RAE STREET

“ Regular readers of this column will know the theory that willpower is a depletable resource: resisting temptation exerts a “psychic cost”, temporarily reducing your reserves of self-discipline. (This is why across-the-board self-improvement projects fail: the willpower you exert on avoiding cheeseburgers means less to spend on a daily swim.) Studies suggest the same goes for any kind of “trade-off thinking”, which leads to the striking hypothesis researchers have been testing: that being poor makes those psychic costs far more weighty. Poverty, as the analyst Jamie Holmes put it in the New Republic, means making more trade-offs and resisting more temptations – depleting the very willpower people might have used to lift themselves out of it. ”