Poor people are disproportionately likely to make various choices that appear obviously counter to their long-run interests. These include decisions regarding finances, childbearing, parenting, recreation, and health; Pepper & Nettle (P&N) collect various examples that they call the “behavioral constellation of deprivation.” Bad choices make poor people easy to pathologize as chronically undone by a lack of intelligence or impulse control. Against this view stand efforts to recast these choices as, in one way or another, reasonable responses to the deprivations that low-socioeconomic-status (SES) people confront in their everyday lives: In P&N's parlance, as a “contextually appropriate” response.
Implicit throughout P&N's argument is that premise that the behaviors associated with lower SES pose a puzzle. What cannot be emphasized enough is how dependent this puzzle is on the perch from which academics observe it. In truth, we – not poor people – are the weird ones. From an evolutionary perspective, many commonplace high-SES behaviors in developed societies, from long-delayed first pregnancy to voluntary low fertility to regular recreational exercise to deliberately abstemious diets, are downright peculiar. As more recent history, SES differences in several behaviors P&N cite – smoking, breastfeeding, age at first birth – have emerged more from changing behavioral patterns among high-SES individuals than low-SES individuals. For example, in the United States, little SES difference in smoking existed until rates began dropping among higher-SES individuals, creating a gap as rates among lower-SES individuals declined more slowly (Link & Phelan Reference Link and Phelan2009).
The behaviors identified by P&N surely exacerbate challenges that poor people confront. Yet what we recognize as the social policy problem is not necessarily the most productive way to view the scientific problem. We should not treat the behaviors of the affluent as providing the natural baseline from which different behaviors by low-SES people are to be explained. If the question is what would get low-SES people to behave more like high-SES people, even for policy purposes, it is unclear whether the answer is to be found in the specifics of their lives versus ours. How is it that higher-SES individuals have become so far-sighted and so watchful of long-term health? Why do so many refrain from short-term rewards well beyond any reason for which there is a clear indication of long-term benefit?
That short-sighted behaviors are puzzling becomes even more questionable when we think about contemporary environments surrounding choices. It hardly takes a tie-dyed critic of capitalism to notice the enormous environmental pushes encouraging behavior against long-term interests. The rise of smoking famously involved the systematic marshaling of an enormous agricultural, physiological, political, and marketing knowledge to get hundreds of millions worldwide hooked (Brandt Reference Brandt2009). Smoking's decline among high-SES individuals occurred in the face of this, and only subsequently did this transform into various increasingly coercive measures to push lower-SES individuals to follow their lead. Lesser variations on this theme lurk behind other products connected to behaviors highlighted by P&N: opioids, fast food, soda, infant formula, machine gambling, usurious credit cards. Low-SES people in developed societies exist at a nexus of manipulation in which vast enterprises devise ever-more-inviting traps of immediate gratification, while academics and others devise interventions to discourage these same behaviors.
P&N's focus on risk and control leads them to overstate the individuality of decisions. Many behaviors noted by P&N are plainly subject to social influence, or even to collective decisions. As examples: Trajectories of smoking, alcohol, and drug use notoriously often involve groups of users; social transmission contributes to obesity; exercise experts regularly tout the adherence advantages of “working out with a buddy”; and parental investment regularly involves joint decision making by parents and a good deal of kibitzing and mimicking of others.
Indeed, one of the most consequential things about SES is how it connects individuals in social space, so that individual choices reflect and reverberate through networks of others with disproportionately similar statuses. Even today, a low-SES person who wants to quit smoking still likely has many more fellow smokers in his or her life than a higher-SES smoker who wants to quit. Behavioral tendencies may be pervasively amplified by the choices of others with similar tendencies. To this end, one might be skeptical of the prospects of a theory of SES differences in behaviors that focuses so much on individuals and so little on relationships and networks. These behaviors clearly have cultural and normative aspects: If you do not believe so about smoking, try lighting up in a faculty meeting and see what happens.
P&N's emphasis on risk and control may also lead them to sometimes present poor people as more powerless than they are, especially in ways in which their argument draws on evolutionary history. For instance, a key example in their argument involves the homicide risk facing youth in poor urban neighborhoods, where “your risk of being a victim of homicide is relatively high” (target article, sect. 2.3, para. 3). These youth do face a homicide risk many times higher than that of affluent kids from the suburbs, but it should also be recognized that the mortality risk to low-SES youth today is substantially lower than that of a woman dying in childbirth any time before the nineteenth century. Moreover, P&N characterize homicide for those stuck in poor neighborhoods as being a “risk beyond [their] control,” so much so that “there may seem little point in quitting smoking or eating healthy foods, because you may not live” (sect. 2.3, para. 3). In the United States, at least, homicide victimization in such neighborhoods is, in fact, highly disproportionately concentrated among youth with significant histories of criminal or gang activity (Papachristos et al. Reference Papachristos, Wildeman and Roberto2015). Low-SES youth certainly have much more control over avoiding death from homicide than women historically have had from avoiding death in childbirth. Poverty presents enormous challenges, but we should be wary of casting the lives of the poor as but a small step removed from Mad Max.
Poor people are disproportionately likely to make various choices that appear obviously counter to their long-run interests. These include decisions regarding finances, childbearing, parenting, recreation, and health; Pepper & Nettle (P&N) collect various examples that they call the “behavioral constellation of deprivation.” Bad choices make poor people easy to pathologize as chronically undone by a lack of intelligence or impulse control. Against this view stand efforts to recast these choices as, in one way or another, reasonable responses to the deprivations that low-socioeconomic-status (SES) people confront in their everyday lives: In P&N's parlance, as a “contextually appropriate” response.
Implicit throughout P&N's argument is that premise that the behaviors associated with lower SES pose a puzzle. What cannot be emphasized enough is how dependent this puzzle is on the perch from which academics observe it. In truth, we – not poor people – are the weird ones. From an evolutionary perspective, many commonplace high-SES behaviors in developed societies, from long-delayed first pregnancy to voluntary low fertility to regular recreational exercise to deliberately abstemious diets, are downright peculiar. As more recent history, SES differences in several behaviors P&N cite – smoking, breastfeeding, age at first birth – have emerged more from changing behavioral patterns among high-SES individuals than low-SES individuals. For example, in the United States, little SES difference in smoking existed until rates began dropping among higher-SES individuals, creating a gap as rates among lower-SES individuals declined more slowly (Link & Phelan Reference Link and Phelan2009).
The behaviors identified by P&N surely exacerbate challenges that poor people confront. Yet what we recognize as the social policy problem is not necessarily the most productive way to view the scientific problem. We should not treat the behaviors of the affluent as providing the natural baseline from which different behaviors by low-SES people are to be explained. If the question is what would get low-SES people to behave more like high-SES people, even for policy purposes, it is unclear whether the answer is to be found in the specifics of their lives versus ours. How is it that higher-SES individuals have become so far-sighted and so watchful of long-term health? Why do so many refrain from short-term rewards well beyond any reason for which there is a clear indication of long-term benefit?
That short-sighted behaviors are puzzling becomes even more questionable when we think about contemporary environments surrounding choices. It hardly takes a tie-dyed critic of capitalism to notice the enormous environmental pushes encouraging behavior against long-term interests. The rise of smoking famously involved the systematic marshaling of an enormous agricultural, physiological, political, and marketing knowledge to get hundreds of millions worldwide hooked (Brandt Reference Brandt2009). Smoking's decline among high-SES individuals occurred in the face of this, and only subsequently did this transform into various increasingly coercive measures to push lower-SES individuals to follow their lead. Lesser variations on this theme lurk behind other products connected to behaviors highlighted by P&N: opioids, fast food, soda, infant formula, machine gambling, usurious credit cards. Low-SES people in developed societies exist at a nexus of manipulation in which vast enterprises devise ever-more-inviting traps of immediate gratification, while academics and others devise interventions to discourage these same behaviors.
P&N's focus on risk and control leads them to overstate the individuality of decisions. Many behaviors noted by P&N are plainly subject to social influence, or even to collective decisions. As examples: Trajectories of smoking, alcohol, and drug use notoriously often involve groups of users; social transmission contributes to obesity; exercise experts regularly tout the adherence advantages of “working out with a buddy”; and parental investment regularly involves joint decision making by parents and a good deal of kibitzing and mimicking of others.
Indeed, one of the most consequential things about SES is how it connects individuals in social space, so that individual choices reflect and reverberate through networks of others with disproportionately similar statuses. Even today, a low-SES person who wants to quit smoking still likely has many more fellow smokers in his or her life than a higher-SES smoker who wants to quit. Behavioral tendencies may be pervasively amplified by the choices of others with similar tendencies. To this end, one might be skeptical of the prospects of a theory of SES differences in behaviors that focuses so much on individuals and so little on relationships and networks. These behaviors clearly have cultural and normative aspects: If you do not believe so about smoking, try lighting up in a faculty meeting and see what happens.
P&N's emphasis on risk and control may also lead them to sometimes present poor people as more powerless than they are, especially in ways in which their argument draws on evolutionary history. For instance, a key example in their argument involves the homicide risk facing youth in poor urban neighborhoods, where “your risk of being a victim of homicide is relatively high” (target article, sect. 2.3, para. 3). These youth do face a homicide risk many times higher than that of affluent kids from the suburbs, but it should also be recognized that the mortality risk to low-SES youth today is substantially lower than that of a woman dying in childbirth any time before the nineteenth century. Moreover, P&N characterize homicide for those stuck in poor neighborhoods as being a “risk beyond [their] control,” so much so that “there may seem little point in quitting smoking or eating healthy foods, because you may not live” (sect. 2.3, para. 3). In the United States, at least, homicide victimization in such neighborhoods is, in fact, highly disproportionately concentrated among youth with significant histories of criminal or gang activity (Papachristos et al. Reference Papachristos, Wildeman and Roberto2015). Low-SES youth certainly have much more control over avoiding death from homicide than women historically have had from avoiding death in childbirth. Poverty presents enormous challenges, but we should be wary of casting the lives of the poor as but a small step removed from Mad Max.