Trapped in the Present: Poverty and the Undermining of Prospective Agency

I. Trapped in the Present

People in poverty repeatedly describe being thwarted from projecting themselves into the future by the necessity of having to focus on the present. This sense of being ‘trapped in the present’ is echoed in descriptions of poverty by people in low-income and high-income countries, the working poor, and those dependent on the safety net.

In the 1990s, the World Bank commissioned an in-depth study of poverty—The Voices of the Poor—in which impoverished people across the globe described their experiences. Many people living in poverty are employed, but work is not enough to propel them out of poverty. This is not just because their work doesn’t pay enough, though in many cases that is undoubtedly a factor, but the conditions under which people work are themselves a source of instability and insecurity. A participant in Kalofer, Bulgaria, describes it this way: “There’s great insecurity now. You can’t make any plans. For all I know, tomorrow I might be told that we’ll be laid off for a couple of months or that the factory is to shut down. We work three days a week even now, and you’re in for a surprise every day.”⁵

Katharina Hecht and Kate Summers compare the experiences of time between people in poverty and those with higher incomes in the UK. They argue that “living on a low income and the concomitant absence of wealth does not allow for much attention to be given beyond an insecure present.”⁶ The descriptions of life offered by the low-income participants point to the excruciating attention and focus they must pay to the present. Going to the grocery store, while a relatively unremarkable event for the well-to-do, can be a taxing exercise in careful, deliberate, efficient decision-making for those trying to stretch a few bills to cover their needs. Pemberton and collaborators also find a similar experience among their poor interviewees; one describes her life as “existing, rather than living.”⁷

The working poor in the United States describe similar experiences of precarity and insecurity.⁸ This feature of working life for those in poverty has been further exacerbated by technology that allows employers to minimize labor costs ever more efficiently and pass on the cost of inefficiencies to employees.⁹ For example, if tomorrow’s sudden rainstorm will depress the number of customers visiting a coffee shop, the algorithm will recommend staffing fewer workers for that day. A worker might get little advance notice that her hours have been cut or her shift canceled. The rise of such technology has led to an increasing number of workers who face irregular schedules, fewer opportunities for full-time work, and less ‘downtime’ at work.¹⁰ These working conditions disrupt workers’ lives, making it difficult to plan childcare, attend college, or count on benefits.¹¹ Because this technology has deeply penetrated many industries, particularly low-wage work, employees know that changing jobs is unlikely to result in better working conditions.

In many wealthier countries, those who cannot work or make ends meet despite working turn to various programs that form the welfare ‘safety net.’ These programs vary from country to country, state to state, and even city or town. For example, those who qualify for such provisions must navigate a dizzyingly complex set of overlapping bureaucratic systems in the United States.¹² One of the most heart-breaking descriptions of how the byzantine ‘safety net’ traps families in poverty can be found in Andrea Elliot’s book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City. Elliot describes how the resources the city offers the unhoused do not free families from the mind-consuming task of survival but impose a different version of it mediated by forms, bureaucrats, and punishing rules.¹³ Elliot describes the family she shadows as being “consumed by the project of survival.”¹⁴

These cases show us the many faces of poverty—some the result of material deprivation, but others generated by working conditions, housing laws, or even the very system of welfare meant to address poverty. People in these various contexts appear to share an experience of being trapped in the present, hindered from planning for the future.

I do not wish to deny that there are significant differences. A family in a homeless shelter and someone working at an Amazon warehouse in the United States are not in the same situation as those on the verge of starvation in less wealthy nations. However, one common feature that recurs across these different material manifestations of poverty is having one’s prospective agency undermined by the demands of one’s context.

Behavioral economists have suggested that being thwarted from future-directed decision-making might not just reflect the experience of poverty but also play a role in exacerbating poverty traps. People in poverty are more likely to play the lottery, take out high-interest loans, and avail themselves of check-cashing services.¹⁵ Anuj Shah, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir’s research suggests that this is because resource scarcity leads those in poverty to hyper-focus on the present at the expense of the future.¹⁶ In the scenarios in which they tested this theory, they noted that “the more focused the [resource] poor were on the current round, the more they neglected (and borrowed away from) future rounds.”¹⁷ If they are correct, understanding the thwarting of prospective agency of those in poverty is essential, not just because it illuminates a common aspect of the experience of poverty but because this phenomenon might play a role in entrenching poverty.

II. Why Prospective Agency Matters

We are creatures who project ourselves into the future—our agency is temporally extended. We have the capacity not only to respond to our current desires but also to give our lives a structure over time that reflects our engagement with the world. This critical agential capacity underpins much of our engagement with our values, relationships, and life projects. We not only respond to our immediate needs but care about the wellbeing of those we love, embark on projects with others, and strive over time to live up to values that are important to us.¹⁸ All of these dimensions of human agency require that we project ourselves into the future and respond to the reasons those ends give us, even when they might conflict with more immediate ends.

Prospective agency is more prevalent than we might initially think. It isn’t limited to the kind of planning view of agency that philosophers like Michael Bratman have singled out, though that is an important version of it.¹⁹ Many different types of ends require deliberation and action that extend into the future. Some of the ends in question might be ongoing, such as caring for a child or parent. Some might take the form of principles or values—honesty or compassion.²⁰ Others might be the sort of projects that might never come to fruition—fighting for racial justice or safeguarding the welfare of our community in the face of climate change. What matters is that, to engage with these ends fully, we must be able to prioritize them over other, more immediate ends.

We should not understand the above to mean that long-term ends are fixed or that their achievement is the only mark of successful agency. Sometimes, the best manifestation of our prospective agency involves responding to deviations from our plans, reconsidering the ends we were after, and adopting new ends.²¹ What is critical is that our future-directed agential orientation underlies many ends that are important to us.

Consider, for example, Samuel Scheffler’s discussion of the temporal dimension of our engagement with those we love and that which we value. When we invest in what we love and value, we project our agency forward and ground it in the past. He writes, “to lead one’s life is to exercise one’s agential powers to direct or shape one’s future in ways that reflect one’s aims, values, and desires.”²² For example, being a parent is an end that exhibits this structure. It often requires that we engage in immediate actions like cleaning crumbs from the car and feeding a screaming child, but it also structures how we act and think over time in a way that demands that we consider our child’s future welfare. During the pandemic lockdown, I worried about letting my preschooler watch hours of television, even though doing so would have made our lives easier in the short term. In effect, I prioritized her long-term welfare over the immediate satisfaction of both of our desires. Of course, even good parents sometimes let their children watch too much television, but when we do so, we recognize that we are coming up short.

Beyond our individual projects and relationships, prospective agency is critical to assumptions of agency that underlie views of opportunity and responsibility in the political sphere. For example, the principle of equal opportunity, understood as a fair competition for scarce goods, such as interesting, well-paid work, often assumes that citizens will develop the talents, skills, and knowledge required to enter that competition.²³ However, this requires a fair degree of future-oriented thinking from parents and young adults. The young person competing for a medical school spot must have done significant future-directed planning to be eligible for that position.

The same is true for many, though not all, cases of holding each other responsible in the political sphere.²⁴ We hold citizens accountable for paying their taxes, purchasing automobile insurance, and enrolling in a healthcare plan. The state also makes available opportunities to safeguard our future welfare that depend on planning ahead, such as saving in tax-deferred retirement accounts and healthcare savings accounts. In expecting us to live up to such duties and take advantage of such opportunities, the state assumes a robust capacity for future-directed agency.²⁵

Of course, some people might choose not to engage in this kind of prospective agency. Why should it matter to them to be in a context in which such agency is possible? Three reasons can be offered. The first is that for various contingent reasons, we live in a social world in which that kind of agential architecture is closely tied to other goods that matter.²⁶ Having the choice to access those goods is important even if one decides not to pursue them. A second reason is that even those who choose not to engage in future-directed agency live in a society with many others who care about the goods that require prospective agency. And if we care about others being able to pursue flourishing lives, then we should care about supporting a context in which people can engage in prospective agency. The final reason is that if we live in a context that is inimical to prospective agency, our rejection of ends that require future-oriented planning might result from adaptive preferences.²⁷ Being in a context in which one can pursue such ends helps mitigate this possibility, even if one chooses not to do so.

My argument is not that we must project ourselves into the future or that such a capacity is essential to our agency or leading meaningful lives. The Buddhist monk who strives for mindfulness or the middle-aged philosopher who takes pleasure in atelic activities are not counterexamples to the much more modest point I seek to make here.²⁸ What I aim to show in this section is that the capacity to project ourselves into the future and to prioritize it over our immediate needs is related to many things that human beings do, in fact, value, to how we organize our social and institutional life, and to the shape that many of our relationships and life projects take. Being in a context that thwarts that capacity is a barrier to central ways human beings engage with the world: our pursuit of meaningful projects, our relationships, and, in the political realm, opportunity, responsibility, and civic action.

III. An Ecological Approach to Poverty

So far, I have noted that one feature common to a diversity of experiences of poverty is having one’s prospective agency undermined. I have also argued that many ends, projects, and relationships we value require we exercise prospective agency. Therefore, poverty deprives people of an agential capacity that, for many, is critical to adequately responding to their ends, values, projects, and relationships. This, in part, is what makes poverty a normatively significant deprivation. This view of poverty as a kind of agential deprivation aligns with Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities account, which we will consider more fully later.²⁹ But it would be a mistake to equate the ‘scarcity mindset’ (as some have called this present-directed thinking prevalent among people living in poverty) with poverty. Instead, we should think about the agency of people living in poverty in an ecologically rich way that stresses the importance of context.

To do so, we must turn to a theoretical framework rooted in Herbert Simon’s theory of bounded rationality and psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer’s theory of ecological rationality.³⁰ Central to these accounts is the idea that humans reason and act in ways adapted to their context. Given that we are beings with limited cognitive capacity, the ecological theory tells us that it is rational for those habits of thinking and acting to be differentially and systemically shaped by that context.³¹ On the ecological approach, we cannot think of agential capacities in isolation.

The proposed view of poverty that I put forward draws from this tradition.

The Ecological Approach to Poverty: Being in poverty essentially involves being in a context in which a reasonable agent’s prospective agency is systematically undermined.

What I’m proposing here is not an analysis of poverty that provides necessary and sufficient conditions. Poverty is a social condition the borders of which are unlikely to be amenable to this kind of joint carving. Instead, in the spirit of Peter Carruthers’ conceptual pragmatism³² and Sally Haslanger’s ameliorative conceptual analysis,³³ I am proposing an approach to poverty the value of which is to be measured based on its usefulness to (1) recognizing a normatively significant commonality in the experience of poverty across different material contexts, (2) developing a deeper understanding of the agential deprivation at the heart of poverty, and (3) illuminating aspects of poverty that are not as salient on existing articulations of the concept.

Before we consider whether the view delivers on this promise, we need to get clear on the four fundamental notions it employs: (a) context, (b) reasonable agent, (c) prospective agency, and (d) systematicity.

IV. Contexts of Poverty

I will highlight three mechanisms often at play in poverty contexts to understand how an ecological approach can shift our thinking about poverty beyond focusing on individuals and their material deprivation. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but it helps us see why thinking of poverty through the lens of prospective agency is fruitful.

V. Objections

The reader, no doubt, might have come up with a running list of counterexamples. For example, the pensioner living on the edge of subsistence but with an entirely predictable future ahead of him would show that the account hasn’t offered necessary conditions.⁵⁸ Or a very wealthy person with many demanding duties that require them to focus on one immediate crisis after another seems to show that I haven’t offered sufficient conditions.

The ecological approach has the resources to respond to these examples in so far as the context is fixed by whether it systematically undermines the prospective agency of the reasonable person. Let’s think about the pensioner’s context more fully. Their context is one of a limited guaranteed income that might not keep up with inflation, no prospects to improve their situation through work or other means, and no scaffolds to pursue goals other than the satisfaction of their immediate needs.⁵⁹ Even though they can engage in some form of planning, the scaffolds for prospective agency are unavailable in their context. They are still better off than those who must stand in long lines, fill out dozens of forms, or beg for food. There are degrees here.

The same can be said of the ultra-wealthy person who is focused on their day-to-day crises but will often have outsourced thinking about the future to wealth managers and other service professionals. Their context is one in which they lack time and attention for much else beyond immediate, urgent demands. Still, they have a high degree of institutional scaffolding to outsource their prospective agency. Furthermore, they have sufficient resources to change their context to be more suitable to prospective agency should they so choose—an option that is not available to those living in poverty.

Nonetheless, what drives these objections is the sense that the mechanisms I have identified here are not exclusive to the case of poverty, though they are magnified in that case. This is correct. To be clear, this is true of many accounts of poverty, most of which admit degrees of deprivation. People in poverty live on the edge of precarity—they are subject to the most extreme deprivation of prospective agency. They face many of the factors we have discussed—lack of time and attention, lack of scaffolds for long-term planning, and contextual instability—at the same time. The rest of us, however, are not immune from being subject to some of these very same factors.

Consider, for example, insecurity in the labor market. The working poor are the most affected by the technological changes that have been allowing corporations to minimize labor costs, but many other people’s lives have also been negatively impacted by corporations shifting the cost of ‘inefficiencies’ from employers to employees.⁶⁰ Consequently, the reasons for addressing this change in the labor market go beyond the imperative to alleviate poverty—they would improve many people’s lives.⁶¹

Is this a problem for the view? It depends on what we are using the concept to do. If the hope is to find a unique factor that only those in poverty are subject to, then it is a serious problem. However, if a consequence of taking on this view is that it helps us illuminate structural features that disproportionately harm those in poverty but which harm many of the rest of us, too, then this is a feature, not a bug. It is still true that those in poverty live in contexts in which they are systematically and unrelentingly being thwarted from future-directed agency; recall the descriptions of those experiences in Section I. The same is not true of all of us. Nonetheless, many of the mechanisms that drive poverty today also harm the lives of those who are not in poverty.

VI. Assessing other Approaches

The Ecological Approach to Poverty aims to capture a dimension of poverty that cuts across different material conditions. Unlike absolute deprivation accounts, it allows that poverty can exist even when someone has enough to eat and a roof over their head. However, there are several alternatives to absolute deprivation accounts that we haven’t discussed. In this section, I discuss two alternatives and highlight their limitations. Note that even though I present my account as an alternative, they are not strictly speaking incompatible. One could accept either of these views and still think that the Ecological Approach to Poverty is getting at something quite important. One could see my view as one that develops the capabilities approach in a new direction. Nonetheless, in this section, I hope to show that these existing views haven’t fully acknowledged the centrality of prospective agency to poverty.

VII. Taking Prospective Agency Seriously

Thanks to the influence of research done in behavioral economics and social psychology, policymakers have embraced more complex ways of thinking about human agency in their policy recommendations.⁷⁴ There is more attention paid to cognitive bandwidth, the importance of choice architecture, and the cognitive burdens imposed on agents. However, many of these accounts haven’t been informed by a philosophical understanding of the importance of prospective agency to many valuable aspects of our lives. In this paper, I developed an approach that puts this normatively significant expression of our agency at its center. In this section, I discuss a few cases of poverty policy using the lens provided by the Ecological Approach.

First, let’s turn to poverty alleviation programs that target the poor through means-testing. The argument for these programs is that they are a more efficient way of redistributing resources to only those who truly need them. Some have criticized the implementation of targeted programs for being demeaning to recipients, while others argue that they are not, in fact, effective because the bureaucratic machinery required to determine eligibility is itself expensive. I share these critiques, but the Ecological Approach to Poverty gives us another reason to reject such programs—they make participants poorer. Proving eligibility is often demanding both in terms of time and attention.

Consider, for example, the free school lunch program in the United States. In many school districts, only children whose families are eligible based on income will receive free or reduced lunch at school. Consequently, a child’s eligibility depends on their families successfully navigating the bureaucratic system that certifies them as needing this kind of assistance. A change of status or unexpected extra income can push a family over the threshold, even if the change is temporary, thus resulting in a loss of eligibility. Some districts offer free school lunches for all. In that district, a child and their family do not have to worry about demonstrating need or losing eligibility. However, some affluent students do end up getting a free lunch. Nonetheless, the families in the universal school lunch district enjoy a benefit that the families in the eligibility district do not and, from the perspective of the Ecological Approach, are less poor.

Alternatively, consider labor policy. In the United States, there has been a movement to increase the minimum wage. This is a laudable goal, and arguably, it would have some effect on decreasing the poverty of the working poor. However, unless we also tackle labor stability, a higher minimum wage does not by itself address the sources of precarity that are inimical to the working poor’s capacity to plan for the future. Historically, labor unions, for example, have focused on far more than hourly wages—demanding protections against unfair dismissal, minimum guaranteed hours, generous pensions, and other mechanisms of inducing stability—in seeking good working conditions.

Finally, let’s briefly consider universal basic income. Erich Fromm argues that UBI would lead us to “shift from a psychology of scarcity to that of abundance.”⁷⁵ There are merits to this position in so far as it avoids much of the bureaucratic morass that impoverishes those who most need aid. However, UBI is not a panacea, and the Ecological Approach can help us see why. When basic income is used as a substitute for the public provision of some basic goods, as is suggested by some libertarian-minded thinkers,⁷⁶ then we might in effect eliminate some of the scaffolding that enables future-directed agency. Part of what enables agents to pursue their long-term ends, prioritize their values and the wellbeing of those they love, and project themselves into the future are features of the context that go beyond income such as social support structures, housing and labor policy, and institutional stability.

UBI would increase the income of the working poor. However, it is an open question whether this would give them leverage to secure stability and security. For example, stable employment might not be available for someone with their education and skill set.⁷⁷ This is not to say that UBI would not alleviate poverty, but income itself might not be sufficient to ‘buy’ the kind of stability that allows for the thriving of prospective agency.⁷⁸ When we hold the Ecological Approach in view, we can articulate why certain institutional arrangements are better than others on this dimension even if they, in effect, transfer an equal amount of income to their recipients.

There is much more to be said about how this framework can help us think about the agency of people in poverty in a fruitful way. What these examples show is the importance of keeping in mind not just what resources an agent has at her disposal, but whether her social, institutional, and material context is a source of precarity that thwarts her Prospective Agency. This is particularly important when so much of our social policy targeted at the poor aims to enable people in poverty to plan their way out of poverty.

Human agents project their agency into the future. We invest in relationships, projects, and values. We seek to be agents whose actions over time reflect what we care about. However, our capacity to do so depends on being in contexts that allow us to deliberate, plan, and pursue those ends in the face of competing considerations. I have argued that to be poor is to be in a context that systematically prevents us from exercising this critical dimension of our agency.

Acknowledgments

For engaging with this paper I am grateful to audiences at: The Centre for Ethics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs at the University of St. Andrews; the Stanford Political Theory Workshop; the Princeton Political Theory Workshop; the Penn Normative Philosophy Group; the Philosophy Department Colloquia at Brown University and Wake Forest University; and the Central States Philosophical Association 2022 Meeting. Thanks also to Juan Pablo Bermudez, Michael Bratman, Angela Duckworth, Randall Curren, Robert Goodin, David Grusky, Kristen Harknett, Susan Meyer, Vanessa Schipani, Anna Stilz, Sarah Paul, Jonathan Wolff, Manuel Vargas, Gideon Yaffe, the students in Sarah Paul’s Philosophy of Action course and Michael Bratman’s Topics in Philosophy of Action course, and the referees for their feedback. I completed a portion of this work while I was a SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and with support from the Guggenheim Foundation.

Competing Interests

The author declares that she has no competing interests.