Is it _really_ all the individual?

I've had separate conversations with two people in the past months about the actions/activities of people individually. This goes back to my post on September 19 of last year where I speculate on the direction of our future economic and social evolution. One person completely disagreed with my use of the term society and insisted that I was ascribing traits to a group which a group cannot hold; that only individuals could. For example, individuals choose which candidate to vote for, what products to purchase, to recycle, to drive a truck, etc. An economy and culture and society is the combined aggregate of individual actions and the use of economic or cultural or social as a modifier is a lazy and inaccurate shorthand. More significantly, persuasion can only work at the level of the individual and not the broader society. The second person was apoplectically insistent that being poor was a result of personal choice and implied it to be a moral failing on the part of the individual.

Let me say first off, I am not refuting the importance of individual choice or action. There are definitely situations where individuals could have or even should have made better decisions or choices. But is it not irresponsible and shortsighted to ignore the larger social/cultural/economic context in which individuals act or function?

To the person who claims one can only measure individual activity, I will give one hypothetical situation: one farmer working only with tools he can fashion, will have a negligible impact on his environment. One farmer using tools invented by one person, improved upon by an industrial design team, built by a assembly team and delivered by transport teams will have a slightly larger but not irredeemable impact on his environment. Many farmers using advanced tools under the financial and agricultural policies of the 1920's resulted the dust bowl which affected the climate of the greater part of the land area of the United States. A clear case of a circumstance where group activity at the level of farmers but also dependent on the wider social input of inventors, manufacturers and policy makers had real consequences. If any single step of the process was delayed or abrogated, the consequences may have been much less dire.

What troubles me most about this view is it suggests that societies cannot evolve, or change their values/priorities over time; only individuals can have values/priorities. This implies that every single person is born in some state of naiveté and in the process of maturing, they undergo a series of steps to bring them up to date on current attitudes. So as attitudes change over time, each person has integrate more steps to assimilate into modern society. I would counter this by contrasting the Code of Hammurabi which was highly advanced for its time to the Convention on the Rights of the Child which is barely advanced for today. Individuals may like and advocate for certain aspects of Hammurabi's code but it has been rejected by most people at large and social (peer) pressure exerts further influence. I doubt many individuals disagree with the Convention on the Rights of the Child although their societies (read governments) may not have not ratified them.

The second person insisted that the poor were poor because they chose to be poor. If they wanted to not be poor, they would work harder or longer hours or better themselves for a higher paying position. According to this individual, s/he worked hard for all his/err financial assets and no one had ever given him/er anything. Additional, s/he personally knew an immigrant family who 'chose' 72 hour work weeks and living in 'basements' to see that their children were adequately housed and fed and able to go to college thereby elevating the economic class of the family as a whole. There are many counters to this person's arguments but I will focus on this edition of the immigrant experience and how it relates to today's economic conditions and the issue of 'choice'.

For starters, college today is out of reach for most Americans and places such a debt burden on many students that economic elevation is brought to a standstill. This applies to all Americans, not just recent immigrants, and is the direct result of the erosion of support for public education at both the grade school and college level [by the way, public support of educational institutions is an application of socialist principles.] <http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/27/us-attn-andrea-education-dropouts-idUSBRE82Q0Y120120327; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/education/poor-students-struggle-as-class-plays-a-greater-role-in-success.html?pagewanted=1>. In terms of 'choice', many untrained immigrants have very limited choice in the jobs they take. They frequently depend on family members or friends for entry into a low wage position such as hotel housekeeping, child care or janitorial work from which they network into other similar jobs. If fortunate, they speak English and can join a union to improve their job security and, hopefully, bargain for better wages and benefits. Else they are at the mercy of their employers and supervisors or worse, find employment/income opportunities in the grey market where there are no legal employee protections or benefit provisions. I am certain that the parents in the family described above would have 'chosen' to join a union had that been possible. They would not have 'chosen' to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week. In some ways, they were fortunate in that 20-30 years ago they were able to earn enough to put their children through college with manageable debt. It is not clear that the same immigrants arriving on these shores today could do the same.