Ideas42, a non-profit organization that uses the insights of behavioral science – which helps us to understand the choices and decisions people make – to design innovative solutions to social problems at scale, recently released a report titled, Poverty Interrupted, that presents behavioral insights that “shed new light on the many challenges facing families with low incomes and those who seek to support them.” The report puts forth three design principles that flow from these insights:
- Cut the costs of living in poverty by reducing burdens on time, attention, and cognition;
- Create slack by helping individuals and families to build an adequate cushion of time, money, attention and other critical resources; and
- Reframe and empower individuals and families by crafting services to help people do more of what they want to do and less of what they don’t want to do – and to ensure that service providers are capable partners in that task.
Poverty Interrupted: Applying Behavioral Science to the Context of Chronic Scarcity