Abstract

This article is mainly based on ethnographic research conducted over several years in a working-class neighbourhood of a medium-sized town in eastern France. The research focused on the economic practices of the inhabitants of this neighbourhood as well as on the public and private actions seeking to prevent personal insolvency. The street-level bureaucrats involved in these actions are intended to help indebted French households to regain control of their budget. To decide how best to support them, they start by assessing their economic skills and financial literacy. When shortcomings are detected, they propose a follow-up to remedy them. However, it turns out that the poor are over represented in these public and private actions, which contributes to doubts about the ability of the poor to make good use of their low income. This paper proposes to address the issue of economic incompetence as a cause of poverty. It looks at discrete processes that have remained in the shadows of research on the subject: paradoxically, their economic skills are overexposed to evaluation and remain partly invisible during these evaluation procedures. These processes of overexposure and invisibility can be combined, but both contribute to the social production of economic incompetence of the poorest.