The fastest way to fight poverty is to redirect money from higher-income to lower-income people. In the meantime, behavioral scientists have some tips on how the present system can do a better job of helping the poor.
Last month, the behavioral economics-focused nonprofit Ideas42 released a report that attempts to suggest improvements to our current government methods of poverty-fighting. The group is quick to say that “advocating for a behavioral approach to poverty alleviation is not equivalent to suggesting that people in poverty should simply behave differently... Instead, we contend that the burden of change rests primarily with the individuals and organizations who have the power to design programs and systems in ways that take universal human tendencies into account.” In essence, they are suggesting subtle ways that our current system can be tweaked to make it work better for the people it is supposed to serve, and offering some explanations as to why attempts to escape poverty sometimes break down. For example, some insight into how poverty affects the human mind:
This slowdown is driven by the brain’s tendency to “tunnel” in response to scarcity: whatever is most urgent, whatever unmet need is most pressing, fully “captures” the mind and crowds out all other concerns, questions, or tasks that would otherwise compete for attention. What to have for lunch, what to do this weekend, and what bills are due soon are all issues easily ignored when feeling the effects of scarcity. Temporarily, this laser-like focus can be useful—it’s what enables you to focus when time is scarce and you have a fast-approaching deadline at work, for instance—but nobody can afford to tunnel all the time. Too many important (though not quite imperative) things will inevitably get neglected. As one parent put it, “I just focus on today, [as though] nothing happened in the past and nothing will happen in the future.”
[For more of this story, written by Hamilton Nolan, go to http://gawker.com/behavioral-s...tm_medium=socialflow]
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