Contemporary Financial Self-Help and the Rise of Neoliberalism

LIKE ANY BROAD CONCEPT that attempts to include a number of heterogeneous components, the term financial self-help is not perfect. Simply put, while it references what is traditionally considered the self-help genre (resources, including books videos, group meetings, audio recordings, and so on aimed at improving some area of one's life), it encompasses only those that apply mainly to the financial realm. Some types of self-help obviously are excluded from this definition. A book about improving one's love life or working on one's body image is self-help, but is certainly not financial self-help. A textbook about micro-economics belongs to the universe of financial expertise, but no one would call it self-help. But other cases are harder to classify. There are some self-help resources that touch upon prosperity and economic advancement, but do not make economic issues the main focus. There are also training workshops and websites about stock market trading which might not be self-help per se, but are important resources that are very popular among users of financial self-help.

Defining too strict a set of boundaries would not be productive. I use financial self-help to identify a very fluid set of cultural resources, practices, techniques, and expertise that is more a hybrid of related knowledge, practices, and techniques than a clearly bounded world. I prefer to define the field of financial self-help not by its boundaries but rather by the presence, with various degrees of salience, of three features:

1. A technical economic component: technical expertise loosely related to professional investment and accounting

2. An emotional or motivational component: techniques of the self used to produce changes in dispositions, attitudes, and behavior, aimed at dealing with fears and emotions in economic behavior and planning, particularly in terms of risk-taking, managing, and thinking about money

3. A sociological component: social theories about how the world works (the economy, the social class structure, and so on), and what people's goals should be under those circumstances.

Using this definition, financial self-help resources can be classified not by being inside or outside a delimited universe but rather by being closer or farther to or from a center. In that epicenter is the work of Robert Kiyosaki and the groups inspired by it. Kiyosaki's products most clearly combine these three dimensions. He provides resources to increase users' "financial intelligence," such as real estate training and accounting tools; he encourages readers to examine their upbringing and subjectivity and to identify those parts of the self that are impeding their financial improvement; and he offers an account of the shift of capitalist societies from the "industrial age" to the "information age." Other gurus combine the three components in different forms and with different intensities. Author Suze Orman (1997, 2007a), for example, provides investment and personal finance advice coupled with motivational material and self-help, but she does not focus as much as Kiyosaki on offering an account of the structure of social classes in the current world.

Financial self-help borrows much of its discourse and knowledge from several forms of related expertise, some of which enjoy a more legitimate status than others, including economics and finance, coaching, corporate success literature, personal finance, professional investing, neurolinguistic programming, leadership, and psychology. All of these fields are largely autonomous, and financial self-help authors frequently legitimate claims on their basis. Although they are all related to financial self-help, they should be differentiated. Corporate success literature, for example, is closely tied to financial self-help in its advocacy of individual strategy and positive thinking. But although financial self-help takes that flavor from corporate success literature, it explicitly disregards the corporate world as an adequate setting for the pursuit of financial success. In other words, financial self-help would not see much use for resources that help people succeed inside the firm. Financial freedom, the goal of financial self-help, is precisely the liberation from the constraints of that world, not the mastery of a corporate ladder.

The field of personal finance or household finance is very close to financial self-help. They both advocate a balanced family budget and careful expense recording practices. But financial self-help is not just personal finance. It promotes self-regulation of spending practices as only one part of a quest for wealth, success, and, ultimately, "financial freedom." Achieving a balanced household budget and healthy personal finances is seen in financial self-help as a very limited goal, perhaps one step on the way to financial freedom and a sign of improved financial intelligence. But for authors like Kiyosaki, only "losers" would conform to that goal alone.

Those unfamiliar with the genre often think that financial self-help books are nothing but glorified "get rich quick" schemes. But authors, group leaders, and practitioners in general emphasize how financial self-help is not such a scheme. There is a paradox here. Get-rich-quick schemes are a presence in the world of users and fans of financial self-help. Late-night infomercials abound, promising that without any financial expertise, and by just clicking a few buttons, one may become wealthy in a short time, as do pyramid network schemes that promise to multiply one's income almost overnight. While those schemes often use similar discourses, they have little to do with the core discourse of financial self-help that I examine in this book. Both approaches argue that anyone can be rich if they really want to be, but the paths to riches each of them promotes are quite different. Most financial self-help resources stress that becoming rich is difficult and make quite clear that get-rich-quick schemes are illusory. Financial self-help users are told that they need to understand financial goals correctly, acquire technical tools, and work on the self. Devotees of this discourse are taught to forget much or all of what they have learned thus far, and to combat all the dispositions that prevent them from achieving financial freedom. For example, in Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Kiyosaki writes,

I wish I could say acquiring wealth was easy for me, but it wasn't. ... I believe that each of us has a financial genius within us. The problem is, our financial genius lies asleep, waiting to be called upon. It lies asleep because our culture has educated us into believing that the love of money is the root of all evil. It has encouraged us to learn a profession so we can work for money, but failed to teach us how to have money work for us. It taught us not...