I really enjoyed learning about Professor Barrett’s research on poverty traps. One of the things that I found most interesting about this learning experience was how he gave us a chance to understand how researching and truly attempting to understand the barriers and difficulties that keep people in poverty reveals information about how those barriers can be mitigated or even removed to allow people to begin to propel themselves out of the trap of poverty. I think that, in the United States especially, politicians do not take time to truly understand problems and end up pushing simple solutions that may be intuitively appealing and politically advantageous but ill-suited to solve complex, multi-faceted issues. Moreover, I really appreciated how Professor Barrett emphasized that understanding the barriers and difficulties that people caught in poverty traps face reveals how their responses to these problems are calculated and rational even though they might not appear that way to an uninformed outsider. This point, in my opinion, is crucial to remember. I think that too often, at least in the United States, people have a tendency to point to specific actions of the poor as irrational, problematic, or even irresponsible to unjustly blame them for their own continued struggles. A closer look at the varied, complex challenges that the poor face often reveals those actions to be rational, necessary, and inventive. Given that decreases in rates of upward mobility are indicating that the United States is failing to be the meritocratic land of opportunity that it promises to be, I think it is extremely important that people recognize what kind of poverty traps exist in the U.S. as well. The increasingly polarized labor market, for example, forces many individuals without a college education to earn in a living in the precarious, low-wage service sector where jobs are usually part-time, last-minute scheduling makes it difficult to work two different jobs, and there is little room for promotion.