A Systemic Approach to Poverty Alleviation: Expanding Opportunities and Capability Enhancement

This paper presents a theoretical framework for understanding poverty persistence and heterogeneous economic outcomes by integrating standard microeconomic theory with findings from behavioral genetics. While existing poverty alleviation approaches—such as redistribution, education, and behavioral nudges—often focus on average effects, empirical evidence consistently shows large variations in individual responses to identical policies. The framework introduced here treats individual heterogeneity not as noise but as a central explanatory factor. Traits relevant to economic decision-making, including time preference, risk tolerance, self-control, and learning capacity, are modeled as components of an individual’s feasible economic action set. Drawing on behavioral genetics, these traits are understood to be probabilistically influenced by both genetic and environmental factors, without invoking genetic determinism. By conceptualizing poverty as a trajectory within constrained action sets rather than merely an income state, the paper offers testable propositions explaining why uniform policies generate dispersed outcomes. The framework complements existing economic and policy models and suggests that more effective poverty alleviation strategies require differentiated approaches aligned with individual behavioral constraints. This work is intended as a theoretical contribution to social science, providing a bridge between microeconomic choice theory and empirical findings on behavioral heterogeneity.