"What Romney doesn’t understand about personal responsibility" Posted by Ezra Klein at WP

[applegrove]

What Romney doesn’t understand about personal responsibility

Posted by Ezra Klein at WP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/20/what-romney-doesnt-understand-about-personal-responsibility/

"SNIP.........................................

The problem is living the dream has blinded him to other people’s reality. His comments evince no understanding of how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car, how awful it is to choose between skipping a day on a job you can’t afford to lose and letting your sick child fend for herself. The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.

In their book “Poor Economics,” the poverty researchers Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo try to explain why the poor around the world so often make decisions that befuddle the rich.

Their answer, in part, is this: The poor use up an enormous amount of their mental energy just getting by. They’re not dumber or lazier or more interested in being dependent on the government. They’re just cognitively exhausted:

Our real advantage comes from the many things that we take as given. We live in houses where clean water gets piped in — we do not need to remember to add Chlorine to the water supply every morning. The sewage goes away on its own — we do not actually know how. We can (mostly) trust our doctors to do the best they can and can trust the public health system to figure out what we should and should not do. … And perhaps most important, most of us do not have to worry where our next meal will come from. In other words, we rarely need to draw upon our limited endowment of self-control and decisiveness, while the poor are constantly being required to do so.

........................................SNIP"

[Cha]

1. Thank you, Ezra Klein!

Thanks for the link, applegrove!

[applegrove]

2. He's on a roll today.

[gkhouston]

3. The working poor also spend more energy on worrying, too, IMO.

If you're well-off, a doctor visit, car repair, plumbing bill, etc., can be an expensive nuisance. If you're poor, it can be a catastrophe. It's not just dealing with the things that are broken now that wear you out: it's also worrying about how you're going to handle what might go wrong next.

[applegrove]

5. They also get abused more by crummy jobs and crummy housing and bad neighbourhoods. That takes

a huge toll.

[FirstLight]

4. exactly!

The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.

Funny, I am taking an ECON class this quarter and just had my first assignment, regarding 'opportunity cost'
The instructor wanted a personal example...I wrote that basically my entire LIFE is a practice in OC... to go back to school or stay in low income jobs? To live in poverty in the inner city or move to a rural and hence 'safer' place...etc...

[KT2000]

6. Insightful article

it is exhausting.I spend so much time being cautious so nothing will break because it will not be replaced. It takes a lot of planning to be poor and keep your head above water. If you don't the worst will happen.