This piece Strategy in Card Games and Cards that "Win Harder When.." makes the point that in a card game like Yu-gi-oh, you can classify cards as Wins Harder When Winning, Wins Harder When Losing, or Generally Usable. In such games, a good deck is mostly made up of cards that are Generally Usable, with a few cards that Win Harder When Winning and a few that Win Harder When Losing.
Cards that Win Harder When Losing can help you get out of a terrible mess. But if that is all you have in your hand, you've got no game except when you are in a terrible mess. It is nearly impossible to actually win with a deck made up entirely of such cards. All of your moves are brilliant when you are in the hole, but you have no means to consolidate your position when you get out of the hole, much less build upward from there.
I think this is a really good explanation of poverty mentality. Poverty mentality is a real phenomenon. There are people who are perfectly smart people, some in fact are brilliant, who cannot manage to break the cycle of poverty and it is clear that their mental models are part of the problem.
I think a lot of people think poverty mentality amounts to doing things that are simply "dumb" -- that poverty mentality means you make choices that are fundamentally bad choices and that is what keeps you poor. But I don't think that really works as an explanation.
Anyone who really does "dumb" things all the time doesn't get labeled as having a poverty mentality. Instead, they get labeled as mentally handicapped and we lower our expectations for what they can achieve. In order to get labeled as suffering from a poverty mentality, a person has to be smart enough that we expect better of them.
Anyone who really does "dumb" things all the time doesn't get labeled as having a poverty mentality. Instead, they get labeled as mentally handicapped and we lower our expectations for what they can achieve. In order to get labeled as suffering from a poverty mentality, a person has to be smart enough that we expect better of them.
So I think it is more useful to think of poverty mentality as being like having a deck that has too many moves that Win Harder When Losing. In other words, people who cannot escape poverty are people who consistently do things that are useful, perhaps even brilliant, when everything is going wrong, but they have no moves that are useful in other situations, and they thus have no means to consolidate their position and build upward.
They may know how to brilliantly get out of the hole, but they have no idea how to stay out. This becomes a vicious cycle where relying on their most brilliant moves gives them a rush and makes them feel great, so they keep doing that both because it worked so well and because it felt so good. In comparison to the rush of brilliantly overcoming their latest crisis, moves that are merely Generally Useful look relatively "dumb" and just don't provide that rush of satisfaction. So they increasingly rely on their moves that Win Harder When Losing, because obviously those are brilliant moves! and they need all the help they can get.
The problem is that moves that Win Harder When Losing don't actually lead to winning. It becomes a rut where they brilliantly get out of the hole over and over and over again, but they make no lasting forward progress. Relying solely on strategies that work well when you are behind the 8 ball becomes a bad habit. You get addicted to the rush of doing these few brilliant things but fail to develop more boring Generally Useful tactics.
If you are homeless and want to get off the street, you need to work on building a more diverse deck. You need to work on finding solutions that are relatively boring, that work well even if you aren't poor or in crisis, and that can lead to consolidating your position and building upwards. You need to rely less often on things that give you that rush of dramatically getting out of the hole -- again! -- and more often on more mundane solutions that have some hope of keeping you out of the hole.
In life, moves that Win Harder When Losing get called crisis management techniques. You cannot crisis manage your way out of poverty and into a middle class life. Crisis management only helps you survive the crisis. But other techniques are needed to give you stability and prevent you from just bouncing from crisis to crisis.
This blog tries to focus on helping homeless people diversify their "deck" (strategy) and rely less on moves that Win Harder When Losing so that you can stop losing all the time and get your life back. It tries to promote solutions that don't require you to be in crisis to access them, things that are available when you are dirt poor and in crisis but that do not get taken away if things improve.