Educated to be indebted: “Social-financial” inclusion in Chile

Abstract

This article argues that the expansion of credit in Chile has been fabricated as “social-financial” inclusion, whose most advanced strategy is a set of private and public actions labelled as financial education; these actions assume that citizen-consumers must be educated as debtors. In addition to viewing credit as a social practice, the article critically reviews the economic concepts used by this financial education and analyzes empirical data about financial education activities and the social practices of their recipients.