By Nco Dube | 23 April 2026

 

Expecting the poor to behave within the tidy bounds of rationality is a cruelty dressed up as common sense. It is the language of those who have never had to choose between a meal today and a promise of a better tomorrow. It is the rhetoric of policymakers and commentators who mistake compliance for virtue and who confuse patience under duress with moral worth. In the most unequal societies on earth, where wealth is concentrated and dignity rationed, reasonableness is not a universal human trait. It is a privilege. To demand otherwise from the desperate is to demand that they perform miracles with empty hands.

Sociology teaches us that human behaviour is not a set of isolated choices made in a vacuum. Behaviour is embedded in institutions, shaped by history, and constrained by material conditions. The so-called rational actor model assumes stable preferences, reliable information and the capacity to plan. None of those assumptions hold when people live in chronic scarcity. When your daily horizon is survival, when your neighbourhood is cut off from decent work and your children attend underfunded schools, the calculus of choice changes. Prioritising immediate needs over long-term investments is not irrational. It is adaptive. It is the only sensible response to a system that has stacked the deck against you.

There is a science to this. Behavioural research shows that scarcity consumes cognitive bandwidth. Scarcity narrows attention, increases stress, and reduces the mental resources available for planning and self control. Poverty is not merely a lack of money. It is a tax on the mind. Expecting someone under that tax to behave like a middle-class planner is like asking a person with a broken leg to run a marathon. It is cruel and it is stupid policy.

Political economy explains why this cruelty is not accidental. Capitalism, in its current form, is not a neutral mechanism that rewards merit and punishes sloth. It is a distributional machine that concentrates wealth through ownership, rent extraction and control of labour. In societies where the state has retreated from redistribution and where social protection is weak, the market treats those who cannot be profitably employed as disposable. The rhetoric of flexibility and competitiveness becomes a licence to casualise labour, to outsource risk and to normalise precarity. The poor are then expected to be entrepreneurial, resilient and grateful for any crumbs that fall from the table. That expectation is not a policy. It is a moral abdication.

History is the missing chapter in most public debates about poverty. You cannot understand present desperation without acknowledging dispossession.

Centuries of colonial land grabs forced removals and racially codified labour systems created spatial and economic apartheid. Generations were denied access to land, capital and quality education. Those legacies do not vanish because a new constitution was signed or because a market opened up. They persist in the geography of cities, in the asset gaps between families and in the social networks that determine who gets a job and who does not. To moralise poverty while ignoring that history is to rewrite the past in service of the powerful.

The state plays a decisive role in either reproducing or alleviating these harms. Policies that punish the poor for being poor, that impose punitive conditionalities on social grants, or that prioritise austerity over public investment, do not correct market failures. They institutionalise humiliation. Conversely, policies that provide predictable income, that invest in public employment, that expand access to land and housing, and that integrate transport and spatial planning, create the conditions for people to make longer term plans. Dignity is not a soft outcome. It is a stabiliser. It reduces crime, improves health and enables people to invest in their futures.

There is a moral economy at work when we demand reasonableness from the desperate. The language of responsibility is often a code for compliance. Responsible behaviour, in this framing, means accepting low wages, tolerating unsafe work, and deferring claims on dignity until the market decides you are useful. It is a standard designed by those who already have security. It is a standard that ignores the fact that many people are excluded from the very institutions that would allow them to meet it.

The psychological toll of living under such expectations is profound. Chronic stress, trauma and the erosion of agency are not incidental. They are predictable outcomes of living in a society that treats you as a problem to be managed rather than as a citizen with rights. Learned helplessness sets in when people repeatedly encounter institutions that punish rather than support. Stigma becomes internalised. Children grow up with narrower horizons. The social fabric frays. These are not abstract harms. They are the lived reality of millions.

We must also be honest about the political incentives that sustain this cruelty. Elites benefit from narratives that blame the poor for their plight. Blame shifts responsibility away from policy choices and onto individual behaviour. It makes redistribution politically costly and morally suspect. It allows those in power to claim that the system is fair because everyone supposedly has the same chance to succeed. That claim is a lie. It is a lie that is maintained by statistics stripped of context, by pundits who moralise poverty and by politicians who prefer scapegoats to structural reform.

So, what does a serious response look like? First, stop moralising poverty. Treat it as a policy problem that requires public solutions. Second, expand social protection in ways that respect dignity.

Unconditional grants, when properly scaled, stabilise households and create space for planning. Third, invest in jobs that pay a living wage and in public employment programmes that provide meaningful work. Fourth, tackle spatial exclusion through integrated planning, affordable transport and land reform that is serious about redistribution rather than symbolic. Fifth, invest in education and health in ways that close intergenerational gaps rather than reproduce them.

None of this is easy. Redistribution is politically contested. It requires confronting entrenched interests and changing the rules of the economy. But the alternative is to continue asking the hungry to be patient while the system that starves them carries on. That is not realism. It is ideology. It is the ideology of those who can afford to be patient and who mistake their patience for virtue.

We must also change the metrics we use to judge success. Too often policy is evaluated by how well it disciplines the poor rather than by whether it expands their capabilities. Success should be measured by whether people can plan beyond the next meal, whether children can expect a different life from their parents, and whether dignity is a right rather than a privilege. If a policy increases compliance but deepens precarity, it is a failure.

Expecting reasonableness from the desperate is a moral failure and a policy failure. It is a failure of imagination and of political will. It is also a failure of language. When we speak of responsibility without speaking of rights, we are complicit in a politics that blames victims. When we demand patience from those who are hungry, we are asking them to perform a virtue that the rest of society is not willing to practise.

If we are serious about justice, we must stop designing systems that make reasonableness a luxury. We must build institutions that expand agency, redistribute assets and protect dignity. We must refuse the easy moralism that blames the poor and instead confront the political economy that produces poverty. The test of a society is not whether it can demand patience from the hungry. The test is whether it will stop starving them.