How do you improve your life? Many of us assume that flourishing in the face of adversity requires a certain kind of mindset. Believing in your power, staying focused on future goals, being proactive, and leveraging social relationships are four outlooks that can help, many of us suspect, in overcoming life’s obstacles. Driven by the belief that people can change their lives by thinking differently, public organizations in the UK and the US have made a deliberate effort over the past decade to develop such a mindset among people experiencing the most persistent forms of adversity in advanced democracies: those who live on little or no income. Yet such efforts have been largely unsuccessful at reducing poverty and unemployment, and have been derided both by the people they were designed to help and by those advocating on their behalf. What has gone wrong here?
Many explanations have emerged from those studying poverty, with each account more nuanced and humanistic than the last. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, it was argued that people caught in intergenerational poverty traps were morally deficient: they did not want to work hard to advance in society and would rather depend on the state for financial support, revealing a ‘culture of poverty’ that needed to be disrupted. In subsequent decades, efforts to encourage people to create a better life for themselves were focused on education and financial literacy: those lower in socioeconomic status could be taught which decisions were beneficial in the long run (such as giving up smoking and avoiding costly loans) and how to develop the self-belief and self-control needed to stick to them. More recently, research has focused on the psychological costs of poverty itself: thinking daily about financial worries eats up cognitive ‘bandwidth’, leaving little mental space for someone to figure out how to advance their long-term goals – let alone stick to them. That’s why the latest set of interventions focus either on nudging poor people toward more acceptable behaviours, such as preparing healthier meals and saving money, or training them in cognitive skills that enable them to do these things more regularly.
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