There’s a theory that if we teach people about the technical side of finance, increase their “financial capacity”, that will help people.
Say we apply it to archery. Imagine masses of people in a field. With them is archery equipment, so there are various bows and arrows in different materials, lots of archery aids, telescopic sights etc. Also there are many expert archers to teach people how to shoot.
The other things in the field, and around it on the surrounding hills, are many archery targets, representing the things people want from life.
The “capacity” idea is that we need to teach archery. Everybody should know the tensile strengths of materials, understand hysteresis loss and aerodynamics, optics and air friction coefficients. Then they can shoot accurately.
I think it would be better just to take off people’s blindfolds!
Sorry, I didn’t mention that the crowd all wear blindfolds. In fact, so do the expert archers. If we teach everybody how to shoot arrows and leave the blindfolds on, they might become good archers, but will kill one another by accident and won’t hit their targets because they don’t know what or where they are.
Take off the blindfolds and let people see the targets. Then they might decide that they don’t need a bow at all, they can pick up an arrow, walk two paces and stick the arrow in the target. If the target is half a mile away on the hillside, then they need to get the right bow to fire that far, and the expert archers can help them choose and learn to fire the appropriate bow to hit the target they want to hit.
Tell me, why would you want to learn all about bows, when what is important to you is your own target?