At the end of his Budget speech, the prime minister raised some issues which I wished he had made the central plank of his presentation. For after all the macroeconomic issues have been dissected and debated, the issues he raised all too briefly are far more fundamental to economic outcomes than those he covered.

The prime minister invited a conversation on individual responsibility, an invitation to which I hope we will respond most vigorously. Let me be early in accepting the prime minister's invitation. The prime minister said, "We in Jamaica need to urgently develop a sense of individual responsibility. We need a conversation as to what is government and what is the responsibility of government."

For example, "poor Jamaicans so often protesting on television that they have five, six, seven children with no one to take care of them ... that the Government is doing nothing for them, need to join that conversation ...". Of course, there will be those on the left who will be quick to point out that the prime minister is 'callously' and 'cynically' disregarding the State's responsibility to the poor and excusing an unjust capitalist system, which has condemned people to poverty and degradation, and which fosters the very irresponsibility he now decries.

These mothers of seven children with five babyfathers are victims of an oppressive system, we are told, and, therefore, Golding is merely engaging in that frequent pastime called blaming-the-victims. I am well acquainted with these arguments and have read the best exponents of them. It is a fact that some women, because of poverty and its attendant limited opportunities, move in and out of relationships, getting pregnant in the process, just to survive economically and 'hold dem man'.

The man dem want dem 'youth', so if the women are to keep the relationship they have to supply the 'youth'. And then the man departs, but because that child needs to be supported, the woman moves on to another prospect - and then another baby.

But while it is true that such behaviour cannot be totally be divorced from its socio-economic context, the fact is people do have choices and not every woman in that same context makes choices which retard her future. Some people take personal responsibility, despite the pressures, despite the educational deficits, despite any failure on the part of the State.

Unless poor Jamaicans come to understand that this is not Scandinavia where there is cradle-to-grave social welfare (and even there the benefits have been whittling down), and that no government, whether Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) or People's National Party (PNP) is going to provide adequately for them and all their children, they will continue in the poverty trap while the leftists continue to pronounce from their ivory tower.

culture change

We need a culture change in Jamaica, a message I have been preaching for years.

Nobody needs to tell me about the debilitating effects of poverty. There is a reason why the girl from downtown is likely to find herself with the seven children rather than the girl from Norbrook or Cherry Gardens, and it has nothing to do with any genetic disposition to irresponsibility. It's a straight class issue, generally. The reason children of the poor are more likely to end up committing gun crimes and engaging in antisocial behaviour is not unrelated to economics and social class. One does not have to accept Marxian economic determinism to concede that people's economic and social circumstances influence their behaviour.

But it must also be conceded that people from the most depressed and oppressive circumstances have risen from those circumstances, escaped the usual limitations and have developed into wholesome, highly productive members of society.

While freedom is not absolute and is constricted by economic and social circumstances, humans do not totally lose their free will simply because of their economic circumstances. If that is true, the prime minister's point about individual responsibility is germane and worthy of conversation. It's not necessarily a cop-out argument, as those on the left would argue.

"The father or mother whose child is allowed to roam the streets, never bothering themselves with the homework that he has not done or with how he is doing in class, but cries injustice when he is held with a gun, must start taking responsibility," the prime minister said in his Budget presentation. Again, I know what poverty does to family life. How it saps the energies of parents, who have to work long hours - when there is work - and who are emotionally-drained by all the stress of economic scarcity.

But despite that, free will is not totally eradicated. Individual responsibility is not eclipsed. Fact of the matter is, there is no huge block of concessionary funds waiting for us to draw down on; even our borrowing is now severely restricted and our opportunities for earnings are very limited.

So if there is no Santa Claus to help us; limited borrowing, limited earnings and limited opportunities to impose taxation, where will the money come from to solve the poverty problems for mothers of the seven children in the ghettos and for fathers who have abandoned their babymothers? Tax the rich? The rich have options. The don't have to stay here to be taxed excessively, however they define that.

Word to the wise: Take responsibility for yourselves. It can't hurt. While the Government should be able to take us to the Promised Land, in some people's view, objective reality is that its capacity to do so is greatly exaggerated.

The prime minister referred to the businessman who finds clever ways to avoid taxes but who "demands that the Government gives up some of the taxes it is collecting from others so that he can enjoy incentives needs to join that conversation so that he might understand that he has to start taking responsibility". I like that one.

People don't see the link between behaviour and the macro-economy. A book which has just come off the press and which has already been given high praise among scholars is Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters to Global Capitalism (2009). It is written by two distinguished economics professors, George Akerlof of the University of California at Berkley and Robert Schiller of Yale University. The exploration of 'animal spirits' came from the great economist, John Maynard Keynes who, incidentally, is experiencing another renaissance.

The thrust of Keynes concept about how animals spirits drive the economy is that, according to the authors, "people have non-economic motives and they are not always rational in pursuit of their economic interests". We can't depend on Adam Smith's 'invisible hand', and our elaborate technical macroeconomic theories don't always account for how people behave in real economies and real markets.

"The macroeconomics of the past 30 have gone in the wrong direction. In their attempts to clean up macroeconomics and make it more scientific, the standard macroeconomists imposed research structure and discipline by focusing on how the economy would behave if people had only economic motives and if they were fully rational." The fact is, there are a lot of non-economic factors which influence people's behaviour and which impact on the economy. The moral philosopher Adam Smith understood this more than the reductionistic Karl Marx.

How people see themselves have a lot to do with their economic decisions. Akerlof and Schiller have a fascinating section on savings, showing the startling difference between Americans and the Chinese. America, with a population of just over 300 million, has 1.3 billion credit cards. China, with a population of 1.3 billion, has five million credit cards! So China's savings rate is over 50 per cent of its gross domestic product while America has a negative savings rate and is the world's biggest debtor nation. (Bankrolled by the same Chinese.)

"Our devotion to the credit card and the shopping mall is symptomatic of broader views of who Americans think they are and how they think they should behave," says the book Animal Spirits.

What is the average Jamaican's self-concept? How does he get validation and a sense of self? What gives him self-esteem? These issues are fundamental to economic outcomes - and, indeed, to social stability. Who is the model for the average Jamaican: the frugal Chinese or the spendthrift American? No one will get this one wrong! So we need a conversation on these issues, indeed.

The prime minister said also that it is hard on the worker who "trembles every Friday when he is not sure whether he will be handed a pink slip with his payslip. It's hard on the civil servant, nurse, teacher or policeman when they can't get their wage increase that was to have been given them." I ask: What will make those workers put out their best, increase productivity and be highly motivated under those circumstances? If you build a society solely around economic goals when your economy is in recession, what do people hold on to? We need a conversation on this.

The prime minister said he knows it is hard on "the poor who have to scrape and scrounge and hustle not knowing where the next meal is coming from or how the hungry bellies of their children will be filled". My question to him is, does he know how they are likely to respond if that situation persists? What are the internal resources which they possess, what are the values and attitudes which they can call upon them to sustain them in the hard times? Yes, we need a conversation on these matters.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.