intellectual properties

decision-making shoes

at the core of our work, my firm tries to facilitate better/more informed/longer-term-focused decision-making about environmental public policies. it is often quite interesting to hear the cost-benefit analyses that the various stakeholders come up with when rationalizing their preferred alternative. it’s ok to pump all of the water out of the river now, otherwise we won’t have any food next summer. despite the fact that we go through very careful, articulated, researched decision-making processes, sometimes the best decision just can’t get enough momentum. because people have a really hard time thinking about anything but today. right now.

this Seed Magazine article about decision-making is very interesting, and does a good job of relating the decisions we often attribute to the “state of being poor” to those most of the rest of us make every day.

Sitting on the couch and watching TV does not seem very attractive when thinking about tomorrow, but in the moment it is a particularly attractive option. This means that even if individuals would like to behave as the traditional economics view would suggest, they find it difficult to do so. The patient me looking into the future wishes I would do one thing — my taxes this weekend — while the deciding me in the present does another thing — watches TV.

i myself, despite all these years of fostering careful decision-making in the workplace, have a hard time adhering to what i know are the best practices for myself in my personal life. this is something i’ve been trying to work on.

if you’re poor, it all gets even harder. living hand-to-mouth makes decision-making all the more urgent. every decision. life-threatening decisions. which is why the opening paragraph of this article is so very important to consider:

All too often, the choices of the poor are viewed as a result of either some intrinsic failing (“they’re just very myopic people”) or some deep psychological feature of poverty (“they’re desperate”). Behavioral economics — the integration of psychological insights into economic analysis — offers a third interpretation: All of us face difficulties in making the right choices; the poor are just asked to do it more often and in tougher circumstances.

living in a relatively poor urban neighborhood (globally speaking), i am also highly-aware of and interested in what drives some of the “bad” decisions i see being made in my neighborhood every day. like why people keep dumping what appears to be regular household trash on the corner, right under the “no dumping sign”. in their own neighborhood. or why one chooses to steal from their neighbors. or sell crack. or carry a gun. what previous decisions, by whom, and under what circumstances, led to these?

this is where i find my compassion around things that happen to me that are unsavory, like getting my car busted into or having to witness certain behaviors on the streets around my home, and where i get extremely irritated at those who think the poor deserve what they have, that they are poor through some fault of their own, that if they just worked harder and were “better people”, they wouldn’t be poor. everyone makes their own choices, sure, but assuming that everyone had the opportunity to make the same choices as you is where the fault lies. and on top of that, as this article discusses, even the privileged make bad decisions, so why do so many expect the poor to be any different than the rest of us, and hold them to such different standards? you often hear about the rash decisions that get made in the face of unforeseen circumstances, or unexpected situations, or dire emergencies. often, being poor means that you face those things almost every day.

Filed in culture and random linkage | Tagged with poverty | Comment (1)