This book explores the issue of consumer financial education responding to increased interest
in and calls to improve peoples' financial literacy skills and abilities to understand and
manage their money. New conceptual frameworks introduced in the book offer academic audiences
an innovative way of thinking about the project on financial literacy education. Using the
concepts of 'edu-regulation' and 'financial knowledge democratisation' to analyse the financial
education project in the UK the book exposes serious and often ignored limitations to using
information and education as tools for consumer protection. It challenges the mainstream
representation of financial literacy education as a viable solution to consumer financial
exclusion and poverty. Instead it argues that the project on financial literacy education
fails to acknowledge important dependences between consumer financial behaviour and the
socio-economic political and cultural context within which consumers live. Finally it
reveals how these international and national calls for ever greater financial education
oversimplify and underestimate the complexity of consumer financial decision-making in our
modern times.
