THE POOR CHOICES OF POOR PEOPLE

I am financially comfortable and educated. The people around me are financially comfortable and educated. Great! But sometimes its not so great, when we start to make judgements about the choices made by less fortunate people. I mean, we’ve read the books, consumed the newspaper and watched the TED talk. Of course we know more about being poor than, well, poor people.

Recently, I was trying to figure out the psychology behind those moments where I have at my disposal Netflix, Viki, and Youtube, and yet I lazily just watch The Office for the millionth time. It took some digging on Google scholar (yes, I have lots of free time and very few friends), and I stumbled upon papers on decision fatigue. Decision fatigue is the phenomenon of mental tiredness experienced where a decision needs to be made which causes people to just not do anything at all. This kind of fatigue can be experienced when one can’t really answer either/or questions at the end of a long day, browsing through every channel to conclude there’s nothing to watch, or having a frustrating and time-wasting online shopping session which ends with a ‘0’ in the cart.

One of the papers mentioned something about how the number of decisions made is impacted by what you have now and what you need. The more comfortable you are in life, the more things feel like decisions as it is only a decision when there is some weighing of options involved and the more comfortable you have the more you can get something without a huge cost to something else.

Now think about the times you or someone you know said one of the following about the poor:

“Why don’t they just send their child to school? It costs nothing.”

“Did they really buy a TV? They don’t even have a toilet!”

“I don’t understand. Why don’t they just save that money for their son instead of buying a TV?” (The TV thing seems to come up a lot.)

The answer is this: because these are all either/or decisions for the poor, and they already have to make a lot of them. They are the worst affected by decision fatigue as every action is essentially an impactful choice for them

One example of a choice is one between using up money for daily expenses or putting some away in some sort of insurance policy. If you are not in abject poverty, there is really no decision to be made here. An insurance policy isn’t something you decide to get, it’s something that you figure you have to. But if you are poor, you figure I can do this but if I do, something that I have right now, something that brings me a little bit or joy or comfort in the harsh grind of my life, will have to go. A poor person’s decision will come at the cost of either the present or the future, thereby calling for a carefully executed DECISION, whereas if you are not that poor, the cost to your present will be relatively insignificant to the added advantages to your future, therefore requiring less of a decision a DECISION. This is how poverty makes people give up. When the decision to buy or not buy a bar of soap requires the mental gymnastics of calculating the weekly budget (or lack thereof) while standing at the counter of the only local kirana store, it’s understandable to disregard the nationwide campaign for handwashing and just skip the soap this week in favor of feeding your child an extra chapatti. Because it really is a choice between bathing and feeding, something that we do not understand as we shrug off using soap as basic hygiene and crinkle our noses at those who don’t.

Now let’s look at those lines again:

“Why don’t they just send their child to school? It costs nothing.” To the poor it costs time that could be spent learning a trade, doing housework, or otherwise making ends meet. An either/or decision.

“Did they really buy a TV? They don’t even have a toilet!” To the poor this is a choice between just a tiny amount of comfort after a very long day at work or waiting many years and saving up the money for many TVs to maybe (it is often not assured) get a toilet with faulty plumbing. An either/or decision.

“I don’t understand. Why don’t they just save that money for their son instead of buying a TV?” (Dude, they can’t change their whole lives with the cost of a TV anyways. Just let it go!)

Poverty is defined, first and foremost, by inflexibility. This is why it can be the same in a rich country like the US and a poor country like India. In the US, if you are poor (with a very likely overlap with some sort of drug use, broken family, and colored skin), you could lose one job—just one shitty job—for a reason as innocuous as oversleeping one day, and the next thing you know you’re homeless and shooting up heroin because what else are you going to do? I mean, I have overslept a couple of times and this would never happen to me. I have made bigger mistakes but my education and status give me safety net that a poor man from Harlem or the Ozarks simply doesn’t have, even though I am originally from a poorer country. In India, all it takes is one year of rains not showing up for a farmer to kill himself or a family to starve to death. Isn’t it so strange? I mean, I have some food on my plate if it’s flooded in Mumbai or swelteringly hot, and it’s difficult for me to imagine that rains being two minutes late can cost someone their life. Really. That is all it would take. The inflexibility of poverty is a state of if-one-thing-goes-wrong-everything-falls-apart. It is a constant tightrope walk over deep shark-infested waters. The inflexibility causes decisions to appear in your life in a way that make you choose between two options that in your context are equally costly, and also, everything becomes a decision between having one thing or the other. Anybody would be fatigued after that.

My intention here is not to say that our prescriptions to the poor are wrong. What I am trying to say is that the psyche of the person you are trying to help should be understood with greater compassion instead of urging someone poor to do something and then getting frustrated when they don’t. Because if you really want to help this is a decision fatigue you will have to face: do you keep making the CHOICE of helping or do you see that people aren’t listening to you and decide “Oh, they just want to stay this way!” If you’ve ever done grassroots level work, you know what I’m talking about. Perhaps this can help you understand the tiredness that causes your prescriptions to be met with such resistance by the intended beneficiaries, explain why some people “just don’t seem to listen,” and conceptualize the real psychological cost of buying that damn bar of soap.

So next time you are on the verge of criticizing the decisions of a poor family, know that making the obvious choice between enjoying the money they have now for simple pleasures or getting some sort of insurance policy is not an obvious choice for them.