Four Views of Poverty

In “,” I summarize the four main views of poverty that have been around for hundreds of years. Surprisingly, the view a person chooses reflects their answers to two fundamental questions: Are the poor, generally speaking, like me (as a self) or different from me (as an Other)? Is poverty an individual or a systemic issue? How one answers these two questions will determine one’s place in the ongoing poverty debate.

A structural view (systemic issue affecting people like me) argues that the poor do their best to escape poverty, but traps and barriers keep them where they are. A trap consists of mutually reinforcing challenges, such as when you need money to pay for childcare, but you need childcare so you can look for a job. Barriers include things like racism, sexism, lack of education or lack of job opportunities that prevent a person from receiving the reward for their good efforts.

A cultural view (systemic issue affecting people different from me) claims that there is a coherent set of attitudes and behaviors — a “culture of poverty” — that keeps people poor. Adults transmit this culture to the next generation through parenting styles and through the community’s self-defeating beliefs about the world.

A contextual view (individual issue affecting people like me) acknowledges that the bad behaviors of the poor perpetuate their poverty but suggests that these behaviors make sense within the absurd context in which the poor live. This view currently draws on brain science to show that conditions of scarcity can reduce cognitive capacity by up to 14 IQ points — the so-called “” — producing bad decisions that the person would not make if they were not poor.

A behavioral view (individual issue affecting people different from me) claims that the self-defeating behaviors of the poor result from a lack of ability, motivation, or willpower.

Each of these views implies its own solutions to poverty. The structural view demands new investment in housing, education, transportation, etc., in order to dismantle the traps and barriers that keep people poor. The cultural view proposes interventions within families and communities to improve parenting skills and to foster positive attitudes. The contextual view argues for universal basic income and other supports to relieve the stresses that promote poverty-perpetuating behaviors. The behavioral view wants to cut social programs for the poor, or at least to impose behavioral requirements (like working at a job) on those receiving benefits. And so the debate goes on and on.

Our View

If sincere, thoughtful people have expressed all four views of poverty for centuries, then each view probably contains at least some part — but not all — of the truth. Certainly, the poor are in some respects like me and in other respects different from me. Certainly, the poor, like all of us, face the consequences of their own actions, but at the same time they inhabit a systemic context where the consequences of an individual decision can prove catastrophic.

Common sense also supports the assertion that each view contains some truth. Somewhere a hardworking man cannot find a job despite his best efforts. Somewhere a father bestows upon his daughter a worldview that will not serve her well in life. Somewhere the stresses of poverty erode a mother’s ability to care for her children the way she knows she should. Somewhere there is a poor and pregnant teenager who really should have known better.

If all of these views are true in some way, then why do we each choose the view we do? Where do our answers to those two fundamental questions come from? They likely come from our own experience, or from our family’s experience, of poverty. Only 200 years ago, 84% of humans lived in what the World Bank (on less than $1.90 per day, roughly, accounting for inflation). Most of us can probably point to an ancestor who genuinely struggled to survive and whose name we know. How our own ancestors escaped poverty, or why they were unable to do so, likely shapes our understanding of poverty today.

Integrating these different views of poverty is not just a cognitive exercise. It is an emotional process of looking at what we believe about poverty and why. When we look inside ourselves, we may find an uncanny connection between our own lived experience and the solutions we are proposing out in the world. But leaders of change undermine their own effectiveness when they fail to distinguish between what the poor really need and what they themselves feel fulfilled in providing. Many end up simply projecting the emotional baggage they carry forward from the past onto the lives of others.

Integrating the poverty debate requires not just that we listen to other views, but also that we expand the emotional place from which we listen. It requires that we integrate our own thoughts and feelings through an often painful process of self-awareness and reflection. Only then can we share that integration with a world that so badly needs it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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We just can’t figure out . Watching pundits try to explain his success in the polls—despite his appalling public statements—is even more spectacular than watching the man himself.

Part of the difficulty is that we tend to look at such things rather superficially, without looking at the deeper psychological dynamics that are in play. A psychological study of the democratic process is in order.

Fortunately, the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott provided such a study in an article entitled “,” in which he asks, what is the proportion of a population that must be healthy—that is, emotionally mature—to sustain a democracy? (Or conversely, “What proportion of anti-social individuals can a society contain without submergence of innate democratic tendency?”)

The question is important because, as Winnicott writes, “The vote [by an individual] expresses the outcome of the struggle within oneself, the external scene having been internalized and so brought into association with the interplay of forces in one’s own personal inner world.” Thus, the political domain becomes an aggregate of the inner worlds of the voters.

Winnicott creates a framework for answering his own question by defining four distinct segments of a population:

1) Healthy members: Those who are mature (particularly in an emotional sense) according to their chronological age and social setting;

2) Anti-socials: Winnicott doesn’t define this term, but the DSM-5 description of “anti-social personality disorder” includes such attributes as manipulativeness, deceitfulness, callousness, hostility, irresponsibility, impulsiveness and risk-taking;

3) “Hidden anti-socials”: Those who react to inner insecurity not by rejecting authority (e.g., society or the state), but by identifying with it;

4) Indeterminates: Those who fit into none of the above categories, the psychological equivalent of “swing voters.”

For several years, I have been interested in developing a set of proxy indicators that would provide a psychometric—or “ego demographic”—profile of a given population. By “ego demographic,” I am referring to the population-level application of Jane Loevinger’s eight stages of ego development that I described in  for an international development audience. (These proxy indicators would help international nongovernmental organizations tailor their strategies and communications to the social psychology of the population with whom they are working, which is often misleadingly termed “culture.”) While I haven’t systematically mapped Winnicott’s categories to Loevinger’s ego stages, it is clear that the two maps pertain to the same territory.

For the US, I propose that the presidential polling numbers can be used to create such a psychometric profile by sorting the population (in a general sense) into Winnicott’s categories, and potentially into Loevinger’s stages as well, particularly early on in the election cycle before “electability” becomes the principal concern.

The Donald’s Chances

Since an individual vote reflects “the interplay of forces in one’s own personal inner world,” supporters of psychologically healthy candidates indicate their own psychological health through that support. Supporters of candidates who exhibit callousness, hostility or impulsiveness indicate that those traits are resident within themselves. Some voters are anti-social, rejecting society in favor of the individual, while others represent the “hidden anti-social” tendency by rejecting the individual in favor of society.

What conclusions can we draw from this analysis?

First, without a major change in America’s circumstances between now and November 2016, it is highly unlikely that or any of the other extremist candidates pose any real threat of actually being elected. It is unlikely that a political campaign could move a significant segment of the population from healthy to anti-social (hidden or otherwise).

Thus, it is reasonable to believe that—if the nation’s circumstances do not change appreciably—Trump’s polling numbers have essentially peaked.

However, any wise democracy will still be wary of such candidates, since they stand at the ready to jump in should some sort of national catastrophe occur, raising fears among the general population to an intolerable level. This is frequently the mechanism by which democracy fails. It is here that those psychological “swing voters” come in, deciding if the nation will follow a path toward health or toward decay.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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