Self-selection is the default explanation; the onus is on financial planners to show that they are helpful.
Give me a practical model for a randomized study, please.
You could... I don't know, select some people, offer half of them $1k to go to a financial planner and the others $1k in exchange for reporting on financial health, then see if the experimental group is better off a year later? This is not harder than doing things like deworming studies in Africa.
Follow-Up to: A Guide to Rational Investing Financial Planning Sequence (defunct) The Rational Investor
What are your recommendations and ideas about financial effectiveness?
This post is created in response to a comment on this Altruistic Effectiveness post and thus may have a slight focus on EA. But it is nonetheless meant as a general request for financial effectiveness information (effectiveness as in return on invested time mostly). I think this could accumulate a lot of advice and become part of the Repository Repository (which surprisingly has not much advice of this kind yet).
I seed this with a few posts about this found on LessWrong in the comments. What other posts and links about financial effectiveness do you know of?
Rules:
General Advice (from Guide to Rational Investing):
So what are your recommendations? You may give advanced as well as simple advice. The more the better for this to become a real repository. You may also repeat or link advice given elsewere on LessWrong.