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| These words are a work in progress. Ending global inequality is a work in progress. This road to one of my fieldsites is one hell of a work in progress. |
David Brooks recently wrote about character development as
the ingredient missing from attempts to break the poverty trap. This irked
me. Greatly. I made use of Facebook to announce my
disgruntledness. Interesting
conversation ensued that was quite helpful for me to see beyond my fury. And I’ve tried to take insight from that
conversation to figure out more thoughtfully why this Brooks’ piece still
greatly irks me.
My primary beef with the column was (and remains) that he
ignored the bigger picture of causality. Does any permutation of character
cause the poverty trap? No. Do permutations of character integrate into
the poverty trap equation? Perhaps, but not in the simplistic equation he
presents. He waters down social science research on character that has merit in
its own right, but is not intended to trigger a
“AH HA, THE solution to breaking the poverty trap” response. Anytime any one thing is heralded as ending
poverty we should all be skeptical. Any one thing that is attempting to end
poverty is patchwork development. Patchwork development isn’t wrong, but it
just patches. It doesn’t fix. I am a
proponent of people reaching out to other people. Good things can come of this.
Lives can improve—both the helper’s and the helpee’s. Maybe some even escape their marginalized circumstances. But as long as the system that actually
causes the poverty is in place, someone else is going to fall right down to the
spot of the escapee. So while certain
cycles of poverty might be broken (or at best interrupted or paused), other
cycles begin. That’s not doing anything
to resolve a world of some people with a whole, whole lot and a whole, whole
lot of people with only bits and pieces.
Furthermore, if David Brooks wants to bring character into the
conversation, why doesn’t he talk about the character of the corporate world or
the political world, the people who circulate back and forth to make the world
the shitty playing field it is? I’d like
to be an AmeriCorps volunteer working on developing some performance character
on Wall Street or Congress. They make rash, impulsive decisions that affect
many more lives than any one individual who decides to buy cigarettes instead
of kale.
His dismissal of the bigger picture is dangerous, but
perhaps what’s more dangerous is that what he’s watering down sets the stage so that people who are chomping
at the bit to blame poor people for their poverty can have an accredited voice
to turn this itch into policy. Brooks’ outline rests on many of our day to day assumptions
about why poor people stay poor—because they make stupid decisions because they
lack self-control/will power. What’s a good way to kill our remaining social
welfare programs (that already don’t do justice for the amount of need)? Make people pre-qualify with a character
assessment. But of course in the
Brooksonian world, the needy folks would have been offered a free online course
on character enhancement (perhaps run by a subsidiary of Haliburton) or had
their neighborhood AmeriCorps mentor train them how to become pre-approved for
social assistance.
I’m allowed to be critical of AmeriCorps. I was a volunteer. Twice.
And that’s what gets me so damn fired up about this Brooks piece.
I was an AmeriCorps volunteer twice. I also spent a year working on a public
health project giving voice to the experience of uninsured Missourians and all
the while was not offered health insurance by my non-profit employer. I’ve done
empirical research on food and health issues in Uganda and Malawi. I spent an
extra year in New Orleans after AmeriCorps Term 2 working several part time
jobs just so I could keep immersing myself in learning how a city’s social and
economic history resulted in the devastating and divergent destruction
unleashed by a hurricane as well as the bizarre and disparate process of
rebuilding the city. Currently, I try to learn about lives and livelihoods of
stressed out farmers in Ghana and how a cycle of poverty and stress perpetuates
in deleterious ways both socio-economically and biologically. I have, and
continue to, live and learn amongst the population whose circumstances I hope
to critically and thoughtfully interpret so as to address the hows and whys of
human suffering. All the while I’ve
never eeked out a living above the poverty level, but I’ve got pre-approved
credit cards, student loans, and parents who won’t let their daughter drive an
unsafe car (or go without the occasional good haircut) on my side to keep me wading
in the kiddie pool of poverty.
And yet because I’m a pie chart of insecurity (woman,
graduate student, Midwesterner) I hesitate to say what is mine even though I
present a decade’s worth of experience immersing myself in and thinking about
the causes and consequences of poverty. I think, well I haven’t quite had enough experiences yet to have a
voice. I’ve worked some jobs and learned
some stuff, and maybe I reached some people with my genuine interest in their
lives and not just their need. But even
in the moment of my effort to help improve lives, I was frustrated that I was
doing was temporary, peripheral, patchworky. I knew the social services I
hooked the elderly up with in St. Louis were fragile services that could just
as easily disappear as appear. And as a volunteer
match make in New Orleans I helped visitors find places to help in the
rebuilding process, but I was helpless to address the fact that the city was
rebuilding long standing racial and economic divides with a brand new dash of
gentrification. Despite the pride I had for the narratives I helped collect on
the experience of living without health insurance, when I marched in and out of
Congressional offices in Jefferson City, disillusionment quickly set in when I
saw just how little elected officials cared about what we had to say about
their constituents’ physical and mental well being.
Then there’s the very upsetting fact that I’m not even close
to figuring out how to dismantle and remantle a healthier, more equitable
economic system like I cheer for.
What I’m starting to realize is that smarter people think on
how to fix the bigger picture. What I’m
starting to realize is that those of us who do have experience in being in some
trenches as teachers, as AmeriCorps volunteers, as social workers, need to
start finding our voices and sharing our experiences more to say that what we
do helps but we see the bigger picture and we’d like to work on that too so
that the seams of our patchwork finally get some reinforcement. We don’t need a
new needle or thread. We need some new
material and a giant new sewing machine. If the David Brooks’ of the world, the
ones who’ve not embedded themselves anywhere, ever with marginalized
populations, are going to say what is theirs then sure as hell the ones of us
who have need to stand up and question that and start saying what is ours.
As an anthropologist invested in theoretically and
empirically understanding the poverty trap, this is what is mine: To truly understand
the poverty trap, it takes understanding the coping mechanisms employed even if
such coping mechanisms are not congruous with seemingly rational or sound
decision making. In my current research,
sometimes I observe someone who has just informed me that they are only eating
2 meals a day and are pretty damn worried about potential medical emergencies, drop
10 cents on beer or 50 cents on gin.
When I see this I don’t think “Shit, another bad move on their part. No
wonder they’re so poor and so worried.”
I think, “Oh yeah. This local
beer is like a meal in a calabash. They
probably didn’t have breakfast so their kids could have breakfast. That beer might be their breakfast.” Or, “That 50 cents of gin is going to make
her worries feel a little less worrisome.
And I know she’d have to save 50 cents everyday for 6 days to have
enough money to buy all the ingredients she needs for a somewhat decent soup. Today she must only have 50 cents. Maybe her charcoal didn’t sell at
market. Maybe she did sell all of her
charcoal but had to spend all of the profit on medicine.” I think those things
because I’ve learned those things by talking with people about their
experience. The same framework can and should be used in the States. I am someone who has qualified for food
stamps for 10 years. And I buy
beer.
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| A calabash of local brew-if Guinness is a meal in a can, pito is a meal in a calabash |
When people are living lives that fall into the “scraping
by” category, the maybes that explain decision making patterns are
INFINITE. As an anthropologist I seek to
understand what can lead people to divert money from one thing to another
thing. The very people who I may observe spending money on booze and not food
might also be diverting money from food to education because in their world it
makes more sense to get your kid schooled than well fed. A malnourished, but
educated child has a better chance of having better job opportunities and
helping out elderly parents than a well fed, but un-educated kid. The farmer who sells the food from the house
so he can buy fertilizer for the farm isn’t making an uncalculated move
either. He knows that his wife can pick
up the slack with her income earning activities until the new crop are
harvested. The poor think about their
immediate and long term future a whole hell of a lot more than we give them
credit for. There’s a very popular slogan here (and perhaps throughout West
Africa and maybe even beyond): “Who Knows Tomorrow?” Poor people never know their tomorrows. Tomorrow your roof might blow off in a storm
and the money you saved for fertilizer will have to fix the roof. Tomorrow you might be paid for labor you
performed 2 years ago and you might be able to buy a bag of maize for your
family and your wife can then divert her income to investments. These are actual scenarios I’ve learned about
within my sample population. Who knows
how many unknown tomorrow stories I haven’t captured in just one community in
just one corner of a country whose economy is falling apart in a very
tragi-comic manner?
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| What do you think when you see this house? |
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| Does your opinion change when you see they have a satellite dish? |
From what I’ve seen and heard in various spots around the
globe, you don’t survive impoverished circumstances unless you’re smart, full
of gumption, and able to navigate daily decisions that require constant
assessment of present and future costs and benefits. Human psychology plays a role in the
decisions we make. But human psychology
is not an isolated thing. Our
psychologies exist within complex domestic spheres and social relations and our
individually complex domestic and social spheres exist within an even more
complex and interconnected global system. Character is something within all of
us humans wherever we may fall on the spectrum of having or having not. It’s
something we build within ourselves and through our interactions with one
another. Maybe we can become better, more accomplished humans through our
character development. But the
development of our character does not determine our ability to succeed or fail
in providing quality lives for ourselves and our future generations. For that we get a lot of help from the social
and economic structures that entangle the most of us.
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| David Brooks needs to sit under more trees with people and just listen to them like I am here with my research assistant. |
If the David Brooks of the world want to pontificate about
poorness and why people are poor, they need to actually start LISTENING to poor
people rather than relying on tired assumptions about poor people. This takes empathy, a trait,
perhaps of character, that is also making a splash in the inequality debate. I
cordially invite David Brooks to come hang out with me in Ghana. Hell, bring
Nick Kristoff, too. We’ll roam town and
talk with people. But like the rest of
us here, he’s going to have to learn to drop his deuces in the latrine or the
bush. Hopefully then he can then use his
column for more well thought out analysis.
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