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Picture a scene

A motivational speaker walking down the street, when he comes upon a homeless beggar asking him for money for food.

Homeless man: I am hungry, sir. And I don't have any money
Speaker: Oh you are poor! I will now offer great advice, you need to work. Enter the real state market, banking, or make a startup. This could be a very good opportunity for you.
Homeless man: Shocked PIkachu face
Speaker: Second of all, you need to work on psychology. You need to travel around the world and meet different people. Are you a tree?
Homeless man: No
Speaker: Good, the fact that you are not a tree should help you move around and travel. But again, check, I am not certain of whether you are a tree or not. You could be a tree without being aware ofit
Homeless man: Not a tree, no
Speaker: Not a tree, okay. These are my advices, they are free for you. Take care. Thank you very much for listening, you are a great guy, I love you. Thanks for your time.

Speaker walks away leaving the homeless man bewildered

In 1960s in Stanford university, social psychologist Walter Mischel

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Here he is looking like he is about to drop a beat by having a heart attack

Anyway, Walter conducted an experiment. Walter wanted to test the instant gratification resistance by children. Why he wanted to do that is up for you to decide. The experiment is as follows, he brings a four years old child, sit them in a room with nothing in the room other than a marshmallow right in front of them. The conductor would give him a choice to either have one now or wait ten minutes with the marshmallow in front of them and have two instead of one.

The experiment that was conducted on around 600 child resulted with more than half the children eating the marshmallow, maybe it looked too delicious, or maybe they just wanted to rid the world of a horrible DJ. Alright, we are done, nice experiment, good work, should I go home? No, because much like Bill Clinton or Kevin Spacey, Walter would just let the kids be. He decided to follow up with the subjects of the experiment 50 years later. And what did he find?

Those who ate the marshmallow all brutally killed their families in murder suicide at the age of 28

No, I am just kidding. I just didn't want you to space out yet. Walter found out after stalking these people for fifty years that those who didn't eat the marshmallow scored higher in the SAT tests, were less likely to get overweight, less likely to be addicted, and their romantic life was much more stable.

So is having that one chocolate bar the reason I live such a miserable life?

Well, no. The idea is that not eating the marshmallow was an indication of high self control, one that prioritize higher level of success over instant one. That is according to Walter Mischel as written in his book The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. Of course when this experiment and study was published it garnered a lot of controversy and still does until today, but I am not about to read a whole other books just to write a post, so we are sticking to this one.

The results from the study was used by the school of Neoliberalism, a school that sees that poor people are poor because they are lazy and don't want to work, they only seek the instant gratification. Really, think about it: how many people do you say who are poor yet have expensive phones? How many of them smoke cigarettes? Wouldn't it have been if they saved that money to make a better living? They are poor because they are weak and couldn't resist eating the marshmallow, right? Well, this is my first post on this community and I feel like it is too early for me to share my opinion about Neoliberalism

According to the book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, winner of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award

Economy scientists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo tried to explain the dilemma, the book says that poverty is the oldest and biggest problem facing humanity.

What is new about this? We all know that

Just wait a little bit. In spite of all the technological advances we reached, there are still a billion and a third of a billion people living off under 1.25 dollars a day. Not only that there more than two billion. Not only that, a billion and a half people living off less than 2 dollars a day. Not only that, there are only 42% of humans have toilets while we have reached such technological that we were able to build toilets in space costing us ten million dollars. I know I have said "Not only that" a thousand times, but that was the last time

Not only that

Less than 25% of the world population have access to clean water. The issue is that we spend BILLIONS to fight poverty and we aren't really successful. To be more precise, we have made progress in fighting poverty but it is very little in comparison to how much we spend on it. The authors of the aforementioned book, great book by the way, most of the solutions suggested to fight poverty are ones suggested by rich white people in their air conditioned room as they have a weirdly named meal imported from the beach of butt-fuck nowhere.

Those people wonder what poor people should do, and suggest it. They don't understand how poor people already think. They haven't lived in the environment and under the same circumstances to understand the reality, which is necessary for someone to implement solutions. the authors are simply saying that we need to understand how poor people think before we act, otherwise each gesture to fight poverty would be doomed to fail.

The poverty problem for example

A simplified solution for that suggests that each person is required to consume a certain level of calories each day. The right number of calories would make one strong enough to work, when they work they have money, when they have money they won't be poor. In a rational sense, yes, valid theory reality is different however.

The authors found that in the 1908's , in a town in India, whenever individuals' income increases, the percentage of how much they would expend on food wouldn't increase at the same rate. Even though, they didn't have money to spend on food while poor, once their financial situation improved, they spent it on other stuff.

Not only th........... Checks a dictionary...... Additionally

When they start making a higher income, they spend their money on more expensive calories. They buy meats, and other types of expensive food they weren't able to buy them before instead of buying fruits, vegetables, bread, and different products that would last them longer.

You are definitely starting to think that they brought this on themselves, but don't want to say. After all, you are a politically correct millennial with your purple-haired, sex positive woke girlfriend and you don't to come off as an alt-right. But that doesn't mean that you haven't thought about, you have, just admit it.

You are not alone however, George Orwell, in his book The Road to Wigan Pier was wondering the same.George Orwell was staying with mine workers in England and he was rather bewildered by the fact that the workers were eating relatively expensive fries, sugared tea, jam and bread He was wondering how come they don't instead have cheaper stuff like orange or carrot juice and vegetables, those would also help them perform their job better , the guy was far from body-positive. However, Orwell did end up answering himself by stating that healthy food is crab.

After all, you work at a low paying job, there is no betterment possible, and you ALSO have to eat tasteless food? Orwell saw that only rich people have the luxury of waking up in the morning to have the dreaded orange or carrot juice and those healthy cute food and then sleep without dinner to lose weight. Poor people have shitty lives, the one thing they could at least get is tasty food.

The reason poor people see instant gratification more important

Doesn't come from the fact that they don't understand or love being poor. On the contrary, if we take into consideration their outlook and situation in life, we would find their choice of instant gratification to be a justified as their future isn't certain. They are paid on daily basis, if they don't work tomorrow, they won't have any food. There is no future, but we are in the present.

Let's go back to the marshmallow experiment for a second.

How do you know that after not eating that marshmallow, the conductor would bring you two instead? Are you sure they will? Isn't it possible that they might not return and you would be missing on the only available marshmallow? In regular situation, not waiting can be seen as a normal decision to make, after all it is simply not certain that you would be getting any sort of gratification should you wait. Isn't it possible that you might be missing out on the marshmallow all together

Not on..... Also

Sane decision or not, your body have already made the decision as a result to a sort of stress. Stress plays a big part in making these decisions, or more precisely *chronic stress. Difficulties faced by the 1 world during financial troubles and future uncertainties are all temporary sources of stress that poor people face on daily basis. You might be thinking that you might be lacking money as well, but the difference is that when you are lacking money, it means not buying a grande crappacino from Starbucks, to poor people it means they won't have dinner.

Emotional stress forces the brain to produce cortisol lowering your ability to focus and affects your decision making. Cortisol affects the brain and the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain in charge of suppressing reckless decisions, so it is normal that poor people are making such bad decisions. At least that is according to the economical school viewing human beings as reasonable, a being seeking their own method to seek as much profit as possible, also known as "principle of the prostitution", basically your goal as an employee is minimum effort and maximum profit.

> Not all cases are like this

It is not a general, but that doesn't prevent us from paying attention to those less fortunate who face more obstacles as each day goes by, obstacles that day by day pulls them down to poverty further and further.

In a series of studies conducted by Eldar Shafir published in Science magazine in 2013, he discovered along with the remainder of his team that the stress caused by financial problems leads to a burden on the brain that equals dropping your IQ by 13 points. To put this in perspective, how sharp would you be after staying up 24 hours then going to work, now imagine doing that for months or even years.

Not o..... Furthermore

Children born in poverty have tighter scalp by 6%, that could affect their mental capabilities and decision making abilities. It is kind of hard after all of this for a person to blame a poor person and their decision, so don't look all fancied up eating expensive sushi before heading to an avenger party premiere that you paid 50K dollars to get in saying

This is not a rational economic decision

Go fuck yourself.

> Does this make fighting poverty an impossible task?

You are asking way too many questions by the way. Anyway, no, the authors of Poor Economics see that fighting poverty is very possible provided we understand how poor people think as opposite to how they should think. Rich people can't expect poor people to behave in a certain way as they simply don't live their lives. That is many countries are opening what is called Behavioral Economics Labs in those poverty stricken countries.

Many of behavioral studies conducted where done on rich-middle class students in the west, most are white and are in advanced countries who think differently to poor people who are the ones suffering from the issue.

A Solution that was suggested is that you kill all the poor people and save up the money

Again, joking. A solution suggested is that add instant profits to actions that lead to long term benefit like education and water. Also there is a necessity to making sure that participation wouldn't cost them additional effort as much like they want instant profit they also prefect postponing the effort.

For example, one of the problems as mentioned above is the low access to clean water, having dirty water leads to cases of death that could be avoided should add chlorine. Chlorine isn't expensive even for poor people, still many houses wouldn't add it.

See? They don't want to improve their lives anyway. They are lazy.

Well, let me propose something, you are not in their place. You go to the water tab, pull it up and it brings you clean water, move it to the right you get hot water, move to the left and get cold water. Be honest, if you were required to add chlorine every time you open the tab, would you do it every time? I personally doubt that. The solution is providing with clean water that they would get without the extra effort. And if you don't have money then simply put up a machine that adds chlorine automatically. Such a solution when implemented was used consistently by poor households.

Not onl...... Forbye

Supporting some families financially played a part in letting their children get their education. That is done instead of trying to convince them that letting the children get their education is better for the future. After all what would make those children wait when they don't have an guarantees about the future? What guarantees do they have that they would eventually get two marshmallows as opposite to the one they have now?

In summary

When the poor people were supported financially and the profit was instant, along with the partial lifting of financial burden, they took a more useful decision on the long run financially. So instead of criticizing the decision poor people made, criticize the circumstances that put them there in the first place. So remember that it is quite that if you were born under different circumstances, you would have eaten the marshmallow. Bona petite

Sources:
1- Poor Economics, Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo.
2- The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control, Walter Mischel.
3, 4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18.19,20,21,22,23