Introduction
'Intelligence,' mostly, is a function of wealth. And as a result, a just, fair, and equal society must, in the U.S., be a meritocracy. This, in short, is the American theory of justice. By that theory, it is only just that those who are able to be responsible and make good choices enjoy the traditional fruits of the American way of life. Consequently, the less-wealthy aren't also less intelligent, they are less intelligent because they are less wealthy. It isn't that I am poor and frustrated because it is impossible for hardworking people to get ahead, but that if I were a hard worker, someone would have already gotten rid of the laziness that is the cause of my frustration. If you see someone who is not doing well, right off the bat, America's position is "you really are stupid," followed closely by "let the reader understand." Because wealth equals intelligence, there can be no asymmetrical distribution of wealth in a just, fair, and equal society.
There is no possibility for common ground in such a stance. One view holds that wealth is the sum of a person's useful knowledge and abilities, that economic inequalities contribute to economic growth and are a spur to economic progress, that merit varies according to opportunity, and that if the market is unbiased, this will be revealed in individual's salaries. The other belief is that a main reason for the rise in the waste of human resources can be traced to the fact that we don't reward scientists, educators, and other people of high skills as well as we should. Nonmonetary motivations of merit being equal to the wealth generated by high skills have been displaced, nudging upper-level management in the direction of artificially and disproportionately inflating the incomes of the so-called meritocracy under the erroneous idea they do so while focusing on the real goal.
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Poverty and Decision-Making
Perhaps most notably, the poor have less immediate access to resources. Failing to account for the fact that the poor have less money than the rich results in a compassionate solution that ironically retains the injustice of the original problem. However, the poor also have less access to options and opportunities. They often have to spend more time managing their precarious finances and are less able to have high levels of time-inconsistent preferences. Poverty impedes our cognitive capacity. In the case of the poor, it is the constant feeling of scarcity that impairs our cognitive capacity. This erodes self-regulation and response inhibition, increases impulsivity and irritability, decreases decision-making, and increases senescence prematurity, effectively reducing overall cognitive capacity.
This lower cognitive capacity increases our inclination to make riskier decisions. This inclination toward risky decision-making is both studied and mockingly interpreted by neuroscientists who use functional magnetic resonance imaging and other tools to demonstrate that 'thinking about finances' consumes a greater proportion of available attentional resources for poor people than for their wealthy counterparts. The poor are more likely to underperform in school because they are more likely to make risky decisions—not because they are less smart. Decision-making has consequences. One particularly bad year could possibly wipe someone out financially for the foreseeable future.
Factors Shaping Poor People’s Logic
Overcoming this fatalistic underestimation of capacities and motivations will require us—the non-stupid, non-poor people—to re-engage with the poverty debate, moving from abstract to specific, from general to concrete, and implementing policies or aid that are tailored to the objects of the policies. Economic policies in particular tend to have the "object" of "the market," but the economy is not an actor. Even if we take the archetypal assertion that the merchant acts in his interest, we have to ask how that self-interest is structured and shaped, and what social relations modify and direct that interest. Non-merchant actors become a part of the market, as both workers and consumers, but at least in the neoliberal fantasy, they are stripped of motivation beyond a desire to exchange and to trade. But the poor people, whether they decide to read or not read or whether they prioritize video games over work, do so because they like it. Sure, the choices are embedded in relations of power that have, to this very point, disempowered the poor. But the alternatives are bleak and cause those who otherwise describe it better. So, of course, they retreat.
I call this the fetishization of choice, as I'm always one for equal-opportunity critique, and it doesn't stop just because different strands of ideology are involved. The problem, then, is not poor people and their relationship to work, but the fact that moving up the socio-economic scale into becoming the "productive" neoliberal subject (hardworking, unsparing, productive, leader-like, middle-class, and rich) is actually a difficult job with low pay and poor benefits at the end of it. And the choices—say, becoming an artist—are very rarely real choices. This underlies the cultural element of this whole thing. The problem for elitism is not the lack of motivation of poor people, but, especially for those who believe in individual choice which, given what I've said so far, may not include many of the hypocrites, the very strong motivation to do anything but reflect on the value of their lives. This retreat, therefore, is asserted as an act of freedom rather than a reaction to a lack of freedom. In short, it isn't just a matter of allocating resources. An examination of resource allocation will rapidly encounter the duality of cultural theorization: what social critics demand may not be desirable to the poor, and what the policy establishment believes is ethical is also not desirable to the poor.
Policy Implications & Interventions
If the people previously mentioned are so stupid, what can possibly be done to help them in a) understanding that the way they manage their money is suboptimal and b) regaining reason and following the wisdom of their progressive middle-class neighbors? Evidence suggests that telling people what to do is just not going to work. Just telling people to save more or behave in a more socially acceptable manner in general might not only be received as a threat but also appears to make the poor nervous about their social identity. The existing state of research indicates that if someone remains in poverty, just telling this person to develop an economic identity or social network does not help – on the contrary, these attempts might be perceived as threatening the poor into the creation of an economic identity and might in turn increase their anxiety. In-lab interventions indicate – similar to the discussed poverty mindset and fatalistic attitudes – that poor people just do not feel very happy and without being given hope that it is actually possible for them to climb the social ladder in a way that makes them feel happy, the reasons summarized are likely to persist.
When considering what straightforward policy implications can be derived from the depicted reasoning, it should become clear that policy by itself will never fix poverty simply because if all people in the bottom quintile were effectively and immediately gifted with good skills, able and caring partners, necessary choices, and efficient pathways, they would immediately leave that position and the set of people in the bottom income category would be replaced by the next group of people with bad skills, no social networks, no ability to reason, no planning ability, and so forth. Hence, if all poor individuals left the bottom income quintile, the set of poor would immediately be replaced by a new set of individuals who are likely facing the same challenges. So when policymakers think about the following question: "Why are you still poor?" or, equivalently, when politicians keep referring to the need to encourage or assist poor individuals to reason differently or to display different time-discounting behaviors, they are essentially helping the set of poor people to be replaced by the next group of people remaining in the same state and enjoying the described personality structure or mental model.
Running the welfare state, policymakers cannot immediately discard the bottom income category, incentivize hundreds of thousands of adults in poverty to change their way of thinking, either rule or limit the financial, emotional, and social trustworthiness of the poor, or continuously provide temporary and long-term support. Providing long- or short-term support would a) be cost-intensive and b) not be in the spirit of democratic virtues. Temporarily fixing poverty by appeals to think differently actually doesn't solve anything and just gets stuck in a way of thinking that views the set of poor people or, in more economic language, models poverty from a static perspective. Alternatively, policymakers could introduce compulsory education and laws that prohibit labeling or force workers in low-paying jobs to serve the needs of those in higher-paying jobs more directly, increasing the demand profile of people in higher-paying jobs and employment opportunities for all workers. However, demand-side policies to lift the sole responsibility of individual poverty might require an understanding of economic growth combined with social mobility and the role of progress and have implications that resonate with the true inner workings of market forces and our own culture in general.
Conclusion
This study offers significant implications for new research that is focused on policy. While this approach centers around developing and testing models of the behavior of the poor, an obvious area of further development will be testing policies based on these models. For instance, we might evaluate the desirability of a policy that restricts the use of essential items, like food or housing, for impaired decision-makers who violate particular threshold criteria. By contrast, we might also evaluate a policy that aims specifically at not imposing these additional restrictions but at improving cognitive skills and self-regulation for impaired decision-makers, thereby making them less poor. The underlying idea behind this is that the what rather than the how of imposition matters for the preferences and actions of the impaired and that impaired decision-makers should actually support 'nudging' policies at the limit as long as these target the what.
The presence of impaired cognitive skills and self-regulation in the poor matters for them and for the reality of social inclusion. Some of the causes identified in this study are more controversial than others, yet they clearly show that the poor are not removed from a society they chose not to be part of, but that they behave and act as they do because of cognitive impairments. This seems to suggest a broader scope for social policy in development; rather than just providing medical support and material goods, it might be beneficial to invest in training the cognitive skills of the poor as a previous step for anything else. This finding has deeper implications for the very notion of poverty itself, as the poor would thus be in a situation of 'human development poverty' and this would suggest they would belong to the universal category of impoverished and disabled people.
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