Al
een paar jaar wordt er in ‘links-liberale’ en neoliberale kringen
gesuggereerd dat positief denken mensen uit de armoede kan
trekken…… Een ‘lekker gevoel gedachte’, waarmee men de smerige handen schoonwast en weer snel aan
de prosecco gaat, of de nog meer welgestelden onder hen aan de champagne gaan.

Uiteraard is dat positivisme gelul van een dronken aardbei, hetzelfde geldt voor het verhogen van
de tabaksprijs, waar men doodleuk beweert dat arme mensen zullen stoppen met roken en zo geld zullen besparen, iets dat uiteraard niet zal gebeuren. Om te kunnen stoppen met
roken moet je goed in je vel zitten en niet in diepe financiële ellende, dat smoort elke motivatie om te stoppen in de kiem…. 

Intussen is de tabaksprijs op een schunnig hoog niveau, waar de pleitbezorgers van prijsverhogingen worden gelogenstraft met het feit dat het aantal rokers al een paar jaar gelijk blijft en veel rokers onder de radar blijven, daar ze illegale (goedkope) sigaretten roken….. (bij elke prijsverhoging verdient de georganiseerde misdaad kapitalen extra aan sigarettensmokkel en het fabriceren van tabak buiten overheidstoezicht… Zo zijn er in Nederland al 2 illegale sigarettenfabrieken gesloten…)

Let wel: het gaat bij rokers om
een verslaving, door artsen en wetenschappers aangeduid als een ziekte…..  Deze chronisch zieken hebben vanwege de financiële problemen geen controle over hun leven, iets dat wordt versterkt door de volgende zaken: -werkloosheid (ook met een te hoge leeftijd, wat al begint na het 45ste levensjaar), –chronische ziekten, -invaliditeit of -een veel te laag pensioen, waardoor deze groepen bij god niet
weten hoe ze de volgende dag de touwtjes weer aan elkaar moeten zien te knopen……

Lees
het volgende artikel en laat je nooit weer wijsmaken dat je met
positiviteit de wereld kan veranderen, helaas een lullig sprookje en waar welgestelden denken deze onzin op te kunnen leggen aan degenen die aan de
grond zitten, zou je deze welgestelden moeten vervolgen voor oplichting en
haatzaaien (tegen die arme mensen…)….. Immers als je een dergelijk
idee oppert stel je meteen dat arme mensen zelf schuldig zijn aan hun
armoede en te bedonderd zijn om iets van hun leven te maken, terwijl
ze nu en later de middelen eenvoudig niet hebben om uit de stront te
komen!

Intussen
hoop ik dat dit soort welgestelde figuren en anderen die deze leugen verspreiden, zelf geheel aan de grond komen te
zitten (en er nooit weer uitkomen) en dan de rest van hun leven met dit soort ‘positieve’
kul worden bestookt…. Deze figuren vind je in het bedrijfsleven, de politiek >> veel VVD, CDA, D66, CU en SGP politici, voorts onder de ‘journalisten’ van regeringsgetrouwe reguliere media, die deze smerige leugens helpen verkondigen…….

Om terug te komen op het begin van dit bericht: de welgestelden hebben wel belang bij positief denken, daarmee kunnen ze hun schuldgevoel over de financiële ellende bij de grote onderlaag wegwerken en hun handen in onschuld wassen…….. Waar de welgestelden op jaarbasis nog steeds rond de 20 miljard euro aan belasting ontduiken, geld waarmee je het arme deel van de bevolking wel ‘positief’ kan beïnvloeden…… (het arme deel van de bevolking bestaat in Nederland uit zo’n 4 miljoen mensen die tegen, op, of onder de armoedegrens moeten leven……) 

Why
Positive Thinking Won’t Get You Out of Poverty

September
13, 2018 at 10:19 pm

Written
by Open
Democracy

To
say that poor people don’t have enough hope, tenacity and
aspiration is to deny their agency as well as the size of the
structural odds they face.

(OD Op-ed) — In
a recent article
in the New York Times,
the development economist Seema Jayachandran discusses three studies
that used Randomised Controlled Trials (or RCTs) to
understand the benefits of enhancing the self-worth of poor
people. Despite wide differences in context, all the cases explore
the viability of ‘modest interventions’ to ‘instill hope’ in
marginalised communities, concluding that ‘remarkable improvements’
in the quest for poverty reduction are possible.

One
of the studies from
Uganda, for example, argues that “a role model can have significant
effects on students’ educational attainment,” so the suggestion
for policy-makers might be “to place more emphasis on motivation
and inspiration through example.” Another case
study of sex workers in Kolkata Brothels argues
that “psychological barriers impede such disadvantaged groups from
breaking the vicious circle and achieving better outcomes in life,”
so small but effective changes that address these psychological
constraints can alleviate the effects of poverty and social
exclusion.

The
underlying theme of these studies is that individuals can surmount
the structural challenges of poverty through their own efforts using
tools like ‘effective role models,’ the generation of ‘more
hope,’ and the ‘improvement of their mental health.’ Positive
psychology of this kind and an emphasis on behavior change to meet
the goals of individuals have been around at least since the 1950s,
first in the popular literature of self-help books and now in
academia, where they form part of an increasingly fashionable trend
to ‘do poverty reduction differently.’

The
push for rebranding
refugees as ‘entrepreneurs’ follows
the same logic. In the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, the UN Refugee
Agency (UNHCR) and TEDx hosted an event to showcase the personal
narratives of refugees. The resulting talk was designed to highlight
the role of positive thinking in overcoming adversity, with the harsh
realities of being a refugee and resorting to extreme survival skills
portrayed through the lens of individual motivation. The implicit
assumption was that positive attitudes could determine better
opportunities in life.

This
trend relies on RCTs as the key methodological tool to prove its
case, a technique born out of an increasing focus in economics on the
behaviour of individuals and the use of computing power to process
enormous amounts of data in econometric analyses. RCTs are supposed
to provide “evidence-based”
answers that form a scientific basis for policy-making. In reality
however, they have some serious limitations.

An RCT
is an evaluation technique that draws from experimental design in
order to measure the impact of a development project. As the name
suggests, the process is based on a selection of a ‘random’ or
unspecified distribution of people or communities who are subjected
to a trial or an experiment. The proponents of this method suggest
that it is possible to measure the impact of an intervention and
attribute a causal relationship between the intervention and its
outcomes when compared to a ‘control group’ who are not
included—a worrying feature in and of itself because people in that
group may be denied the essentials of a decent life if they are only
provided to those who participate in the trials.

According
to Esther
Duflo,
the top five journals in economics published 21 articles on
development in 2000, none of which represented this methodology; by
2015 there were 32 such articles, of which 10 were
RCTs. Researchers Sophie
Webber and Carolyn Prouse go
so far as to say that RCTs have become the new ‘gold standard’
in  development economics, so it comes as no surprise that
poverty has started to be studied in the context of this
new framework.

Poverty
alleviation, however, is a hugely complex subject that touches on the
strengthening of institutions, the health of governance, the
structure and dynamics of markets, the workings of social classes,
macroeconomic policies, distribution, international integration and
many other issues, none of which can be replicated from one context
to another. That means that analyses of poverty have to be based on a
critical examination of processes and actors that cannot be
‘controlled’ against—thus violating the principle of RCTs.

Recent
developments in economics have failed to account for these
fundamental determinants of poverty. Instead, the success of
RCTs can be narrowed down to essentially statistical arguments
that seek to identify ‘what works’ and ‘which interventions’
should therefore be employed to improve the lives of the poor.
In such processes, the focus tends towards the individual or the
household and (initially at least) to the design of small changes
that are supposed to enable them to exit poverty, although eventually
the ‘scaling up’ of interventions might also occur. Akin to the
‘nudge’ approach that has been popularised by Cass
Sunstein and Richard Thaler,
the idea is that people’s choices can be shaped to allow them to
escape from poverty and dispossession.

As
a consequence, this approach individualises the ‘problem’
of poverty whilst failing to acknowledge, contextualize, highlight or
analyse the structures, institutions and actors that actually make
and keep some people poor. For example, the idea that role
models can be effective in changing people’s behaviour, emotions
and self-concepts isn’t new; what’s new is the belief that these
aspirations can lift people out of poverty without broader changes in
politics, social structures and institutions. Returning to the
brothels of Kolkata, advocating for the removal of psychological
barriers may not be effective if the working conditions of sex
workers and the structures on which their material deprivation stands
continue to go unchallenged.

To
be fair, The York Times piece introduces some important caveats to
such strategies:

“Hope
isn’t a cure-all and in none of these examples can we be certain
that it actually explains the gains in people’s income or
education…instilling hope without skills or financial resources is
unlikely to be enough to lift people out of poverty.”

Nevertheless,
if the caveats are so strong as to question the validity of the
experiments then they are not caveats at all, but fundamental inputs
on which any successful methodology must be based. Economics
distracts itself by reforming symptoms and ignoring the conditions
which cause the malaise in the first place. As the development
economist Sanjay
G. Reddy has
written:

“The
larger questions once asked within the discipline regarding the
effect of alternative economic institutions and policies (such as
those concerning property arrangements, trade, agricultural,
industrial and fiscal policy, and the role of social protection
mechanisms), for instance, and the impact of political dynamics and
processes of social change, have been pushed to the background in
favour of such questions as whether bed-nets dipped in insecticide
should be distributed free of charge or not, or whether two
schoolteachers in the classroom are much better than one.”

Hence,
in a recent
open letter
published in the Guardian, fifteen leading economists argued that
relying on RCTs to guide aid spending will lead to short-term,
superficial and misplaced policies. Asking relevant questions is the
first step towards understanding problems. And understanding why
widespread hunger and poverty persist in an era of unprecedented
opulence, rapid technological transformation and democratic
governance is the most important problem of the day. Inequality
is not born in a vacuum; it is a fundamental aspect of the
distribution of income and wealth. Unless we understand how extreme
wealth accumulation is connected to extreme inequality the question
of poverty will go unaddressed.

More
than 800
million people
live in extreme poverty today. To say that they do not have
sufficient hope, aspiration and tenacity to fight for their rights is
to deny their agency. The structural odds against them inhibit their
ability to leave the vicious cycles of poverty. Without additional
resources and much more concerted action on the underlying causes, no
amount of positive thinking will enable the great mass of individuals
to climb out of poverty. We cannot afford to rely on methods that
suggest that poor people are simply failing to make the ‘right
choices.’

This
doesn’t mean that we should disregard RCTs or any other ways of
empowering communities, but it does mean that we should build on an
understanding of poverty alleviation which is concerned with
attacking the malaise of unequal distribution as opposed to
remediating its symptoms. That means confronting structures and
actors that have not only failed to address poverty but may also have
reinforced the nature of uneven development across the globe.

By Farwa
Sial and Carolina Alves / Creative
Commons / Open
Democracy / Report
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