Â鶹¹û¶³´«Ã½

In a special section in today’s print and online NY Times, the paper is pushing a “.” The paper published a series of articles with such titles as “,” “,” and “.”

More than that, the Times has moved beyond the type of reporting on personal finance that and has now put online a variety of tools to assist readers in assessing their personal finance (and following along with the articles listed above)–there’s a , which includes some helpful tips and short instructive videos, there’s a , a and a host of other activities planned.

Education is great and it’s exciting to see the NYT put time, effort and resources into pushing this type of information (and tools!) out to such a wide audience. Making good guidelines and reminders easily available to individuals is important, and hammering home repeated messages about best practices and the importance of savings matters. Education is a powerful tool, however, we know that even the well educated often make bad and irrational decisions when it comes to their personal finances and if we truly want to make a difference in the financial security of large segments of the American populace, using the human tendency toward inertia and other behavioral learnings as well as large-scale interventions are much more likely to yield results. One of the 31 recommendations the Times proposes is to “Automate your savings,”  this is great advice that is out of reach of many workers. Policy interventions like the AutoIRA and to a different purpose, our work on can impact more people’s lives than are likely to be reached otherwise. The Financial Tuneup also recommends sitting down, reading your tax forms and thinking about changes you could make to improve your finances. How much more powerful would that moment be if there were real money attached to incent savings and the option to open savings and investment vehicles was ?

Financial literacy works better when students have a real investment in the subject, that’s one of the reasons why we think a would be such a powerful teaching tool. You’d have the opportunity to raise generations of fiscally literate and savvy investors.

So kudos to the NYT and keep it up, but real change is going to take more.