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Rob's avatar

As always, thanks for the though-provoking post! And (as usual) your ideas have stirred up a number of thoughts for me:

1. It seems like there's a risk in presenting a false dichotomy that poverty is either about personal agency or external factors. I'd say our degree of personal agency is heavily determined by external factors. In the same way that Marcus Aurelius reminds himself not to get angry with others - he points out that their behavior is simply a lack of knowledge and self-awareness (that does not come naturally to most people).

2. If you buy into the dichotomy, you conclude that financial assistance fosters the poverty mindset. It then follows that the best way to reduce poverty is to reduce financial assistance. When it comes to policy debates this is often where more conservative/libertarian folks stop. To take a swimming metaphor - it's the idea that people haven't learned to swim because they have a life jacket on. Take away the life jacket and people will just start swimming. Sure, some will - but others will definitely drown and drag others down with them.

3. I think the best thing to do (and best way to cross the political divides around this social problem) is to acknowledge that the poor have agency AND the circumstances of the poor often make it FAR more difficult to fully realize that agency. I think we underestimate all of the soft skills required to move successfully in an individualist capitalist economy - self-confidence, awareness of opportunities, vision of self for the future, self-discipline. In addition, the degree of opportunities available/possible paths forward is constricted by time and financial resources. People who make it out of poverty often are in micro-cultures that provide these soft-skills and/or connect with mentors who foster these skills and/or provide these resources.

4. The belief that the problem is primarily agency often comes with the belief that if you give a poor person money, they will simply waste it/become dependent on it. There are many actual experiments being run across the world (in both high and low resource settings) that aim to put this idea to the test. GiveDirectly is a nonprofit organization created that believes a huge driver of cyclical poverty is lack of money. They believe that the poor DO have creativity and personal agency but lack the catalyst of sufficient financial resources that would provide them hope (soft skill) and the money to put plans into action (resources). Their results so far have been pretty astounding.

We should experiment with policy approaches that affirm personal agency AND provide resources in an acknowledgment of the increased challenges the poor face. And we should keep in mind that the end goal of any poverty policy should be to figure out the best way, as a society, to empower everyone with the critical soft skills that support personal agency and ultimately independence. That seems to me a way that the Left and Right could meet together on poverty solutions... if we had a more humble and curious approach to the problem we might run many different experiments and find out what works and what doesn't. Let the results decide rather than fight a death match over ideologies.

What are your thoughts?

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