CASBS fellow Will Tiemeijer is a senior research fellow at The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), officially charged by the Dutch government with advising policymakers on social issues and long term policy based on the latest social research and scientific evidence. In his WRR capacity, Tiemeijer researched and authored a report in 2016 for the government on individual financial debt. It was so well received that the highly regarded journal Zorg en Welzijn (translation: Care and Well-being), widely read by both professionals in the field and policy makers, interviewed him for a cover story.
Tiemeijer later presented his results before the government’s parliamentary committee for debt and poverty issues.
He elaborates:
The report focuses on the importance of psychological factors for preventing debt and promoting ‘financial health.’ I show that the probability that people get in serious financial trouble is strongly correlated with their capacity for self-control and with certain aspects of their personalities. In fact, these factors seem more important for staying out of financial trouble than intelligence or cognitive abilities. This explains the – for some people surprising – fact that financial problems are not confined to lower economic classes, but are almost equally common in the upper classes (at least in the Netherlands). Based on the findings (and a series of interviews I conducted with professionals in the field), I outline a handful of policy recommendations that the Dutch government now is considering.
We say hartelijk gefeliciteerd Will!
During his CASBS year Tiemeijer is writing a book on how protective and adverse life circumstances impact individual capacities for rationality and self-control. The level of one’s capacities for rationality and self-control should not be considered stable and fixed, but as the result of trait-situation interactions and therefore (within limits) variable and malleable. In his book, he hopes to combine the (until now) fragmented psychological research on this subject in order to gain a new understanding of these dynamics. With this understanding he will investigate the implications for ethics, politics, and policy.