The stereotypical rightwing commentator's perspective on poverty is that it's down to a failure of will: put your mind to it, harden your resolve – get on your bike, as Norman Tebbit never quite said – and you'll swiftly improve your lot. Unsurprisingly, self-help gurus tend to endorse that view. Self-help's individualism arguably makes the whole thing rightwing, and sometimes the endorsement's explicit: the megaselling Wayne Dyer, for example, likes to namecheck everyone's favourite manic libertarian high priestess of selfishness, Ayn Rand, while another guru, the self-esteem expert Nathaniel Branden, even dated her (which, if nothing else, would give you first-hand expertise with the problem of low self-esteem). As a typical leftish liberal, I think this view of poverty is nonsense. But recent research almost made me spill my muesli over my cardigan: willpower, it seems, is at the heart of the issue – though not in the way Tebbit and friends imagined.
Regular readers of this column will know the theory that willpower is a depletable resource: resisting temptation exerts a "psychic cost", temporarily reducing your reserves of self-discipline. (This is why across-the-board self-improvement projects fail: the willpower you exert on avoiding cheeseburgers means less to spend on a daily swim.) Studies suggest the same goes for any kind of "trade-off thinking", which leads to the striking hypothesis researchers have been testing: that being poor makes those psychic costs far more weighty. Poverty, as the analyst Jamie Holmes put it in the New Republic, means making more trade-offs and resisting more temptations – depleting the very willpower people might have used to lift themselves out of it.
Nobody except the most out-of-touch billionaire needs telling that having less money means making painful sacrifices. But combining this with the depletable willpower theory suggests a bitter twist: that making those sacrifices makes you less capable of doing the things – saving money, say, or giving up a pricey smoking habit – that could lay the foundations of a life with fewer sacrifices. The Princeton economist Dean Spears had his researchers show up in Indian villages, offering a discount deal on soap, then administering tests of self-control. For the poorest people, just considering whether to take the soap deal proved a cognitive imposition. "Choosing first," Spears wrote, "was depleting only for the poorer participants." Poverty, it seems, is indeed bound up with willpower, and the leftwing temptation to see things only in terms of impersonal social forces is mistaken. But it's not that failures of will cause poverty. It's that poverty causes failures of will.
Anti-poverty initiatives, Holmes argues, should focus far more on relieving these cognitive costs. He praises one Philippines bank that lets customers choose a date before which they can't access their money – a "commitment mechanism" of the sort UK banks ought to make easier. On a personal level, meanwhile, the message of depletable willpower rings clear: next time you find yourself full of self-discipline, don't spend it trying to behave virtuously; spend it, instead, altering your environment to reduce your future dependence on willpower. (Rather than resolving to save money monthly, set up a standing order; rather than resolving to watch less TV, get rid of your TV.) Where there's a will, there's a way to stop relying on will.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
