The big challenge though is to show that education does make a difference to how people behave. Asking people at the end of a seminar whether they will do things differently is weak people say they will do is known to diverge from what they actually do. “Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. The result is absolutely nil.” (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray) As we shall note, Choi et al (2006) find Wilde’s dictum is certainly true of pension planning. Making people better informed is hard and expensive.
