Financial literacy training barely changes actual investment behavior

Evidence

Does this preference for conservative investment options reflect an aversion to risk in the black community? Or is it simply a matter of financial literacy, and if black Americans knew more about the stock market, they’d invest more? I find both of these lines of questioning flawed at best. Financial literacy training has been proven to be ineffective: A study found that financial literacy accounts for only one-tenth of 1 percent of differences in behavior when it comes to financial decision-making. It’s not a matter of education more generally either—in the comparable wealth study, the black Americans tended to have higher education levels than their white peers. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 459

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader structural-racism-as-mechanism argument — failure to close gaps via education echoes the reader’s core thesis.