Itís good to see that James Surowiecki has come around to my way of thinking that better investor education is far more likely to hedge the risk of future financial scandals than throwing a few business executives in prison:

The governmentís new consumer-protection agency has the authority to ìreview and streamlineî financial literacy programs, but thatís not enough. We really need something more like a financial equivalent of driversí ed. Thereís evidence that just improving basic calculation skills and inculcating a few key concepts could make a significant difference. One study of the few states that have mandated financial education in schools found that it had a surprisingly large impact on savings rates.   .   .   .The point isnít to turn the average American into Warren Buffett but to help people avoid disasters and day-to-day choices that eat away at their bank accounts. The difference between knowing a little about your finances and knowing nothing can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime. And, as the past ten years have shown us, the cost to society can be far greater than that.

Surowiecki is spot-on with his observation (as is this TGR post on Surowiecki’s article), but the promoters of the Greed Narrative continue to protest — what about the innocent victims who lost their nest eggs as a result of the collapse of a company such as Enron?

Well, one of the main reasons that those victims’ nest eggs ever had value in the first place was because innovative executives such as Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay transformed Enron into the world’s leading energy risk management company through the creative use of futures and options contracts to hedge price risk for natural gas producers and industrial consumers.

Although itís fine to feel sorry for someone who loses money on an investment, the Greed Narrative ignores the fact that most of those "victims" who lost their nest eggs were imprudent in their investment strategy. Taking Enron as an example, those investors should have diversified their Enron holdings or bought a put on their Enron shares that would have allowed them to enjoy the rise in Enron’s stock price while being protected by a floor in that share price if it fell below a certain value. Those are the type of precautions that a prudent ñ and well-educated ñ investor would take in regard investing in a trust-based business.

Incongruously, while virtually all of those Enron "victims" hedged the risk of their investment in their homes by purchasing homeowner’s insurance, few of them hedged the risk of their investment in Enron stock. Most of them simply did not understand how Enron’s risk management services created their nest egg in the first place. Thus, when those nest eggs evaporated during the bank run on Enron, those investors didn’t even try to understand what truly had occurred. They simply embraced the easy-to-understand Greed Narrative.

The Greed Narrative’s devastating impact is that it obscures the true nature of investment risk and fuels the myth that investment loss results primarily from someone else’s misconduct. As Larry Ribstein has been asking for years, do we really want to be sending a message to investors that risk is bad when it often leads to valuable innovation and wealth creation?

Do we really want to allow prosecutors and regulators to paint such beneficial transactions as frauds and then manipulate the public’s ignorance to demonize innovative risk-takers?

At a time when America desperately needs innovators and entrepreneurs to create jobs and wealth, better education for investors makes much more sense than the paths we have been taking.