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  3. The rightwing commentator’s perspective on poverty is that it’s down to a failure of will: put your mind to it, harden your reso

The rightwing commentator’s perspective on poverty is that it’s down to a failure of will: put your mind to it, harden your reso

admin2013-08-22  33
问题     The rightwing commentator’s perspective on poverty is that it’s down to a failure of will: put your mind to it, harden your resolve and you’ll swiftly improve your luck. As a typical leftwing liberal. I think this view of poverty is nonsense. But recent research almost made me spill my breakfast over my sweater: willpower, it seems, is at the heart of the issue.
    Regular readers of this column will know the theory that willpower is an exhaustive resource: resisting temptation exerts a "psychic(精神)cost", temporarily reducing your reserves of self-discipline.Studies suggest the same goes for any kind of "trade-off(权衡)thinking", which leads to the striking hypothesis researchers have been testing: that being poor makes those psychic costs far more weighty. Poverty, as the analyst Jamie Holmes put it in the New Republic, means making more trade-offs and resisting more temptations — draining the very willpower people might have used to lift themselves out of it.
    Nobody except the most out-of-touch billionaire needs telling that having less money means making painful sacrifices. But combining this with the exhaustive willpower theory suggests a bitter twist: that making those sacrifices makes you less capable of doing the things. The Princeton economist Dean Spears had his researchers show up in Indian villages, offering a discount deal on soap, then administering tests of self-control. For the poorest people, just considering whether to take the soap deal proved a cognitive(认知的)burden. Poverty.it seems, is indeed bound up with willpower, and the leftwing temptation to see things only in terms of impersonal social forces is mistaken. But it’s not that failures of will cause poverty. It’s that poverty causes failures of will.
    Anti-poverty initiatives, Holmes argues, should focus far more on relieving these cognitive costs.On a personal level, meanwhile, the message of exhaustive willpower rings clear: next time you find yourself full of self-discipline, don’t spend it trying to behave virtuously; spend it, instead, altering your environment to reduce your future dependence on willpower. Where there’s a will, there’s a way to stop relying on will.
What is the finding of Dean Spears’ study in Indian villages?
选项 A、The poor have better self-control than the rich.
B、Being poor means resisting more temptations.
C、Willpower has nothing to do with poverty.
D、Being poor means making less sacrifice.
答案B
解析
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