure widespread financial well- being. That would require changes in our socioeconomic order that might require a different intervention—finance-informed citizenship education.

But if you read through the author's arguments, they're more of less picking apart the methodology of some studies that disagree with the author's perspective (against teaching financial literacy). Even if the methodology of these other research was flawed, it doesn't disprove anything. That's more of a missing data point. For example, the author complains that in one trial, the treatment group received a savings match whereas the control did not. And therefore, the methodology is flawed. Okay – sure. But in other examples, if the methodology is correct, then the author doesn't agree with the conclusions/extrapolations of the other study.

And there are other parts that are perplexing:

>Financial education has opportunity costs. Participants lose more productive uses of their time. Society suffers a diversion of time, money, and attention from alternatives with better prospects for successfully increasing financial well-being.

Yes, any kind of education has an opportunity cost. So what? My high school had geography class taught by football coaches. We simply copied the textbook onto a sheet of paper and turned it in. There are many countries that I couldn't identify on a map. That form of learning wasn't effective. I would have loved to learn about savings and compound interest. My expectation in high school was that I could have a 9/5 job that makes me a multi-millionaire.

Then the author goes on to state other reasons against financial literacy:

>It can increase financial confidence without a commensurate improvement in knowledge (Bucciol et al., 2020).

But is that a strong reason to not provide financial literacy at all? Because person A doesn't have sufficient self control and might dump their savings into meme stocks, is that a reason to not teach children about the stock market at all?

I try to avoid being overly critical – but this is a poorly written, joke of a research paper. I'm honestly questioning if the author or faculty are under the gun to produce these papers as some performance metric.

And shame on Axios for pointing to this garbage as an authoritative source.