Economy
Related: About this forumWhat if our approach to fighting poverty is bound to fail?
What if the conditions of poverty are a psychological trap? What if our approach, that of giving people payments such as Earned Income Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, food subsidies, etc., can't help but fail because of the effect of poverty on the decisions the recipients must then make? What if the divisive talk, that the "poor are somehow different, that they inherently make bad decisions" is completely wrong, that it is the "distraction" of poverty that makes someone behave in a way that is against their long-term interests? If this is correct, and you don't address that, you consign them, and yourself, to a long series of inadequate payments that will never offer people an opportunity to fight their way out. Maybe it will eventually become so expensive that the calls to stop will be overwelming. Got a Plan B?
In these studies researchers Prof. Eldar Shafir and Jiaying Zhao, both from Princeton University, and Harvard University Prof. Sendhil Mullainathan challenge the notion that the poor are simply people who, as a group, make bad decisions. This story cites behavioral experiments from the U.S. to India which indicate that the stress of poverty is so distracting that even the well-to-do, placed in the same situtation, make bad decisions. One such study showed farmers in India had better IQ's during the time of prosperity after the harvest than they did before that, that their behavior was driven more by the conditions they lived in than a deficiency in their "intelligence", or poor financial awareness. Decisions made by those in or near poverty, though logically sound for the moment, are perhaps as far as the person in poverty dares to think. These decisions will, in fact, cost them more than those with more assets over the long-term. (Note: In the book Broke, U.S.A. Gary Rivlin describes the growth of those industries which are based around this entirely predictable behavior).
"Shafir has proved that anyone faced with adverse conditions will consistently make bad economic decisions. An experiment he conducted with Mullainathan and Zhao placed financially-savvy Princeton students from prominent families under the stressful and rushed conditions that poor people face every day..."My students at Princeton are well-to-do and intelligent," Shafir says. "They are the sons and daughters of senators and other highly successful people. And yet these brilliant students took precisely 10 minutes to start borrowing too much; they were tending to the present without any thought to leaving something for the future. "
...
"If you're Robinson Crusoe you don't think ahead to what you'll build in two months, just to what you'll eat today. It's not a question of character - it's what you have. From the standpoint of sheer human ability, put the poor in the right environment and they'll behave like anyone else."
If we were to let the several conclusions from these studies influence our policy, maybe we would opt for a job program that helps them make more money or work under better conditions, organize into cooperatives, maybe with restrictions or guidance on the income but ALSO policy changes (like maybe re-instating the usury laws that gave us the payday loan and tax places that gave the folks in the funny little costumes, expanding AARP's no-cost-to-the-taxpayer preparation service...)
We have to be careful about restrictions, lest we cause further misery because, as he states, they are human beings, and we need to work to make sure we don't forget that that...
"What would you have them do?" wonders Shafir. "Can't they eat ice cream once in a while? The same lady who finishes the week with NIS 100 to spare and buys her kids a treat instead of saving it - even if she didn't buy it someone else around her would need the money. Her life is full of pitfalls. She too is entitled every now and then to give in to temptation and have some cake. So what? We also can't resist temptation: We're human."
The last paragraph was somewhat sobering. I hear pople suggest that the poor are somehow different, but the researcher points to a very different and scary conclusion in his interview...
Do you think this doesn't apply to you? Think again. The economic crisis and approaching recession are likely to push many of us into poverty. The statistics, Shafir says, are alarming. "One of every two Americans will reach a situation of real monetary scarcity within a few years: not abject poverty but real difficulty in maintaining a standard of living. The situation is obviously terrific compared to poverty in Sudan, but if my kid doesn't have a computer because I can't afford it while everyone in his school has one, it will make me feel poor," he says.
So, while people are celebrating the DOW reaching 13,000, and apparently positive changes in the employment situtation, a look beneath the surface indicates an increase in the number of the now "working poor" and a record number of people who want work but for whom there are NO jobs. There are over 46 million people now classified as living in poverty, many of them children, numbers (and percentages) that we haven't seen since the 1960's and the War on Poverty. Yet since the 90's we have been getting rid of usury laws and enabling policies that insure the wealth of those who prey on the impoverished. Sure, we throw the "poor' a few bones, but we can almost guarantee it will wind up in the pockets of only a few of their wealtheir neighbors.
1 out of 2. I hope it's not gonna be you brother/sister, but I am not looking forward to it being me...
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msongs
(67,430 posts)
socialindependocrat
(1,372 posts)you draw conclusions and set up a program that will test your conclusions.
When you develope a successful program others will supply money for you to
expand or others will copy and run similar programs.
First off, you have studies done in two different societies (one with a class system)
and then try to extrapolate the results to both societies without showing any
differences between the two societies. I would suspect something is being overlooked.
Again, test your conclusions and see if you're successful.
zipplewrath
(16,646 posts)I thought at first that this was some right wing screed. Our social safety net isn't designed to "fight" poverty. Not in the sense of teaching/training/helping people out of poverty. They are designed to address the symptoms of poverty, the worst effects, while other methodologies are brought to bear on "escaping" from poverty.
WIC, EITC, Foodstamp, etc. aren't really designed to someone remove someone from poverty anymore than our prisons are intended to change criminals into law abiding citizens. They are merely designed to address the immediate needs of the poor such has housing, food, and medical care. There are other job training programs that may be brought to bear, or school loans, or Pell grants, etc. that are used to try to help them "out" of poverty.
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)But the real false premise may be that the programs mentioned really "help" anyone, other than helping them stay an indentured servant to the wealthy. There are no other programs that are sufficient in any number - at least I haven't found any that attempt to offer any real opportunity to the 25 million people who say they can find little to none.
If the several experiments in the article are instructive, our attempts to funnel money to these people doesn't help them nearly as much as those who profit from the labor of others, that people who are now wealthy also make mistakes in their decisions when distracted by poverty. If we keep doing this the same way, we are simply enabling their poverty.
Foodstamps? $21 a week. I thought it was kind of funny, in a sad sort of way, to look back at the Congressional challenge, where they tried to live on food stamps for awhile. It only lasted for 4 months in 2007. That group has better education, resources, and even a real kitchen, perhaps, and most of them found it terribly insufficient. (For example, maybe we could drop the subsidies to manufacturers that create fast food (among these, for example: Our taxes pay to train McDonalds employees to serve crap food), and instead provide resources so peopel could create local cooperatives that could sell local, healthy food to people. That would require more labor, btw).
Despite all that aid millions of people, especially seniors and kids, go to be without sufficient food many days of the year.
Pell grants are reduced in both the Republican and Obama's budget just presented. Student Loans - seriously? When we are talking about a trillion dollars in money that thousands of students are going to default on because they listened to their parents and the schools telling them success was finishing college. Pity they didn't realize those people had no answers beyond that. There are now thousands of students having graduated programs with no job, and no hope of paying back taxpayer-backed loans. (Sounds like the housing market all over again).
What work program exists to train people for what jobs? There are 25-30 million people who are vying for what our governement says are 3.5 million jobs (JOLTS). Wait, I take that back - there it is on the front page of the paper, a high school boy being trained to pour coffee as a barista.
dog, that's shortsighted.
And if we are just barely keeping people this side of starving (a large number of these folks work for a living as well), if we are not trying to lift people out of poverty, wtf are we doing? Enabling the wealthy to take advantage of them, insuring they have a steady supply of indentured servants? Should we be comfortable watching the country limp along without those human resources? Because other countries aren't. The numbers of working poor and those in poverty are higher than they have been in decades.
And if they can't make good decisions when it comes to their own finances, their own self-interest, I wonder if that reflects on how they operate their democracy?
Maybe we need to offer real opportunity such as training people in cooperatives and business, fund their jobs as researchers in energy, medicine, manufacturing, in agriculture, and see actually create opportunity. Because the resources, not to mention the willingness of the business community seems wholly inadequate to the task. It will take the resources of the government.
It's just cruel to enable servitude, and any program which doesn't offer opportunity does just that. I suspect a lot of people, offered a REAL choice at an environment where they work towards a REAL opportunity, rather than have some self-serving do-gooder decide for them, would tell the purveyors to shove the food stamps and the student loans.
Thanks for that.
zipplewrath
(16,646 posts)You're talking two different things at once here. There are programs to help people either avoid poverty, or get out of poverty. I'm more than willing to admit that they are significantly under funded, and some of them are of questionable value. However, there are other programs that aren't intended to do those things. They are intended to address the symptoms of people who ARE in poverty. They aren't intended to "help people out of poverty". They intended to assist them in housing, food, transportation, etc. There are programs like the EITC that are intended to the "working poor". Again, this isn't to help them OUT of poverty, but to help them while they are IN poverty.
Don't declare those programs failures because they don't advance the cause of lifting people out of poverty. They were not intended to do that. I need fire trucks that put out fires. There's nothing wrong with preventing fires, but when the fire starts, I need fire trucks that put out the fires. Yes, there will be a mix in some cases, they make fire trucks that laydown foam BEFORE the plane crashes. But predominately they make fire trucks for fires that have already started. Don't call the fire department a failure because there are fires.
There will always be poor people. To some extent there will always be the "chronically" poor. Europe, with their strong social safety nets still have poor people, and some of them chronically. We need to be prepared to address the symptoms of poverty without the burden of trying to ultimately make poverty not exist. The latter is almost impossible to achieve, and the former is always necessary.
We address poverty not to be kind, althought that is a laudable goal. We address poverty because it is in the interest of the society that contains the poverty. Efforts to lift them out of poverty (or their own efforts to lift themselves) will be vastly more successful if they show up for them having addressed many of the symptoms of poverty such as health and nutrition problems, housing issues, and transportation.
FarCenter
(19,429 posts)Maybe not right away, but inevitably.
Relative wealth among individuals is correlated with intelligence, skills, activity levels, foresight, and other psychometric parameter that influence the family's economic decision making. The self-discipline to defer gratification, for example.
Warpy
(111,316 posts)Most poor people are either born poor or fall into poverty by things they can't control, like illness, injury, or a string of jobs at badly managed companies that go under.
When the poor are demonstrably getting less and less of a society's financial pie, of course their numbers and their misery will both increase, along with the decreasing probability they will have the wherewithal to escape poverty.
That is where you need to start looking at where resources are really being allocated and who has the lion's share versus who has the need.
Antipoverty programs in the Great Society did focus on educating people out of poverty. Since then, they need to have been called survival programs, because that's all they allow, bare survival without hope of anything better.
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)Intelligent educated people can so easily end up jobless, bankrupt, too sick to work, etc.
We have had several deep recessions since I became a working adult,
but nothing like the economic problems of today, and at a time when there are much less assistance programs than ever before.
Living on even "just barely enough to get by" takes an enormous psychic toll on a person, life is on the razor's edge, where even the least little unexpected expense can be seriously damaging, and each day has to be thought thru carefully to balance money, child care, menus, schedules.Life is fraught with anxiety about tomorrow, how to get by one more day.
People who have not lived hand to mouth don't have a clue, they really don't.
