THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT. THEY HAVE MORE MONEY. There’s a frustrating clash of polemics, between (roughly) the American right and left, about whether and to what extent poverty is a result of behavior. The Nation crowd accuses the right (and fellow travelers on this question, like Kaus) of blaming the victims; the right plays into that criticism by, uh, blaming the victims, and, at times, acting as if poor people are a different species from the blow-dried, first-pew, well-upholstered upstanding conservative.

But it seems to me that identifying behaviors that lead to poverty ought to evoke empathy in people who aren’t poor. Why? Because so many of the poverty-causing behaviors are prevalent among the rich and the middle-class, as well. Divorce often plunges women and children into poverty, or knocks them from striving-middle-class to they’re-shutting-my-electricity-off. And divorce is anything but unknown among the wealthy and almost-wealthy–flip through the address book for my high school if you want proof, and try to figure out how many of the kids lived with both parents. The behaviors that lead one man to homelessness may lead a man who started out in a better situation to become the standard-issue “functioning alcoholic” who comes home from his 9-to-6 and hits his kids. Almost everyone I know exhibits some of the behaviors that, in more desperate starting situations, draw people into poverty. For a trivial example, I can’t keep track of anything–bills, checks, due dates. I’ve only been overdrawn once. If my finances were generally less stable, my scatterbrained-ness would become a huge problem, and I’d need to work on fixing it pronto if I wanted to avoid major headaches.

It seems to me that poverty is caused by a complex interplay between starting-out-situation, personal history (how your parents treated you, whether you were ever raped, etc.), health, and behavior. Behavior really does play a pretty big role in making people poor–and, even more so, in keeping people poor. But the response to lousy behavior is the same for poor and rich–everyone is challenged to change their wrong behavior. Some behaviors will be more urgent for poor people or people already on the edge of poverty; some behaviors, like my woolly-brained-ness, aren’t actually immoral, but become irresponsible when finances are really tight.

It’s necessary to identify (and even harp on) things people do that keep them poor for a host of reasons: People need to take responsibility for their lives–they need self-determination. Behaviors can change, whereas starting-situation and personal history can’t, so focusing on behavior is actually the most hopeful strategy. People need to know what they’re doing that’s keeping them down, and they need (as all of us need) lots of support in switching from doing the wrong things to doing the right things. And I’ll add that focusing on behavioral causes of poverty, as I said above, should remind people who aren’t poor that the poor are a lot like us. Lots of poor people have self-sabotaging behaviors–like me. They screw stuff up, continually repeat their mistakes, make a lot of wrong choices–like me. Poor people who are making those wrong choices need to be challenged and helped–like, once more, me.

Honestly, if you were screwing up and it was making your life (or, more so, your children’s lives) unnecessarily miserable–wouldn’t you want someone to point it out? And for the people “on the right” on this issue–wouldn’t you take advice better if it was presented with empathy? Aren’t you pretty likely to just stop listening if the “advice-giver” makes you feel like an alien, or like scum, or like an incurable screw-up? A lot of people have done phenomenal work pointing out behaviors that keep people poor–poke around in the archives here for some good stuff–but, as always, more needs to be done to ensure that the behavioral-change message is a message of hope and empathy, not one of self-righteous indignation.