How Poverty Taxes the Brain

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/

by jonbaer • 13 years ago

234 171 13 years ago

crusso5• 13 years ago

It's odd how HN upvotes both articles about learning how to think as well as articles that claim that people are doomed to their financial circumstances because of externalities.

It's a strange schizophrenia in a community pursuing entrepreneurialism.

Sagat2• 13 years ago

Both ideas can be valid at the same time. You can know how to think or be able to autonomously change your life, but at the same time you can also be severely limited or constrained by your circumstances. Humans have a degree of agency (assuming free will) but that doesn't mean they can always realistically escape the human condition.

eru• 13 years ago

I wouldn't say doomed---they just have much harder hurdles to overcome.

We should both inspire people to overcome the hurdles, but also work on creating an environment with less artificial hurdles.

victoriap3• 13 years ago

Regularly, competing views are upvoted, for example for tech stacks or languages. More than one mind end up in schizophrenia everywhere, don't they?

crusso5• 13 years ago

Yeah, but you can get a startup company's technology going with Ruby, Python, or PHP.

However, if you espouse an absolutist "victim of circumstances" ideology like the article:

The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty – or that they ought to be able to lift themselves out of it with enough effort.

You are doomed.

JonnieCache• 13 years ago

On top of everything else, you should probably look into what schizophrenia actually entails.

floobynewb2• 13 years ago

Where you say schizophrenia you probably mean split personality disorder. I am not even bothering to re-read your first sentence because of your perpetuation of this horrendous misuse of language.

crusso5• 13 years ago

Yes because pedantry is so much more meaningful than engaging in communication.

foobarbazqux• 13 years ago

Actually you're talking about the medical definition whereas he's using the colloquial definition. I agree that the mismatch is unfortunate and perpetuates stereotypes about the medical definition, but he isn't wrong to use the word like that, according to the dictionaries I've checked.

victoriap3• 13 years ago

>low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests

Wouldn't highly busy people with a lot of stuff to worry about such as startup entrepreneurs, chief level executives also perform poorly on cognition tests? Doesn't that prove that when your mind is busy at any level of Maslow pyramid, cognition tests and other games become trivia to ignore?

So IMO, these results tell more on attitude towards cognition tests than cognitive power. Au contraire, it can be argued that, people in need focus more on what matters by ignoring noise including tests. So necessity is the mother of positive change and maybe of innovation?

Sagat2• 13 years ago

One (admittedly cynical and disrespectful) hypothesis could be that some of the low-income people are low-income precisely because they disliked abstract reasoning in the first place, thus making them less likely to pursue their education.

To be honest, there are dozens of different ways to interpret this data.

floobynewb2• 13 years ago

There really isn't. You're letting your bias influence your opinion. Read the paper, draw your conclusions carefully, I wager you will have to change them.

notdrunkatall• 13 years ago

Replace 'disliked' with 'incapable of,' and that hypothesis is neither cynical nor disrespectful. People with subpar cognitive abilities are less likely to move themselves out of poverty.

smallish3• 13 years ago

The study is not trying to prove that worried people do worse on tests. That's well-established, not news to anyone.

It's demonstrating that day-to-day financial decisions like "should spend $1500 to repair my car?" produce enough worry in poor people to have a strong cognitive effect, wheras they don't have that effect on rich people.

angersock6• 13 years ago

Have you ever tried to push code after not eating for three days because paying taxes wiped you out?

It's a very different sort of distraction.

kstenerud• 13 years ago

As a matter of fact, I have. Except that I still owed the taxman a lot of money, and was hitting up everyone I knew for loans to keep him off my back just a bit longer, all while working 16+ hour days, 7 days a week in an incubator, trying to get a new business off the ground so that I could get some money coming in and eventually pay everyone back. I learned a LOT of lessons in frugality, and as of last year I'm finally in the clear, hopefully forever this time.

It's a shitty situation, but it's not an insurmountable problem. Life ain't fair and nobody owes you shit. You may not be responsible for the situation you're in, but nobody's going to drag you out, so you have to drag yourself out. Or just sit there and die. Your choice.

smm2000• 13 years ago

Most poor people (not enough food to eat level poor, not 40k is poverty in SF kind poor) do not pay any taxes and actually get money back from the government (unearned income tax credit).

Before I moved to US I lived in a poor Eastern European country. When I was in university my food budget was ~$70 and my total budget was around 150-160 dollars/month. Eating out was not really an option even once a month. 2k/month is as far from real poverty as I am from Bill Gates.

tankenmate• 13 years ago

This is really interesting when correlated with the arguments over WalMart wages vs Costco wages; your average WalMart shop floor employee already has a cognitive load issue "comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults."

Makes you think twice about what you pay your employees. Also it guides thinking on how employee benefits, like food available on campus, can benefit your company; especially in the information worker realm.

astine• 13 years ago

This is a very interesting article, but the experiment, as described, doesn't seem to back up the thesis. They show that people who have less money are more taxed by financial questions, but that could just as easily be a cause not an effect of poverty. (ie, it could back the notion that it's trying to refute.) The article did mention a similar study in India where they tested people who were seasonally poor, but it didn't mention whether their scores changed after they received their harvests. That seems like the crucial point.

alanctgardner2• 13 years ago

It totally does mention that their scores changed after they got the harvest... they went up, presumably because the cognitive burden was gone. Similarly, the experiment with car repairs of different expenses showed that the cognitive impact is correlated to how 'bearable' an expense was: rich people weren't impacted by a thousand dollar repair, but poor people suffered an impairment that wasn't there when the repair was only $100. This is pretty clear evidence that they didn't just pick a bunch of dumb poor people: the poor people started performing worse when there was financial pressure. This could probably be extended to test the impact of financial pressure on 'rich' people: propose they're hypothetically unemployed, or disabled and see if this has a cognitive impact. The problem is that rich people don't deal with that kind of problem with any regularity, so they might be able to shrug off a hypothetical situation.

randomdata3• 13 years ago

As an anecdote, I make a software developer's income, but I also farm on the side. With some new expansion this year, virtually all of my cash assets are tied up in crops that are still growing and I'm going to struggle to finish out the remainder of the season. I'm probably considered "rich" on paper, but I have been feeling these effects start to creep into my own life regardless.

bobbinsIII3• 13 years ago

it might be interesting once it is independently replicated several times.

bobbinsIII3• 13 years ago

why downvote this? the rational response to yet another psychologal 'priming' study is extreme scepticism.

crusso5• 13 years ago

Some political/philosophical frameworks are extraordinarily resistant to frank discussion. Down-voting and shouting-out are the way that proponents of those frameworks deal with any uncomfortable questions that may at all detract from their presupposed conclusions.

Even though your comment was really innocuous, it implied that maybe the study was wrong. Maybe hard work and intelligence are the prime factors in success vs what happens to be in your bank account at the moment. Some people can't handle even that implication.

schoper2• 13 years ago

No it doesn't. I've been poor. There is no 1 standard deviation IQ penalty.

"The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty..."

Again, no. The poorer members of our society have more limitations on average. This is usually IQ, but will often be something like physical disability (ie., blindness), ugliness, or poor socialization, inherent or learned. This does not mean that it is all right to construct a society without full employment or universal healthcare. But if people trying to help the poor continue to be taken in by the above belief, they are never going to get anywhere.

DanBC• 13 years ago

> are responsible for their own poverty...
no. The poorer members of our society have more limitations [...] like physical disability.

I hope I haven't mangled your words too badly. But I'm a bit confused - are you saying that people are responsible for being blind and thus are responsible for being poor?

schoper2• 13 years ago

It's not a moral calculus, Dan.

JanneVee2• 13 years ago

So you as an anecdote trumps multiple people in the sample for the research?

mason240• 13 years ago

It's funny how anecdotes in a comment section that support an article's premise are always upvoted/supported, but any anecdote that runs counter to it is always met with a hostile reaction.

angersock6• 13 years ago

Whoa, slow down there chief.

"Poor" can also encompass all the nice middle-class folks who are heavily leveraged in assets, with credit-card debt and student loans and mortgages and the like.

We're not just talking about Crazy Joe Hobo.

brador• 13 years ago

Also location, network, lack of friends and family support, mental illness, pressure from peers to conform to a low standard...

ritchiea2• 13 years ago

I can speak to this. For a while in 2010 I was completely broke after leaving my first job out of college, which I hated, and having some other employment opportunities fall through. Having that little money changes your decision making process about absolutely everything. Obviously every financial decision is effected, even the tiniest purchases weigh into bigger questions like "will I have enough money in my bank account to pay rent on the first?" It can reach a point where you can barely purchase a soda without any stress over spending money. And at least for me who is fortunate enough that this was not a chronic way of life, one thing that weighed on my mind was how I was spending my time and whether I was doing enough to make sure I wasn't so broke all the time. I could imagine that at some point that sort of thinking goes away and you believe poverty is a way of life. But I can think of a variety of other meta concerns stemming from poverty that could plague your thoughts.

Mentally poverty can be an all consuming condition. I've come to think of it as comparable to programming in a high level language versus programming in a low level language. If you're financially stable you are like someone programming in a high level language who has tedious tasks like memory management taken care of for you. Whereas if you live in poverty before you can get to some of the really productive work you have some hurdles to overcome.

Another way of thinking of the difference between being financially stable and being poor is that if you are poor it is constantly a necessity to think about short term outcomes first so your mind gets clogged up with them. It is very difficult to get to think about your long term good because failing to properly address your short term outcomes could end in complete disaster. This is why I cannot take seriously comments like this on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301856 although thankfully the commenter does acknowledge he is being cynical and disrespectful.

angersock6• 13 years ago

"If you're financially stable you are like someone programming in a high level language who has tedious tasks like memory management taken care of for you. "

This is exactly the correct metaphor.

I had to, at one point, stop using my coworking space and start working from home because I couldn't deal with the occasional overhead of "Huh, shit, I forget to bring lunch--can I afford to eat out today? Do I have enough gas to commute?".

Money is this magical barrier to all sorts of annoying daily minutiae--even a little bit is enough to let you shrug off the effects of suboptimal decisions. Being able to simply buy a lunch when you forgot to bring one can change your whole afternoon of productivity.

3825• 13 years ago

This is why you don't need to pay your programmers too much but you do need to pay them enough that they can focus more on their job and not on trivial items.

In hindsight, nicely presented lunches, gym (and perhaps babysitting?) on campus apparently serve a very real purpose. It makes sense that they are minimizing distractions. (When you think of it this way, employees should not have to pay income tax for free lunch at work but that's a different conversation.)

However, your parent comment made me think a little:

It can reach a point where you can barely purchase a soda without any stress over spending money.

Do people with money not stress about spending money? I mean sure, I have a decent wage rate. According to the New York Times[0], a little more than half of Americans make less money than I do. However, it is difficult to shake the fear. I am by no means wealthy and I have no alternate source of income. If I am out of the work force for a few months, I will have to take shelter with my (retired) parents. I am by no means the most frugal person in the world. I have a nice Nexus 4 phone and I make whimsical purchases like going to the water park ($40+ for about three hours) and I eat out and stuff a few times a week. However, there is that fear in the back of my head that says what happens tomorrow? I would like to go to grad school. Will I be able to afford it?

The article makes me feel like the wealthy people don't have worries like that. I kind of envy that.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-p...

timjahn• 13 years ago

"Money is this magical barrier to all sorts of annoying daily minutiae--even a little bit is enough to let you shrug off the effects of suboptimal decisions. Being able to simply buy a lunch when you forgot to bring one can change your whole afternoon of productivity."

Exactly.

scott_s2• 13 years ago

I observe this at the grocery store. The ones I visit have people from a wide range of economic status. When I go in, I grab what I need and don't think about price - it's almost always just the staples like bread, milk, fruit and eggs, and I know with certainty that I can afford it. And that I don't think about price is literally true until I'm told how much it costs, then I pay it, then I promptly stop thinking about it. I know my eating habits, I know my income, and I know that my eating habits are well within my budget, so it's not worth spending any more cycles on it.

Contrast this with the people who, upon learning that some item in their basket is not actually on sale, put a different item back. Or split the cost of the groceries across a WIC card and cash. Or use five coupons for a small basket.

For me, going to get groceries is an afterthought - I'm out of certain food, I'm out of my place, so I'll pick them up. But for some other people, it's clear to me that visiting the grocery store is an exercise in risk management and weighing priorities. In other words, being poor is hard work.

angersock6• 13 years ago

One of the most interesting domestic exercises is to think about how much different items cost in terms of other items.

A steak dinner (say, $50) is worth just a bit more than 3 double-meat Chipotle burritos with drink and chips and guac (say, $14). Each of those burrito meals is worth a bit more than 4 dozen eggs (say, fancy-pants eggs at $3/dz.) Each of those dozen eggs is worth 20 packs of shitty ramen ($.15/pack).

It's an exercise worth practicing, lest you find yourself one day needing to use that calculus.

EDIT:

This is also why buying Mississippi Mud ($4/qt. of passable black & tan) or Arizona RX energy drinks (~$1/can) is a good investment, as is rolling your own cigarettes or smoking pipes.

Swizec• 13 years ago

For an even more interesting observation:

I have grown up not quite in poverty, but still in a single parent home with mum having to work multiple jobs at times to support me and my sister. Thinking about money has rubbed off on me.

Nowadays I personally have zero money problems on account of my freelancing business doing great. But going to the grocery store habits learned over half of my life still kick in. Do I buy $5 rice or $3 rice? Does that pack of tuna cost less per kilogram than that other pack of tuna even though they're the same brand? And so on.

Buying steak at a restaurant still feels like "Holy crap man, what are you doing, chicken will be just as nice and it's like half as expensive."

I suspect it will take years to unlearn this and I honestly envy people whose parents did not instill this kind of thinking in them. It looks easier.

Yetanfou• 13 years ago

Ah, but keeping track of cost/benefit is a solemn duty in a capitalist economy. The only power you as an individual consumer have against vendors and producers is the power of choice - the choice to buy which product at what price at which location. No matter whether you have plenty of money or have to turn each currency-unit twice before spending it, if you forget about this you will get pilfered. You will lose track of current market prices for commodities and end up paying through the nose because the vendor in your location has noticed he can increase prices without losing business, thus increasing profits. Others who have less to spend will take their business elsewhere and before you know it you'll have created yourself the groceries-equivalent of an Apple store.

So if you happen to see fewer and fewer people swapping products in their baskets because they are not on sale or using coupons or hands of small change or whatnot, take heed and do some comparison shopping.

msandford7• 13 years ago

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but one thing that's always bugged me is how we account for sub-optimal decisions.

What I mean is that if I make 60k per year and I choose to spend very little of it by driving an un-fancy car and cooking all my meals at home and living in a small apartment (perhaps with a roommate) I might be able to save half my net income. Or I could spend nearly all of that income on a bigger place, nicer car and meals out. And then I would potentially be in the exact same mental place as the person in poverty.

What if that gets scaled down to 20k instead of 60k? Is there still nothing I can do to figure out a way to save money? Even if my cognitive load is high due to being poor, which way does causation go? Maybe I consciously decided to live in a bigger place and eat more meals out and as a result I now have more financial worry.

I guess what I'm asking is which way does the causation go? Does being in poverty cause you to become overloaded or does the inability to prioritize well or think under stress cause the poverty? To me this question is neigh impossible to answer because you can't look at a single decision or experiment to determine the outcome.

My naive thinking about this kind of thing is that it's like a betting game. With 50/50 odds you might be up some or down some but in the long run little changes. A hundred $1 bets on a coin toss should leave you with just as much money as you started with. But if the odds change, even just a tiny bit, the outcome of a hundred bets gets really different. Having a slight edge on the house, 51% instead of 50%, can cause you to slowly but surely come ahead of the house. And similarly, going from 50% to 49% can cause you to slowly bleed to death.

Now some math. A 50% chance of winning is the same as a 100% payout. For each win you double your money, for each loss you get nothing. 51% is a 102% payout. 49% is a 98% payout. We'll neglect the notion of a finite bankroll since these are small bets; our bankroll is the full $100.

With 50% odds:

1^100 = 1 so you never make or lose money

With 51% odds:

1.02^100 = 7.24

With 49% odds:

0.98^100 = 0.133

Now of course I don't know how this game would scale to real life. Would a person have only a few chances in a lifetime to make these kinds of "bets" or do you get these chances several times a day? And what is the quantity of the bet? Is it how much I spend, or how much I choose to spend versus my other options of how much to spend?

For example if I feel thirsty I could choose to drink water from a drinking fountain (free) or buy a soda ($2). Is the bet quantity $2 (how much I spend or don't spend) or is it $1 because I either "double my money" (which is to say, I don't spend the $2) or I "lose that bet" buy the soda and spend the $2. I would tend to think it's a $1 bet.

Anyhow I'd love getting some kind of real feedback on the math here rather than just "you're an asshole for not thinking those in poverty are victims"

Retric• 13 years ago

Your thinking at to low a level, the choices that have real impact are things like:

  Where should I live? (Buy? Roommates?)
  What kind of car should I get? (Make? Age?)
  Sould I learn? (To cook, draw, lisp?)
  What kind of Heath insurance do I get? (none?) 
  What cellphone plan do I get.
  What do I do for entertainment?
  Should I start packing lunch?

Each of these can be with 100,000+$ at retirement should I get a soda while at I get gass may be habit forming, but it's got little long term impact. Edit: Getting a Starbucks coffie every day or bringing from home is also one of the 100,000+$ choices but only in terms of the habit not crap I forgot to buy beans what do I do?

pjungwir• 13 years ago

As someone who took a break from a good programming job to attend grad school (on a $20k/year stipend), I can say that for me the causality went poverty->stress. I've never had trouble with money management, but boy I sure sweated every little thing during those years. I was short with my wife and kids. I had sleepless nights. I had no idea how I would ever afford retirement or even health care. Now that I'm back to earning a good living my stress is way back down again. I feel my judgments are more considered, and I'm more confident in myself.

nickthemagicman7• 13 years ago

Your logic is flawed in that people in poverty everything is a priority.

When you live paycheck to paycheck you don't make 'decisions'. You just function and watch TV.

nknighthb• 13 years ago

Everyone has a sustainable comfort level. For most (single) people, that level is well above poverty, but well below a typical Silicon Valley programmer income. It's what you end up spending on ordinary monthly bills, food, and other routine needs and wants, including minor impulse purchases.

For me, when I lived in Santa Clara, this ran me about $2500, including medical premium and certain somewhat expensive tastes (and rarely cooking anything myself). It's where I typically ended up without thinking about it. (If I did watch myself a little more, I could pretty easily stay under $2000.)

I'm in a cheaper area now, but bought and partially renovated a decent sized house on half an acre in a semi-urban area, so the number has actually gone up a bit rather than down, but at the same time, some of the difference is effectively increasing my basis in a valuable asset.

If my income doubled, I'd get more work done on my house, but my routine expenses would otherwise remain largely unchanged. My savings would grow a lot faster. I would not have materially less money-related stress, because my needs are already more than met, not because my spending increased to compensate.

slurry2• 13 years ago

If you're curious about causality could have saved yourself the trouble of constructing these thought experiments by reading the abstract:

"[W]e examined the cognitive function of farmers over the planting cycle. We found that the same farmer shows diminished cognitive performance before harvest, when poor, as compared with after harvest, when rich. This cannot be explained by differences in time available, nutrition, or work effort...Instead, it appears that poverty itself reduces cognitive capacity."

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976.abstract

Buying or not buying a soda seems like a plausible example arithmetically, but in practice any personal budget that does not include a few small luxuries is not a personal budget that anyone is going to follow. If it's not a soda it's going to be a magazine or something else eventually.

Anyway, even if we concede arguendo that those now presently in poverty got there by being stupid and drinking soda they couldn't afford or not finding cheaper lodgings etc., if we somehow removed bad decision makers from the population it wouldn't mean an end to poverty. It would just mean good decision makers would find themselves in poverty. That's because we need at least 5% unemployment to keep inflation at bay, with some number above that underemployed and some number below that dropping out of the workforce entirely. While those states could theoretically be transitory for everyone, in practice they're going to be sticky for a large number. So even in a population of 100% good decision makers you're still going to have some poverty just so the central banks don't run up against NAIRU.

And then, if this paper is correct, those new poor are also going to start having a hard time with congnitive tasks.

delluminatus• 13 years ago

I also find that poverty detrimentally affects people's self-esteem and confidence. It's hard to avoid seeing income as a societal judgement of your value or ability (even though it really isn't).

I've seen this in my family: if people are laid off or struggling financially, it is just incredibly destructive. Losing a job had more impact on my relatives' happiness than getting a divorce. When I called my family I could tell they still hadn't gotten hired without having to ask. Their voice was depressed and they were frustrated with even the littlest things. It is heartbreaking to witness the effects of poverty in people you love.

I know when I was quite poor in college, thinking about money made my chest tighten and my eyes get hot. I knew I couldn't pay for a fourth year. If the slightest thing went wrong, I was just fucked. There was terrible anxiety, and simmering fury, that wasn't alleviated for years.

90002• 13 years ago

While this may not be true to everyone contributing their 2 cents on this piece, most folks here cannot possibly fathom nor understands what it's like to be buried in stress due to poverty or near poverty experiences. I, too, have experienced my fair share of impoverished conditions throughout the course of my life, but it is a bit difficult, even frustrating, trying to explain to someone the effects of poverty. The emotional and physical toll poverty takes on one individual is beyond belief, but some folks will never get it, to be honest. Furthermore, the effects never quite diminish, even if one is able to climb out of poverty, unfortunately.

w_t_payne• 13 years ago

It is all that and more; it is not just the extra mental effort, it is also the stress that messes with your ability to reason; that makes rationality diminish, and drives emotional instability and crisis creating behaviors.

ajslater• 13 years ago

There is a definition of "social class" I read in the last few years that separates income or wealth from social class. The definitive marker in this definition is the length of time you are able to plan for. Naturally wealth affects this, but is not the be all end all. This definition separates the spendy nouveau riche who blow millions on status markers as still being 'lower class', where thrifty thoughtful people of modest current means would be of a 'higher' social class.

Thoughtful thrifty people of great means are able to think in terms of what their grandchildren or foundation might be doing. The impoverished, disadvantaged of education (Like the SOB who stole my motorcycle only to crash it immediately) might be thinking minutes or hours into the future.

Having been in various economic conditions under varying amounts of stress, I find ritchiea's post dead on the money.

desas• 13 years ago

This is how the class system in Britain works. As far as I can tell in the US, wealth is the only input into the social class equation. In Britain there are lots of inputs e.g. where you went to school, your accent, your vocabulary, your occupation, your friends and that of your parents. Wealth is a very small input (except so far in that you can afford to send your kids to the "right" schools where they will make the "right" friends and perhaps ascend a rung).

goggles99• 13 years ago

I am sick of this whole notion that poor people cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This notion that "poverty taxes the brain" is utter nonsense. Peoples brains are generally not taxed by being poor, their brains are lazy and their attitudes are bad, that is why they are poor to begin with.

I take personal interest and issue with comments surrounding this since I lived it. I have personally experienced, watched and read detailed stories of so many living in America who have done just this - Pulled themselves up out of poverty.

My personal experience (and those close to me as well) with having almost nothing was this: You have a lot less to worry about (literally). You don't own much, you have a lot of time to think and research how best you should improve your life. You have less distractions and it is easier to focus on your goals and ambitions. If you have a simple budget (takes hardly any time to make one when you are poor) you don't have to even think about "will I have enough money to make rent this month". This whole notion of poverty taxing the brain is yet another "excuse" for the poor disadvantaged soul living in poverty.

It comes down to this, if someone works hard and makes good choices (either on their own accord or by following wise advice), they are absolutely going to escape the poverty they may have been born into or ended up in by some circumstance.

Let me give you a little example of how things have changed in the last couple of hundred years. Do you think that early settlers brains were "taxed" so hard that they could not work hard? That they could not make good choices? They had to work hard just to eat, just to feed their families (if they had them). If they made one bad choice or made one mistake, they could have lost their herd or crop. This could mean their very lives. They may never have been able to escape barely surviving back then, but times are much different today. Take that level of work ethic and wise/conscientious decision making and put it into the average poverty stricken youth today and do you think would happen?

Your family's lack of money should mean almost nothing today, if anything - it should be extra motivation to work hard and improve you and your family's lives. Is there a reason that a minority youth in the worst and poorest inner city project cannot go to school, pay attention in class, do their homework and achieve at least a "C" average? Well with that average, they will be accepted to any state college. If they are poor, there is a ton of financial aid (free money) available. If necessary - get a student loan (this is your ticket out of poverty here, it is worth it). This is the escape out of the projects that almost everyone can do. It will not cost you a single penny of your own money until you finish college. Even then you can take an online film study (or similar) class at a local community college ($50) every semester and put off paying back your student loan almost indefinitely.

we see case after case of middle or upper class people lose everything and climb back up out of poverty, immigrant after immigrant (or refugee) come to America with nothing to their name and even not be fluent in English in many cases, yet climb out of poverty, minorities from the poorest and most violent inner-city projects climb out of poverty, yet I hear again and again how and why people cannot do it on their own. Well people do. What makes these people so special? Are they extra smart? Do they have more attractive faces and bodies? What is it that allows some to climb out of poverty where most cannot.

The limiting factor here is themselves - their attitude. This has been fostered by such things as the collapse of the family, the loss of strong morals and ethics, the nanny state (creating dependency and sending a message that they cannot do it on their own - creating victims), the entitlement attitude, the victim and disenfranchised mentality, racism (I mean minorities toward majorities here), class envy, the entire black culture in America today.

You would think that if the government really wanted to solve poverty, they would lookup everyone in the country who had escaped poverty, and interview them. How did you do it? How could others do this too? Then publish the results in a big ad campaign.

What would we find? A huge overlap of answers (which I already outlined). The problem is - the government is not really interested in eliminating poverty. Nor keeping people out of prison. The government (generally) is not the friend of the minority or the impoverished. The government does not wish to eliminate or diminish itself by enabling people to become independent of it.

Is it "fair" that someone is born with a silver spoon in their mouth and can move through life lazy and comfortable, while another is born in poverty and must work harder and have to make better choices to succeed? Of course it is not "fair", but it is reality and it is not changing. I can tell you a fact though that the individual who pulls themselves up by their bootstraps is a lot happier and more content person than the one born into wealth. Is that "fair" too? Happiness is something that can never be purchased (for any amount of money).

jobu• 13 years ago

There was a recent article on LinkedIn that talked (anecdotally) about the same taxing on the brain for people that have limited time (http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130627224702-13...)

heatherph• 13 years ago

Isn't this essentially what Maslow's hierarchy states?

xutopia• 13 years ago

Exactly!

revelation• 13 years ago

Who knows, it is made up stuff with no basis in legitimate research.

dsq• 13 years ago

Eric Blair (known to some as George Orwell) wrote two of the most biting descriptions of the grind of poverty:

Down and out in Paris and London

http://www.george-orwell.org/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_Londo...

The Road to Wigan Pier

http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/

kenshiro_o• 13 years ago

I read Down And Out In Paris and London and would recommend it to anyone who wants to read a detailed account of how it was (and probably still is) to be poor at Orwell's time.

I believe The Road To Wigan Pier must be quite similar although it will most likely focus on British poverty. I think it is very hard to fully understand poverty unless one has lived in such conditions for a prolonged period of time as an adult (I don't know if they are any accurate studies on how it feels like to be a poor child).

theorique• 13 years ago

What is correlation and what is causation?

Is it possible that less intelligent people are shunted (through education, etc) into lower-paying jobs? Thus, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

smallish3• 13 years ago

You are suggesting that maybe poor people just have lower IQ, but this study doesn't support that.

It shows that cognitive performance between rich and poor is the same when they're asked questions which both groups consider easy and/or non-stressful.

bobbinsIII3• 13 years ago

the cognitive performance between rich and poor was the same in the sample they looked at (using their specific test). we know that is not true in general -- richer people are smarter on average.

AsymetricCom• 13 years ago

It's more like busy people are too busy to read the article so they post flamboyant comments hoping to get a tldr.

afterburner• 13 years ago

On a slight tangent, is the better education "rich" people are getting thanks to their money making them smarter in the first place though?

These things feed on each other, the feedback is a loop.

rsiqueira• 13 years ago

TL;DR: Poor people are 13 IQ points below non-poor because they spend "brain bandwidth" thinking about their poverty instead of doing other brain activities.

BetaCygni• 13 years ago

Doesn't the fact that they scored the same on the first tests actually prove that being rich or poor doesn't matter in practice?

If you give someone a problem to solve and then another one of course he will still be busy with the first. For rich people it's a simpler problem so they solve it quicker.

Of course it's possible to end up in a negative spiral. It's up to society to provide for people on a sufficient level that they can lift themselves up if they are able to.

venomsnake• 13 years ago

Being poor is a full time job. I have fasted for weeks without problems and yet on the one occasion in the last 20 years where I was unable to buy food for three days the hunger was severe and overwhelming - the experiences had nothing in common.

The cognitive load I have seen on friends struggling with poverty is immense - they are permanently mentally exhausted of all the hard decisions and complicated math needed to make the income last longer. When I was with a friend out buying groceries figuring out the correct amount of baby formula diapers and detergent to buy took half an hour (yeah I offered to helped with the bill, was rejected) and the amount saved compared to just throwing stuff from the shelf in the cart was less that 10% of the total.

Edit: Here is an idea for a product - easy to use program that balances the budget as good as possible while taking into account the unique challenges that struggling people are faced with.

michaelfdeberry• 13 years ago

Here is an idea for a product - easy to use program that balances the budget as good as possible while taking into account the unique challenges that struggling people are faced with.

It's a good idea, but saving money often has an up front cost and I think an app to help the poor would fall into that category.

The people that would end up benefiting from such an app would be people that could afford to purchase a device to run the app.

mkr-hn• 13 years ago

I think venomsnake's choice to use "program" instead of "app" was intentional. Most people have access to a computer at the library or even an aging Dell/Compaq that they bought when times were better. This hypothetical program sounds like something that could run inexpensively on AWS and save to Dropbox (like fargo.io).

superuser2• 13 years ago

An app... for people who can afford smartphones but not groceries?

It's an interesting problem, though. A smartphone app would be the perfect way to deliver that functionality, but if someone has a smartphone, they probably don't need it.

jerawolfe2• 13 years ago

The poor do tend to acquire cell-phones. They're necessary for survival and appearing that you aren't a lost cause.

So this would help many many struggling folk who do have access to the tech.

The prices for cellular service are still very high, though, and that's the biggest barrier. The poor who can't make the payments. But its not a bad idea that would help many people trying to move out and away from poverty

jerawolfe2• 13 years ago

http://goo.gl/TjeDJq

johnfuller• 13 years ago

I imagine this could also be applied to startups running out of cash. Not only do you have the stress of all the implications of running out of cash, but getting more cash becomes the number one priority, over things that you would otherwise be doing if you were flush. You might have to take on cash from sources you would otherwise decline. You might have to start thinking about doing client work. Fun stuff.

padobson• 13 years ago

Now that all of these perspectives have come together, the implications for how we think about poverty – and design programs for people impacted by it – are enormous.

So you mean it might be a bad idea to endlessly complicate the tax code and setup massive, complex bureaucracies all in the name of helping the poor? There's a chance they might not have the cognitive bandwidth to traverse these boondoggles designed to help them?

Simplicity will liberate as many or more people from poverty as generosity.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

Most of the complications in the tax code are not in the name of helping the poor.

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

So you mean it might be a bad idea to endlessly complicate the tax code and setup massive, complex bureaucracies all in the name of helping the poor?

We don't do that in the name of helping the poor.

We do that in the name of avoiding helping the undeserving (whether the undeserving poor or others undeserving of the help), and/or in the name of attempting to influence the behavior of the poor with "help" as an encouragement for them to accept the influence.

Accepting those kind of bureaucratic structures with those kind of motivations is often a political compromise made with those otherwise unwilling to help the poor in order to get some help to the poor, but helping the poor isn't the motivation for those particular structures.

Its not the people that want to help the poor that oppose simpler options like Basic Income.

amerika_blog• 13 years ago

Actual article:

http://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/30_aug...

Posting this does not necessarily convey agreement.

Carltonian3• 13 years ago

I'm witnessing this tax first hand right, but the tax is in a more literal sense. Some background: Right now my commute is about 35 minutes through Southern California (I live in Riverside and drive south to the Inland Empire). On Tuesday, my car was totaled. I was in the middle lane on a 3 lane highway when I saw someone coming up behind me a couple of miles before my exit, so I got over to the slow lane. Right as the car behind me was passing me in the middle lane, their tire exploded, spinning them into me, and spinning me across the freeway into the center divider.

This crash is an example of just how much money not having money costs. It wasn't an issue of the driver's unsafe driving, but of the driver's unsafe vehicle due to poor maintenance. Well, that driver doesn't even have insurance, let alone money to fix their balding tires. For now I'd agree with anyone that says it's their fault for driving it, because that's my insurance's stance and that's the stance that gets me reimbursed for my vehicle, but I can't help but see how if they wanted to fix the initial problem of poor maintenance and no insurance, then they'd need money, so they'd need to drive to work...

But it gets worse. My car handled the crash like a new car should. I was safe. I got a little whiplash but I felt fine and was back to work that day. Her car, much older than mine, flipped (exploding tires are about as bad as a car accident can get - keep up on your treads and watch the air pressure in the summer folks!) and she left the scene unconscious in an ambulance. Now I don't know what the statistics are, but my bet is if you don't have car insurance, you're note likely to have medical either. So this woman, who started too broke to replace her tires, now has whatever legal trouble one gets for not having insurance, has no drivable vehicle, huge medical bills, and whatever suit my insurance files against her.

Me, I'm fine, but I'm without a car (and I opted out of the rental car coverage, and she has no insurance to reimburse me for one), so in the name of frugality I start taking the bus. I go against traffic on my daily drive, so there aren't many routes, but there is one. It makes 93 stops between Downtown Riverside and my place of work. It takes about 2 hours 15 minutes with walking time. That's over an hour and a half longer than my commute driving. I'm on the bus with a few other people who make the same trip. Right now my life consists of waking up, walking to the bus, sitting on the bus, going to work, walking back to the bus, taking it home, walking home, eating a small meal, and going to bed to repeat the process tomorrow. Not to mention last night the bus was 2 hours late because of flash floods in Riverside. I got home after my bed time. Everyone this morning was taxed by pretty much all definitions of the word. Night class? Studying for that certificate to get a promotion? Reading a fucking novel? Ain't nobody got time for that.

homosaur• 13 years ago

You do have time to read, though. You just stated you have 2 hours on a bus.

Carltonian3• 13 years ago

True, and I'm already 10 chapters into Moby Dick, but it's just not the best environment for that. It feeds back into the article. There's a reason studying is synonymous with a quiet place, or with people also studying with you. Doing it under less ideal circumstances than that creates overhead on your attempts to "get ahead" that people with means do not have to deal with. Not making excuses for myself, I am of means, but I can definitely see how an uphill situation quickly becomes a complete vertical situation.

ljf3• 13 years ago

I used to commute nearly an hour each way on the tube in London, and read endlessly. Until someone asked me about the books I'd read lately and in could barely recall then story lines. Yes at the time I was engaged and was enjoying the story and act of reading, but it just didn't go in to my mind in the same way that reading at home or on the beach does.

So I stopped reading and started cycling. Much better use of my time, and I was forced to spend that time with my thoughts (and watching my safety on the road) I was better off mentally than when I was kidding myself that I was being productive.

I'm not saying you can't read or work on a commute, but it did not work for me in the slightest.

mikeash2• 13 years ago

Why not rent a car on your own dime? A low-end one can be cheap, on the order of $20-25/day, which is pretty reasonable to save you a lot of time on the bus until you find a new car. Obviously not an option for poorer people, which is your whole point, but it could be a good option for you.

joshdance• 13 years ago

I think this is related to the research that your willpower and energy is limited. When you have to make tough decisions over the course of the day you get run down, and start making worse decisions.

colmvp• 13 years ago

I wonder if being ugly taxes the brain too, as ugly people probably have sex less than average to beautiful people.

smtddr• 13 years ago

This makes perfect sense. If you're all stressed out trying to figure out if you'll have next month's rent or how you're gonna eat this week, you won't have the mindset to read a good book, consider how to improve your life in the long term or just relax your mind with some smooth jazz.

A sorta near-topic question.

How often do people check their bank account balance? I've been told I'm odd for not checking at least once a week. Do people who have more money not bother checking it? I only check once a month, when I'm about to pay my mortgage. Sometimes not even then, which means I don't know what my balance is for 2 months.

ljf3• 13 years ago

I am OK off these days, but have never really considered myself rich, but I go months without checking my bank account or even credit card bill. I don't need to as I simply know that I am spending less than I earn. Even at university when I had £5000 too live on in London, I rarely checked.

I come from a frugal family, so I always consider before I buy something. But even for larger purchases I just know what's in my savings roughly and go for it. It helps that while I've not been commanding very high wages, I have been employed consistently since I left university 14 years ago.

nwhitehead• 13 years ago

This is a good paper but I believe it is misinterpreting the results. There is strong evidence that people have a limited capacity for making tough decisions. This "willpower" or "bandwidth" gets used up as decisions are made. I think the right interpretation of the results of the experiments is that fixed price decisions are tougher decisions for poorer people than for richer people. This interpretation would differ from "poverty impedes cognition" in the decisions of richer people to bigger price tag scenarios. I would expect asking richer people about what they would do if their house were destroyed in a plausible way not covered by their insurance would induce a similar cognitive impairment.

jes• 13 years ago

This article made me think about David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) system / methodology.

One of the ideas in GTD is that by getting organized and using a trusted reminder system, you free up some subconscious processing capacity.

I have found GTD to be helpful.

jrn• 13 years ago

I think their experiment may be an example of prospect theory in action. And relative utilities/loss aversion.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory

morgante• 13 years ago

The experiment really doesn't match up with what they're saying. It's certainly well studied that making difficult decisions taxes you mentally, and it's not surprising that spending $1,500 is a more difficult decision for someone with a lower net worth.

Where it falls apart is with the assumption that only the poor have to make difficult decisions. If anything, wealthier people spend a lot more time making decisions at work and receive commiserate cognitive load. Not sure working at McDonalds requires you to make any decisions at all.

Even if we're going to pretend that financial decisions are the only decisions in life, I still think the poor might expend less cognitive energy. Frequently they are poor because they specifically avoid making financial decisions. (Hence that's not a cognitive load.) On the flip side, people with more significant assets have to make more significant/difficult allocation decisions, etc.

ljf3• 13 years ago

Mental bandwidth is not just purely down to the decisions you make for yourself, do you think working in McDonald's is not a stressful way to spend your day? These days I have a pretty high stress job, but I know which rile I'd rather be doing.

You also have to remember that for many people in a service role, that might be the only job they could find and they don't have the chances we do to pick and choose roles based on interesting projects.

unono2• 13 years ago

Poverty is a great opportunity for startups. There's huge pent up demand for crowd sourcing of the Mechanical Turk variety. There's no real reason a person shouldn't be able to work anytime, using just a smartphone, and earn a middle class income. This is going to be huge next year, 2014 will be the year of the crowd-work.

tluyben2• 13 years ago

What kind of work are you talking about? I live in a village/province/country with a very high unemployment rate for part of the year; I tried getting people (esp youth) here in the village to do the work you suggest; it's simply not possible. They cannot do it; not native English and the jobs which are out there are either trivial for a computer to do meaning they pay literally cents or too hard for them to do (correctly) even after training.

Yes, most US citizens with a smart phone (they were poor right, smartphone?) and a few neurons could get to a level of a few $100/month doing jobs which are or almost are doable by computers now. Check the HITs on mturk currently; there are exactly these 2 categories; most of them are already doable (and very easy as well) by computers and the rest is too hard for someone who is not native English speaking or who is just not smart enough.

unono2• 13 years ago

The crowd-work industry is woefully immature at the moment. However, it's potential is far greater, 1000000x or more.

The way to imagine it is that all work that gets done in the world could be split up into pieces and coordinated by software. When there is a lot of this crowd-work to go around, prices will rise and crowd-workers will earn a reasonable income.

Much of enterprise software today is already this, the filling in forms and systemic procedures. However, it hasn't been intelligently designed to be distributed through the internet, instead having been mostly a transfer of pen and paper forms into a computer.

Another type of crowd-work is of the physical variety, what amazon, uber, task-rabbit do. There are complaints that these reduce wages, but I don't buy that. There is pent-up demand for things that currently don't get done. For example, I might hire someone to clean my house, but the current mechanisms are too much effort. If there was an uber-like button to press, I might do it every once in a while.

I could get carried away and talk about this for hours so I'll stop. But the essential point is to reorganize all work through web and mobile interfaces, have human -> computer -> human, instead of the inefficient human -> human system.

mabhatter2• 13 years ago

yeah, they just proved Maslow's hierarchy of needs from another angle.

GigabyteCoin• 13 years ago

Who'd of thought?

Just keep the majority of your people poor/starving/wanting, and they'll have no time to contemplate how to overthrow your regime.

What a concept.

ALee• 13 years ago

This list by John Scalzi seems to help us figure out the actual aspects that take away cognitive volume: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1712493

In general, it makes sense, since a lot of behavioral research shows that making too many decisions takes away our power to make other decisions and cognitive power.

How Poverty Taxes the Brain

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