The “culture of dependency” argument for cutting benefits
David Brookes in NY Times on Romney’s latest gaffe.
The final thing the comment suggests is that Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.
But, of course, no middle-class parent acts as if this is true. Middle-class parents don’t deprive their children of benefits so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities — so they can play travel sports, go on foreign trips and develop more skills.
People are motivated when they feel competent. They are motivated when they have more opportunities. Ambition is fired by possibility, not by deprivation, as a tour through the world’s poorest regions makes clear.
Source here. Discuss.
the line from outward opportunity (environment) to inward motivation or individual initiative is hardly as direct, let alone as causal,as you assert. Surely, even the most pedestrian of analyses would show a more complex relationship between material abundance and a given individual’s will to succeed. Are the wards of the affluent state so very different from the unmotivated children of the well-off when it comes to the question of personal ambition? Perhaps this makes no sense in your way of accounting for outcomes. Socialists, pretending to political neutrality and independence of approach have, still to admit to, a lack of insight into the human psyche when they maintan that the welfare “culture”,especially as it goes on for generations,is anything short of deleterious to the human spirit. Materialism,even of the dialectical type, has always lacked an adequate psychology, as someone much wiser once noted.