Poor took the bad choice : poverty

Rational choice focuses on individuals as rational actors. It takes self-interest and individual preferences as causes of the actions people take by choosing better alternatives over worse ones. However, against nonegoistic considerations, Margaret Levi pointed out that people act consistently in relation to their preferences, a type of utility maximization. It is manifested through a process by which individual actors weigh the cost and benefits as strategic calculations, considering the capacity of actors to assess the risk they face, to gauge the potential benefit of their behavior, and to understand the effects their actions is likely to have on other actors. Additionally, constrains are important since maximization implies certain confines, which are the resources scarcity and the structures of institutions, regarding to Levi who defines them as sets of rules and sanctions that structure social interaction. Institutionalism, being between rationality and structuralism, assigns a key role to the institutions, which structure the individual choices of strategic actors producing a certain equilibrium among the multiple “players” representing the actors in a constraining environment, “the game”.

Culture being a residual theory is usually avoided when objectively explaining political issues. Its causal significance is suspect since the behavior of actors is not strictly determined by culture factors, it is complex and intangible, and one can argue that it is both cause and effect being not static. However, recent events demonstrate that one of the main political interests in this century is and would be Religion. According to an article (“In god’s name”) in The Economist published in November 1^st, religion will play a big role in this century’s politics. Religion has power but it is not necessarily a causal power. The key, states Lim, is to avoid treating culture, and specifically religion, as a set of unchanging values, norms, and beliefs that define and shape the social, political, and economic fate of individuals, societies, and countries.