it’s not just about bad choices
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6/15/2015 It’s Not Just About Bad Choices NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/opinion/sunday/nicholaskristofitsnotjustaboutbadchoices.html?smid=fbnytopinion&smtyp=cur&_r=0 1/5
http://nyti.ms/1ebFHvi
SundayReview | OPED COLUMNIST
It’s Not Just About Bad ChoicesJUNE 13, 2015
Nicholas Kristof
BALTIMOREWHENEVER I write about people who are struggling, I hear from readers
who say something like: Folks need to stop whining and get a job. It’s allabout personal responsibility.
In a 2014 poll, Republicans were twice as likely to say that people are poorbecause of individual failings as to say the reason is lack of opportunity(Democrats thought the opposite). I decided to ask some of the poor what theythink. Here in Baltimore, I consulted Andrew Jackson Phillips Jr., 28, who’sbeen homeless for the last eight years or so, and he thinks that there issomething to the personal responsibility narrative.
“I had multiple chances,” he acknowledged. “I made some bad choices” —although he added that he thought “the system” had failed him as well.
I asked about his childhood. Phillips said that his mother had been a drugaddict and that he may have been born with drugs in his system. His siblingshad had acute lead poisoning, and he may have had toxic lead levels as well,with lifelong cognitive and behavioral consequences. At age 3, Phillips said hesaw his brother shot dead. At age 5, he himself was shot in the head by a drugdealer (he showed me the scar). In the eighth grade, he dropped out of school.
Sure, he made bad choices. Who among us, after going through his
6/15/2015 It’s Not Just About Bad Choices NYTimes.com
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traumatic childhood, could be sure of making optimal choices?
Too often, I believe, liberals deny that poverty is linked to bad choices. AsPhillips and many other poor people acknowledge, of course, it is.
Selfdestructive behaviors — dropping out of school, joining a gang, takingdrugs, bearing children when one isn’t ready — compound poverty.Researchers have often found that very poor families worldwide spend more oftheir income on alcohol than on educating their children. And, in centralKenya, a government study published a few years ago found that men there, onaverage, spent more of their salaries on alcohol than on food.
Yet scholars are also learning to understand the roots of these behaviors,and they’re far more complicated than the conservative narrative of humanweakness.
For starters, there is growing evidence that poverty and mental healthproblems are linked in complex, reinforcing ways. In the United States, aGallup poll a few years ago found that people living in poverty were twice aslikely to have been diagnosed with depression as other Americans. One studyin 2010 found that 55 percent of American babies living in poverty in 2001were raised by mothers showing signs of depression.
The journal JAMA Psychiatry last year estimated that millions of lowincome Americans suffer from parasitic infections such as toxocariasis andtoxoplasmosis that, in turn, are associated with cognitive impairment ormental health disorders.
“I estimate 12 million Americans living in poverty suffer from at least oneneglected parasitic or tropical disease,” says Dr. Peter Hotez, the author of thatstudy. “The media places so much emphasis on imaginary infectious diseasethreats, when millions of people in poverty, mostly people of color, haveneglected infections that are almost completely ignored.”
If you’re battling mental health problems, or grow up with traumas likedomestic violence (or seeing your brother shot dead), you’re more likely tohave trouble in school, to selfmedicate with drugs or alcohol, to have troublein relationships.
“There’s a strong association between poverty and low mental health,”
6/15/2015 It’s Not Just About Bad Choices NYTimes.com
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notes Johannes Haushofer, a psychologist at Princeton University.A second line of research has shown that economic stress robs us of
cognitive bandwidth. Worrying about bills, food or other problems, leaves lesscapacity to think ahead or to exert selfdiscipline. So, poverty imposes amental tax.
Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard and Eldar Shafir of Princeton exploredthis research in their important book “Scarcity.” They note that Indian farmerstest about 10 points lower on I.Q. tests before the harvest (when they’restretched economically) than afterward (when they’re flush). Indeed, evenasking poor people in psychology experiments to imagine a $1,500 car billleads them to perform significantly lower on I.Q. tests.
It turns out that when people have elevated levels of cortisol, a stresshormone, they are less willing to delay gratification. Researchers have raisedcortisol levels in research subjects — who then became more impatient forimmediate rewards, and thus more prone to “bad choices.”
“This is a really difficult conversation,” notes Haushofer, “because youvery quickly can end up in the corner of blaming the poor for poverty, andthat’s not the message I’ve been telling. Rather, it’s circumstances that canland you in a situation where it’s really hard to make a good decision becauseyou’re so stressed out. And the ones you get wrong matter much more, becausethere’s less slack to play with.”
Esther Duflo, a poverty expert at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, wonders whether America’s ideology of mobility, the HoratioAlger notion that people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, mayempower some poor people but leave others feeling like failures, brimmingwith selfdoubt that makes bad choices all the more likely.
Certainly that selfdoubt is ubiquitous among the poor.“Everything that happened in my life was bad choices,” Bernard Jackson,
53, who has battled poverty, crime and drugs for decades, told me here inBaltimore. “I take full responsibility for everything that happened.”
I suggested that Jackson had the deck stacked against him, consideringthat he was raised by a single mom in poverty, began smoking at 10, and was
6/15/2015 It’s Not Just About Bad Choices NYTimes.com
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arrested for the first time at 13. But he was accepting no excuses.“If I don’t get into the real core of what caused the problem, I won’t have
success,” said Jackson, who is on a drug treatment program and has beenclean for 10 months. “The real problem is me. If I don’t change me, I won’t getanywhere.”
That emphasis on personal responsibility is part of the 12step program toconfront alcoholism or drug addiction, and it may be useful for people likeJackson. But for society to place the blame entirely on the individual seems tome a copout.
Bill O’Reilly of Fox News is among the many commentators who hasemphasized this theme of personal responsibility. “Our culture is clutteredwith excuses for bad behavior,” O’Reilly has said. “It’s always somebody else’sfault.” In some sense, he has a point, along with Jackson and Phillips: Badchoices are real and have consequences.
Let’s also remember, though, that today we have randomized trials — thegold standard of evidence — showing that certain social programs make selfdestructive behaviors less common. Infant home visitation can reduce leadexposures and help moms with breastfeeding and reading to their children.Mental health outreach reduces homelessness. Career Academies, which giveatrisk teenagers work experience, boost earnings. Familyplanning programsfor the needy pay for themselves: An IUD or implant costs $800, a Medicaidbirth is around $13,000.
So as long as we’re talking about personal irresponsibility, let’s alsoexamine our own. Don’t we have a collective responsibility to provide more ofa fair start in life to all, so that children aren’t propelled toward bad choices?
When the evidence is overwhelming that we fail kids before they fail us,when certain programs would actually save public money while elevatingpersonal responsibility, isn’t it also time to stop making excuses for our ownselfdestructive behaviors as a society?I invite you to sign up for my free, twiceweekly newsletter. When you do, you’llreceive an email about my columns as they’re published and other occasionalcommentary. Sign up here.
6/15/2015 It’s Not Just About Bad Choices NYTimes.com
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A version of this oped appears in print on June 14, 2015, on page SR1 of the New York editionwith the headline: It’s Not Just About Bad Choices.
© 2015 The New York Times Company