戴按：
此文作者死死抱着「马克思主义」立场不放，批判罗尔斯，固不可取。但列举西方学者对罗尔斯的批判论点，值得参考。
作者﹕王今朝 龙斧
一、问题的提出
社会主义和谐社会以平等、公平和正义为必备内涵，其中又以平等，特别是经济平等为根本内涵。不同社会形态中，经济平等具有不同的内涵，其中，社会主义社会的经济平等必然是建立在公有制基础上，也就是说，社会中没有一个因为拥有生产资料私有而获得收入的剥削阶级。它不排除人们由于劳动能力、劳动时间不同而得到不同收入的可能性，它也不排除不同家庭因为家庭结构不同（成员多少、性别比例、年龄构成等）、家庭状况不同（如健康程度如何、处理家庭事务能力如何、预见性如何等）所产生的消费结构和总量的不同，它也不排除某些家庭因为拥有零星生产资料而得到一定额外收入的可能性。无疑，建立在社会主义公有制基础上的社会一定是和谐的。问题是，有没有其他和谐社会呢？
美国哈佛大学哲学教授罗尔斯，利用无知之幕的概念把卢梭等人的社会契约论翻新，提出了一种“正义”的社会模式，在西方据说具有压倒性的“学术影响”。中国一些人在对马克思主义知之不多，甚至知之甚少的情况下，就对马克思主义理论加以反对，或者置之不理，反而利用罗尔斯的理论探讨中国社会发展中一系列重要问题（分配正义、制度正义、公共政策程序正义、权利机会和资源分配正义等），贴上马克思主义中国化的标签，或者贴上现代社会科学的标签，搞乱了中国的宣传。鉴于这种现实，看一看西方著名学者对罗尔斯的理论的批判是有益的。
二、西方学者对罗尔斯理论的看法
中国人迷信权威。一见到压倒性影响，就以为必然是权威，并把权威当成真理。什么叫做压倒性影响？这是一种似是而非的说法。毛泽东思想在1945年到1976年的中国是否具有压倒性影响呢？如果是，那中国是否就“党外无党，党内无派”了呢？今天，毛泽东思想对中国社会的影响又怎样呢？由此观之，罗尔斯作为一个教授，而不是政治家、社会活动家，更不是革命家，他的影响，即使在学术界，也恐难称得上具有压倒性影响。有了这点作为准备，我们就可以预测，罗尔斯的理论在西方学术界恐怕也不乏反对者了。并且，这些反对者不是盲目的，不是别有用心的，而是基于罗尔斯的理论体系所存在的逻辑问题。这大致有以下几种分析角度。
1、由于罗尔斯的理论体系是运用假设-公理-命题的演绎方法推导而来，在哈佛大学获得哲学博士学位，曾在芝加哥大学、哥伦比亚大学、马萨诸萨Amherst大学任哲学教授的Wolff在1966年就对罗尔斯的理论提出质疑。他假定罗尔斯设想的无知之幕的环境合理（从方法论上看，罗尔斯既然试图用逻辑演绎的方法来推演他的正义论，就必须事先假设一套公理体系作为环境），质疑人们会真正做出罗尔斯所主张的那种选择。按照Wolff在1977年对罗尔斯的更系统的批评意见，市场和资本主义社会关系建立在剥削和非正义的基础上，而罗尔斯的理论对这一重大问题并没有涉及。在加州大学伯克利分校获得哲学博士、先后任教于纽约州立大学水牛城分校、罗切斯特大学、密西根大学和亚里桑那大学的著名哲学家J.L.Pollock在1971年把罗尔斯所设想的无知之幕环境归结为8个条件，并指出，一方面，没有这些条件，罗尔斯的理论就不成立，另一方面，这些条件并不构成正义问题产生的典型条件。结果罗尔斯的理论就陷入到两难之中——这些条件缺乏一个，罗尔斯的演绎推理就不能成立，而具备了这些条件，所产生的结果并不能保证就是正义。
2、罗尔斯的推理模式是对数学理论中屡见不鲜的公理化方法的僵化运用。在数学上，欧几里得几何、非欧几何、概率论都是成功运用公理化方法的典范。这种方法试图从几个假设作为公理推导出全部的理论体系。然而，任何一种理论使用这种方法只是以假设的成立为前提，并不需要关心假设的反命题。如果有甲乙两套假设体系，而其中甲中某个假设与乙中某个假设正好相反（如欧式几何和非欧几何只有一个假设不同，那就是两条平行线是否相交），那么，由此两套体系所得出的体系就可能都对，但适用于不同的情况。由此看来，罗尔斯从公理化方法得出的结果并不能保证它的唯一性。而且，由于这里是社会科学，唯一性不成立意味着如果由公理化演绎方法得出的结论与人类社会的实际情况不一致，那么，应该抛弃的是理论而不是实际的人类社会。有一位名不太见经传（网络）的D.L. Schaeffer在1974年指出，罗尔斯从初始状态得出正义原则的做法带有根本性的困难，这种困难在于他没有用实证主义的方式（而是用公理化演绎方法）来研究人类欲望和行为的性质，从而那种原初状态下的各方（Parties）与人的本性也就没有对应，因此这些各方也就不能被合理地看出代表了真正的个人的诉求。罗尔斯的契约修辞不过是掩盖他把自己的原则建立在未经检验的偏见之上，并不能对于政治哲学给予真正的指导。
3、罗尔斯试图用契约论反对功利主义，但1994年诺贝尔经济学奖得主J.C. Harsanyi在1975年指出，罗尔斯的这种企图并没有成功。原因是：（1）作为一种决策规则，最大化最小是作用于不确定性环境下的。而将最大化最小原则应用于一些重要的情况，它可能会建议实践上完全无法接受的答案。比如，一个纽约人接到两个工作机会，一个是在纽约，工作条件很差，一个是在芝加哥，工作条件很好，但可能因为去那里时飞机失事而死亡。按照最大化最小原则，这个人应该会接受纽约的工作。再如，两个人急需紧缺的抗生素治病否则会立即死亡，但其中一个人身患癌症，那么这一支抗生素该给谁用呢？是延长癌症患者几个月的生命还是挽救那个健康人的生命呢？又如，社会有一笔资源可以花费，既可以用于培养最优秀的人才，也可以用于痴呆患者的照顾，最大化最小应该怎么决策呢？
（2）罗尔斯认为，契约论原理的基本应用是优于效用论的，而Harsanyi根据上述普遍的反例认为，事实恰好相反。实际上，Harsanyi认为，最大化最小规则将使得人们无法生存，它使人们不能过街、不能做任何事，因为这都会涉及到最坏情况的发生。让一个社会根据契约论来判断那个纽约人应该在纽约工作，还是在芝加哥工作，那么，按照最大化最小原则，所有人都应该主张他在纽约工作，结果，纽约人就都不能走出纽约了。把同样道理运用于其他地方，芝加哥的人也不能走出芝加哥。实际上，任何一个地方出生的人都不能走出这个地方。结果，世界就没有交通运输业了。就抗生素的例子而言，所有的医疗服务都应该建立在甄别最恶劣的健康情况之上。而这种甄别都必须运用医疗手段，结果，为了实行最大化最小，就必须取消甄别，也就是必须取消所有医疗手段，那意味着人只要得病，就只能靠自己来治疗或等死了。这就真的让人类回到“原初状态”了。社会资源花费的例子举出后，我们就可以明白，诸如此类的例子太多了，举不胜举。不同例子意味着不同的“最小”，也就是说，如果不断变换“小”的标准，那么，最大化最小就无法作出决策了。
（3）在大多数实践领域中，应用罗尔斯理论所得出的结论与效用主义者的理论没有大的差别。上面Harsanyi所举出的反例有点儿胡搅蛮缠的意思，一般来说，社会不会就上述问题进行选择。比如，社会在将一定比例的资源用于照顾痴呆患者之后，就无需考虑其他资源的继续投入了。社会上也不会有人主张把无限的资源用于照顾痴呆患者身上。从这个意义上看，契约论和效用论的区别是人为制造的。既然按照契约论，社会会选择把大量的资源用于培养优秀的人才而不是照顾痴呆患者，而功利主义显然更是会赞成这个观点，那么二者在结论上并没有大的差别就是显然的了。这样来看，用契约论来代替功利主义岂不是多此一举、并无新意吗？
4、从对概念的具体运用看，罗尔斯的正义论围绕正义与善的概念的区分和优先性大泼笔墨，他认为，正义优先于善，试图在两个无法区分的概念中分出个先后和上下。美国著名政治哲学家、哈佛大学教授M.J. Sandel（1998）对其这种区分猛烈抨击，认为正义是内在于善的。在我们看来，正义和善都是抽象的属于上层建筑的东西，它们本身固然可以相互区别，但如果它们的定义不是建立在经济基础之上，即如果不与所有制相联系，那么它们的含义是不清楚的。如果它们的定义是建立在私有制基础之上，比如，凡是维护私有制的社会选择就是善的，或者就是正义的，那么，社会主义无法与这种善或者正义相容，而善与正义的区分与中国也就没有什么相关性了。
5、罗尔斯的理论一方面想要回答社会发展的方向、性质问题，另一方面又回避所有制这个决定社会发展方向、性质的最基本问题，它就陷入各种矛盾之中。C.R. Goodrum（1977）指出，罗尔斯理论作为政治自由主义（Political Liberalism），实际上是在个人自由、社会福利和人人平等这三元价值观之间寻找平衡，因为其中任何一个价值观的主张都可能会对其他价值观产生损害。
（1）私有制下，个人自由与社会福利和人人平等产生矛盾。比如，5%的人非常有钱，占据了社会财富的20%甚至更高。而1%的人可能占据了社会财富的10%。那么，有钱人的自由与社会福利最大相容吗？社会福利是否非要建立在一部分人非常有钱的基础上呢？显然不是的。有钱人的自由也与人人平等不相容，因为钱的多少本身就是一种自由程度的衡量。
（2）社会福利最大化要求限制个人自由，也要求把人人平等控制在一定范围之内（不能绝对的平等，也不能过分的不平等，比如中国社会主义建设时期一些企业建了较多的宿舍，其他企业就有意见，这就有追求绝对平等的倾向了）。
（3）任何社会无论如何都无法实现绝对的人人平等，但又不能不防止明显的不平等。绝对的人人平等与绝大多数人的个人自由是相矛盾的，也与社会福利的提高相矛盾。由于以上三个原因，Goodrum指出，面对功利主义的福利最大化，罗尔斯保卫自由的优先性；面对无约束的市场，他主张起码的平等；面对绝对的平等，他举起了福利的大旗。这种面对现实矛盾与冲突的折衷主义必然在理论建设上产生冲突。折衷主义是西方社会科学的一个普遍特征。它是既对社会的不平等不满，又对少数人（即资产阶级）的自由（那些处于社会最弱地位的人有什么自由）迁就、捍卫，由于无法看到不废除少数人（即特权阶层）的自由就没有那些最弱群体（社会最广大人群）的自由所产生的怪物。所以，正如康奈尔大学哲学教授Miller在1974年所指出的，罗尔斯的理论低估了社会冲突的程度和后果。由于这种低估，1986年诺贝尔经济学奖得主Buchanan（1972）不赞同罗尔斯的契约思想，许多人认为它很难付诸实施（Bentley，1973）。这样，对于罗尔斯的后期的一系列修正工作对于政治哲学的意义，也有不同少人明确地加以质疑（P. Neal, 1994），也就不难理解了。
三、中国学界可以从以上分析得到的教益
改革开放后，在社会发展理论方面，不少学者靠翻译兜售西方政治社会理论起家，实际上对这些理论并不明白。20世纪70年代后，西方罗尔斯研究已经沉寂，它对于社会实践的影响也较为有限（与马克思理论的历史影响相比远远有限）。然而，国内学界似乎把《正义论》中文版的翻译出版发行作为一件大事。而自此之后，国内对他的理论似乎情有独钟，有的认为他的正义论对中国和谐社会有极大借鉴意义，有的继续探讨他的理论体系，特别是不少人利用他或者与他类似的框架来探讨中国构建和谐社会中的分配正义、制度正义、公共政策程序正义。这些现象反映出，国内人对于西方学者的批判性分析一无所知，对于罗尔斯理论的本质更没有抓住。这种本质就是唯物主义和唯心主义的分野。恩格斯关于这是哲学最基本问题的观点在今天的中国是没有多少人真正理解的。
改革开放后，中国不少知识分子受光环效应影响，言必称哈佛、耶鲁，实际上也就是知道一个哈佛、耶鲁的名字而已，以为世界一流大学必然产生科学的真理，殊不知，真理不仅与权力不能划等号，与被认为视为真理发源地的大学也不能划等号，就如当年真理不能与教会划等号一样。历史大量实证数据表明，被称为知识分子的人往往是阻碍历史进步的人。比如，僧侣在中世纪就是被认为知识分子阶级，并且垄断了社会知识。但它正是中世纪黑暗之源。再比如，清政府末年，难道清政府的腐朽没落统治不是依靠一些所谓的知识分子吗？又如，难道当年马克思、恩格斯、列宁、斯大林和毛泽东等人所反对的观点都是来自文盲吗？不是的。马克思恩格斯所反对的都是当时在世界上赫赫有名的知识分子。如德国大学教授杜林、“神圣家族”成员等。由此观之，存在对历史发展起阻碍和反动作用的知识分子。只有他们的反面，才是与真理是由关系的。比如，文艺复兴的知识分子和孙中山同盟会的知识分子则代表了科学和真理（相对意义上的）。由此看来，必须对知识分子之间进行区分。并不是只要获得学位的知识分子就是真理的化身，真理的载体。真理必须经受逻辑，特别是辩证唯物主义逻辑和历史唯物主义逻辑的检验。一个知识分子所提主张只要违背辩证唯物主义逻辑和历史唯物主义逻辑，就不可能是真正的引领社会潮流的知识分子。今天，中国即使是最著名几所大学的不少学者表面上反对权威，实际上迷信权威，反对这个权威，迷信那个权威。结果陷入到他们所反对的东西之中，自己反对自己而不自知。
上述西方学者对罗尔斯的理论的分析就表明了这一点。作为一个世界一流大学（哈佛）的一流学者，学术的严谨性和推论的逻辑性也应该是一流的。然而，在经历多年的思考、遭受多方的诘难之后，其理论的基本内容没有变化，只能说明其学术严谨性上的不足是内在的，这种内在不足乃是由于他在这个重大哲学、政治经济学、社会学问题上本质上是唯心主义的——把至关重要的所有制问题忽略掉，关心一些鸡毛蒜皮的问题，同时又试图以精神领袖、天下救星自居，这是典型的唯心主义。在唯心主义框架下，无论体系怎样发展、修正（无疑花费巨大精力、资源），修正一个错误就会导致另一个错误产生。这样来看，上述那些学术严谨性上的分析（包括两位诺贝尔奖得主所作）就成为本来可以避免的学术上的走弯路。
唯心主义是科学发展、社会发展的大敌。一方面，不同学科间具有相通性，就如蘑菇经常长在一块一样，一个学科的唯心主义特征往往与其它学科的唯心主义特征并行。另一方面哲学与政治具有相通性，社会契约不过是政治社会经济制度的哲学说法，哲学上的唯心主义一定会导致政治上的蒙昧主义、犬儒主义。那种对唯心主义和唯物主义之间的斗争漠不关心的人不过说明他们缺乏理论的素养，那种把对唯心主义进行批判看成是“斗争扩大化”不过是思想上自欺欺人（根本违背理论与实践的辩证关系、违背意识反作用于物质的原理）的一厢情愿和政治上的愚昧无知。
当前，经济发展给中国社会带来巨大挑战。然而，很多学者丧失了马克思主义信仰，丧失了应该持有的马克思主义的学术态度，不是用心研究马克思主义，而是对一些西方理论情有独钟，大量引进唯心主义的著作，似乎它们才是中国社会主义社会如何发展的答案，根本不知道如何运用马克思主义对错误的观点进行分析。比如，亨特（2007）以为马克思的立场和罗尔斯的立场可以调和。在我们看来，其实并非如此，除非将罗尔斯的理论进行“改造”或者用马克思主义的方法加以理解（但这不是调和）。阿瑟·奥肯认为，社会主义相对于资本主义，允诺了更大的平等。在我们看来，社会主义不仅是允诺了更大的平等，而且确实可以实现更大的平等，只要是真正的社会主义和马克思主义（关于什么是真正的社会主义和真正的马克思主义，参见龙斧，王今朝（2010）各篇文章）。假设我们同意阿兰·桑德洛（2009）关于马克思所主张的正义只能由阶级斗争来实现的观点，就不难看出罗尔斯的理论的本质。这种本质就是它反映社会主义和资本主义的斗争，它是资本主义在与社会主义斗争中自感危机而寻求改良的一种努力。对于把罗尔斯的理论用于中国将会产生什么结果，我们不难同意杨国荣的观点，即“以权利为关注的中心，使正义很难超越形式意义上的平等和程序层面的公正，从而也无法使人的存在的意义得到充分的实现，必将随着社会的演进而被超越”。
四、结论
如何对待唯心主义理论，必然影响如何对待马克思主义理论，因而在一定程度上就是如何对待马克思主义的问题。与马克思主义不同，罗尔斯把正义赋予了最重要的地位，把正义与平等、公平等同从而混淆了起来（所谓“作为公平的正义”、正义的原则又是用平等来定义），但对于平等的定义又抛开了生产资料所有制，把它与其它次要变量联系起来，从而实际上因限制了社会正义的定义而把社会正义看成是一种抽象的原则。
今天，如果中国社会的主要矛盾是生产关系相对于生产力的落后（参见龙斧，王今朝（2010）《用基本矛盾对立统一规律看待中国构建和谐社会》一文），如果这种主要矛盾表现在少数人暴富、官商勾结、贪污腐败、“国退民进”、分配极度分化，那么罗尔斯的正义理论根本无法用来指导中国社会构建和谐的实践。毕竟，中国构建和谐社会是在政治、经济利益关系的对抗、矛盾过程中寻求一种符合中国社会主义价值观的社会制度，它不是一个契约论的问题。契约论的框架根本不适合解决这一问题——让资本家投票决定中国社会制度，必然是建立一个保护他们既得利益的制度，而且资本家会操纵大众的选票，使得大众选票无法反映大众的利益。这种分析将表明，不能盲目地引进西方政治民主理论，否则，社会科学学术的发展本来应该服务于社会实践，却可能反过来是社会实践服务于学术发展。这种本末倒置所产生的代价是中国支付不起的。
*作者:武汉大学战略决策研究中心。以上仅代表作者个人观点，不代表《求是》及本网立场和观点。
（轉自愛思想網站，原文於2011-6-21更新）
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Monday, June 6, 2011
穷人为何贫穷的新原因
Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty?
A radical new explanation from psychologists.
Jamie Holmes
The New republic June 6, 2011
Flannery O’Connor once described the contradictory desires that afflict all of us with characteristic simplicity. “Free will does not mean one will,” she wrote, “but many wills conflicting in one man.” The existence of appealing alternatives, after all, is what makes free will free: What would choice be without inner debate? We’re torn between staying faithful and that alluring man or woman across the room. We can’t resist the red velvet cake despite having sworn to keep our calories down. We buy a leather jacket on impulse, even though we know we’ll need the money for other things. Everyone is aware of such inner conflicts. But how, exactly, do we choose among them? As it turns out, science has recently shed light on the way our minds reconcile these conflicts, and the result has surprising implications for the way we think about one of society’s most intractable problems: poverty.
In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”
Over the intervening 13 years, these results have been corroborated in more than 100 experiments. Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.”
In addition, researchers have expanded the theory to cover tradeoff decisions, not just self-control decisions. That is, any decision that requires tradeoffs seems to deplete our ability to muster willpower for future decisions. Tradeoff decisions, like choosing between more money and more leisure time, require the same conflict resolution as self-control decisions (although our impulses appear to play a smaller role). In both cases, willpower can be understood as the capacity to resolve conflicts among choices as rationally as possible, and to make the best decision in light of one’s personal goals. And, in both cases, willpower seems to be a depletable resource.
This theory of depletable willpower has its detractors, and, as in most academic topics studied across disciplinary fields, one finds plenty of disputes over the details. But this model of self-control is now one of the most prominent theories of willpower in social psychology, at the core of what E. Tory Higgins of Columbia University described in 2009 as “an explosion of scientific interest” in the topic over the last decade. Some skeptics correctly emphasize the vital role of motivation, and some emphasize instead that “attention” is limited. But the core of the breakthrough is that resolving conflicts among choices is expensive at a cognitive level and can be unpleasant. It causes mental fatigue.
Nowhere is this revelation more important than in our efforts to understand poverty. Taking this model of willpower into the real world, psychologists and economists have been exploring one particular source of stress on the mind: finances. The level at which the poor have to exert financial self-control, they have suggested, is far lower than the level at which the well-off have to do so. Purchasing decisions that the wealthy can base entirely on preference, like buying dinner, require rigorous tradeoff calculations for the poor. As Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, “almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It’s distracting, it’s depleting … and it leads to error.” The poor have to make financial tradeoff decisions, as Shafir put it, “on anything above a muffin.”
Last December, Princeton economist Dean Spears published a series of experiments that each revealed how “poverty appears to have made economic decision-making more consuming of cognitive control for poorer people than for richer people.” In one experiment, poor participants in India performed far less well on a self-control task after simply having to first decide whether to purchase body soap. As Spears found, “Choosing first was depleting only for the poorer participants.” Again, if you have enough money, deciding whether to buy the soap only requires considering whether you want it, not what you might have to give up to get it. Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost.
In a paper in April 2010, Harvard behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan (for whom, full disclosure, I once worked) and MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee applied this same notion to decisions requiring self-control. If a doughnut costs twenty-five cents, they wrote, then that “$0.25 will be far more costly to someone living on $2 a day than to someone living on $30 a day. In other words, the same self-control problem is more consequential for the poor.” And so, in addition to all the structural barriers that prevent even determined poor people from escaping poverty, there may be another, deeper, and considerably more disturbing barrier: Poverty may reduce free will, making it even harder for the poor to escape their circumstances.
All of this suggests that we need to rethink our approaches to poverty reduction. Many of our current anti-poverty efforts focus on access to health, educational, agricultural, and financial services. Now, it seems, we need to start treating willpower as a scarce and important resource as well.
Some promising approaches have already been tried. Starting in 2002, economists Nava Ashraf, Dean Karlan, and Wesley Yin created and analyzed a unique type of savings account at a small rural bank on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. The Green Bank of Caraga’s SEED accounts (Save, Earn, Enjoy Deposits) let clients place restrictions on when they could access their money. SEED clients could set either a date before which or a minimum savings amount below which they couldn’t access their own funds. Twenty-eight percent of existing bank clients who were offered the accounts enrolled in them, and, after one year, the economists found, customers saved over 300 percent more with SEED accounts than they would have without them. The accounts offered an opportunity to circumvent self-control failure, in the same way Ulysses bound himself to the mast to resist the Sirens’ call.
The developed world offers numerous such “commitment products”: certificates of deposit, pension plans, government savings bonds, and education savings accounts, to name a few. But, in the developing world, institutional supports for flagging willpower are far fewer. To make use of these new discoveries, similar products that explicitly attempt to reduce willpower costs could be developed in numerous fields, from health to education to agriculture to financial management.
This brings up a second, similar point: Comfort goods like washing machines and dishwashers free up valuable time and attention. Think of all the things the wealthy do to spend more time focusing on what’s important. They can pay bills automatically, they can hire babysitters and have food delivered, they can have their homes and clothes cleaned for them. But, in the developing world, cost-effective time savers have come much more slowly to those who most need them. Five-dollar, energy-efficient stoves can cut firewood usage, improving children’s health and halving the amount of time it takes to gather enough firewood to cook. Small solar panels systems, too, as The New York Times recently reported, can play “an epic, transformative role” in homes off the electrical grid, saving families time and money on kerosene. Broadly distributed, such simple innovations would allow the poor to avoid difficult tradeoff decisions about how they spend their time or even their money.
Third, money itself can go a long way toward altering the dynamic that leads to willpower depletion among the poor. Government transfers of money have proven successful in Mexico and Brazil, for instance. In particular, attaching conditions to these transfers—such as requiring school attendance, regular clinic visits, and savings behavior—may allow for an end-run around the kind of willpower-based poverty traps that too frequently seem to end with the poor making unwise decisions.
Finally, what about the possibility of strengthening the willpower “muscle”? Here, the research is complicated. While one line of research has found reason to think that drained willpower can be restored in the short term—by taking a walk in nature or watching a humorous video, for instance—studies on how to strengthen the willpower muscle in the long term are far less conclusive. This second line of research seems to be more promising in children than in adults. As Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota, who has done extensive research on willpower, put it, “There might be something of a developmental sweet spot.” In twelve U.S. states, a program called Tools of the Mind is explicitly aimed at improving willpower functions in prekindergarten and kindergarten children. While some of the strategies would be quite difficult in much of the developing world, many are not, or could be adapted.
Of course, to argue that stressful decisions can exhaust precious mental resources is not to suggest that the decisions of the poor can’t be attributed to human agency. Still, while free will is real, it is also subject to complications. The economist Amartya Sen, in his well-known volume Development as Freedom, notes how an individual’s “freedom of agency” is “constrained by the social, political and economic opportunities” available to them. He’s right: Fewer options do reduce freedom. But now, we may need to grapple with a new possibility: that poverty doesn’t simply reduce freedom by constraining an individual’s choices, but that it may actually alter the nature of freedom by reducing an individual’s willpower.
Jamie Holmes is a policy analyst at the New America Foundation.
A radical new explanation from psychologists.
Jamie Holmes
The New republic June 6, 2011
Flannery O’Connor once described the contradictory desires that afflict all of us with characteristic simplicity. “Free will does not mean one will,” she wrote, “but many wills conflicting in one man.” The existence of appealing alternatives, after all, is what makes free will free: What would choice be without inner debate? We’re torn between staying faithful and that alluring man or woman across the room. We can’t resist the red velvet cake despite having sworn to keep our calories down. We buy a leather jacket on impulse, even though we know we’ll need the money for other things. Everyone is aware of such inner conflicts. But how, exactly, do we choose among them? As it turns out, science has recently shed light on the way our minds reconcile these conflicts, and the result has surprising implications for the way we think about one of society’s most intractable problems: poverty.
In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”
Over the intervening 13 years, these results have been corroborated in more than 100 experiments. Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.”
In addition, researchers have expanded the theory to cover tradeoff decisions, not just self-control decisions. That is, any decision that requires tradeoffs seems to deplete our ability to muster willpower for future decisions. Tradeoff decisions, like choosing between more money and more leisure time, require the same conflict resolution as self-control decisions (although our impulses appear to play a smaller role). In both cases, willpower can be understood as the capacity to resolve conflicts among choices as rationally as possible, and to make the best decision in light of one’s personal goals. And, in both cases, willpower seems to be a depletable resource.
This theory of depletable willpower has its detractors, and, as in most academic topics studied across disciplinary fields, one finds plenty of disputes over the details. But this model of self-control is now one of the most prominent theories of willpower in social psychology, at the core of what E. Tory Higgins of Columbia University described in 2009 as “an explosion of scientific interest” in the topic over the last decade. Some skeptics correctly emphasize the vital role of motivation, and some emphasize instead that “attention” is limited. But the core of the breakthrough is that resolving conflicts among choices is expensive at a cognitive level and can be unpleasant. It causes mental fatigue.
Nowhere is this revelation more important than in our efforts to understand poverty. Taking this model of willpower into the real world, psychologists and economists have been exploring one particular source of stress on the mind: finances. The level at which the poor have to exert financial self-control, they have suggested, is far lower than the level at which the well-off have to do so. Purchasing decisions that the wealthy can base entirely on preference, like buying dinner, require rigorous tradeoff calculations for the poor. As Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, “almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It’s distracting, it’s depleting … and it leads to error.” The poor have to make financial tradeoff decisions, as Shafir put it, “on anything above a muffin.”
Last December, Princeton economist Dean Spears published a series of experiments that each revealed how “poverty appears to have made economic decision-making more consuming of cognitive control for poorer people than for richer people.” In one experiment, poor participants in India performed far less well on a self-control task after simply having to first decide whether to purchase body soap. As Spears found, “Choosing first was depleting only for the poorer participants.” Again, if you have enough money, deciding whether to buy the soap only requires considering whether you want it, not what you might have to give up to get it. Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost.
In a paper in April 2010, Harvard behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan (for whom, full disclosure, I once worked) and MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee applied this same notion to decisions requiring self-control. If a doughnut costs twenty-five cents, they wrote, then that “$0.25 will be far more costly to someone living on $2 a day than to someone living on $30 a day. In other words, the same self-control problem is more consequential for the poor.” And so, in addition to all the structural barriers that prevent even determined poor people from escaping poverty, there may be another, deeper, and considerably more disturbing barrier: Poverty may reduce free will, making it even harder for the poor to escape their circumstances.
All of this suggests that we need to rethink our approaches to poverty reduction. Many of our current anti-poverty efforts focus on access to health, educational, agricultural, and financial services. Now, it seems, we need to start treating willpower as a scarce and important resource as well.
Some promising approaches have already been tried. Starting in 2002, economists Nava Ashraf, Dean Karlan, and Wesley Yin created and analyzed a unique type of savings account at a small rural bank on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. The Green Bank of Caraga’s SEED accounts (Save, Earn, Enjoy Deposits) let clients place restrictions on when they could access their money. SEED clients could set either a date before which or a minimum savings amount below which they couldn’t access their own funds. Twenty-eight percent of existing bank clients who were offered the accounts enrolled in them, and, after one year, the economists found, customers saved over 300 percent more with SEED accounts than they would have without them. The accounts offered an opportunity to circumvent self-control failure, in the same way Ulysses bound himself to the mast to resist the Sirens’ call.
The developed world offers numerous such “commitment products”: certificates of deposit, pension plans, government savings bonds, and education savings accounts, to name a few. But, in the developing world, institutional supports for flagging willpower are far fewer. To make use of these new discoveries, similar products that explicitly attempt to reduce willpower costs could be developed in numerous fields, from health to education to agriculture to financial management.
This brings up a second, similar point: Comfort goods like washing machines and dishwashers free up valuable time and attention. Think of all the things the wealthy do to spend more time focusing on what’s important. They can pay bills automatically, they can hire babysitters and have food delivered, they can have their homes and clothes cleaned for them. But, in the developing world, cost-effective time savers have come much more slowly to those who most need them. Five-dollar, energy-efficient stoves can cut firewood usage, improving children’s health and halving the amount of time it takes to gather enough firewood to cook. Small solar panels systems, too, as The New York Times recently reported, can play “an epic, transformative role” in homes off the electrical grid, saving families time and money on kerosene. Broadly distributed, such simple innovations would allow the poor to avoid difficult tradeoff decisions about how they spend their time or even their money.
Third, money itself can go a long way toward altering the dynamic that leads to willpower depletion among the poor. Government transfers of money have proven successful in Mexico and Brazil, for instance. In particular, attaching conditions to these transfers—such as requiring school attendance, regular clinic visits, and savings behavior—may allow for an end-run around the kind of willpower-based poverty traps that too frequently seem to end with the poor making unwise decisions.
Finally, what about the possibility of strengthening the willpower “muscle”? Here, the research is complicated. While one line of research has found reason to think that drained willpower can be restored in the short term—by taking a walk in nature or watching a humorous video, for instance—studies on how to strengthen the willpower muscle in the long term are far less conclusive. This second line of research seems to be more promising in children than in adults. As Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota, who has done extensive research on willpower, put it, “There might be something of a developmental sweet spot.” In twelve U.S. states, a program called Tools of the Mind is explicitly aimed at improving willpower functions in prekindergarten and kindergarten children. While some of the strategies would be quite difficult in much of the developing world, many are not, or could be adapted.
Of course, to argue that stressful decisions can exhaust precious mental resources is not to suggest that the decisions of the poor can’t be attributed to human agency. Still, while free will is real, it is also subject to complications. The economist Amartya Sen, in his well-known volume Development as Freedom, notes how an individual’s “freedom of agency” is “constrained by the social, political and economic opportunities” available to them. He’s right: Fewer options do reduce freedom. But now, we may need to grapple with a new possibility: that poverty doesn’t simply reduce freedom by constraining an individual’s choices, but that it may actually alter the nature of freedom by reducing an individual’s willpower.
Jamie Holmes is a policy analyst at the New America Foundation.
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