In Jamie Holmes informative essay "Why can't more people escape
poverty?" (2011) she implies that for the less fortunate, freedom is not really
free and their willpower is always being controlled by finances. Holmes
provides valuable explanations of why people stay in poverty by showing us
researched experiments from various studies of peoples' decision making. In
order to effectively conclude that one's willpower is not self-controlled,
Holmes compares poverty stricken life to wealthier people. Jamie Holmes intends
to draw in everyone who has ever experienced poverty.
This article was very interesting to me. I believe it to have some truth
value to it. If you take a wealthy person and relieve them of all their
property, financial resources, and income, and replace it with a lowly
sum-subsistence level, and set them loose on the city streets, their level of
stress and depression will tremendously rise. Their standards of self-control
will decrease.
“Willpower is defined by the article as
it was defined by the study: the capacity to make a long-term decision over a
short-term decision. To put it another way, can you continue at a difficult
task? The study showed that those who had resisted cookies did not keep on at a
tough task for as long as those who had "resisted" radishes. The more
we have to control the id, the harder it becomes. ”I am obviously not convinced
by the article. I don’t agree with their definition of will power. What does it
mean to make “a long term decision?” Does it mean making a decision and
sticking by it? If so there may be many reasons why a “long term decision
should not be implemented: conditions change and if you make a long term
decision and stick to it for its own sake over changing circumstances, then
that in itself could be a sign of irrationality. I also found the cookie/radishes
decision unreal. Will power is part of the will, a human faculty. It is not a
human organ or muscle. Will power is more like memory and imagination than it
is like seeing or speaking. The poor are poor because they have no power to
paraphrase Hemingway in a different context and not because of any lack of”
will-power. ”If you have ever met a variety of poor folk you would know what a
load of horse manure the argument is. Many poor people I know have a lot of
will power but they are still poor. I also know some rich people with very
little self-control.
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