
How Poverty Taxes the Brain - jonbaer
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/
======
ritchiea
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301856)
although thankfully the commenter does acknowledge he is being cynical and
disrespectful.

~~~
msandford
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"

~~~
slurry
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](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.

~~~
msandford
The argument wasn't that drinking soda caused poverty. It was a thought
experiment about the idea that a person's decisions are cumulative and that a
person could lean ever so slightly towards saving and slowly dig themselves
out of poverty, or ever so slightly towards spending and find themselves in
poverty. And that it wouldn't necessarily take hundreds of year for those
decisions to add up, that perhaps it could happen in a few years or a decade.

I definitely don't understand the link between unemployment and inflation.
Could you elaborate a bit how full employment causes inflation? I'm not being
purposefully dense; I just don't get it.

~~~
slurry
I know I characterized your argument a bit harshly. It's probably true? In
some cases? All? I don't know. The paper doesn't rule it out. It does purport
to show that causality does run the other way [as well].

Anyway, I just think it's important to keep in mind how much the macro
environment affects which bad decisions get punished and how much. The same
mistake that might have got you a nasty email from the boss in the late 90s
might have got you fired in the late 00s. The sorting effect you hypothesize
might happen, but there's significant variability in how harsh it is, at least
a portion of which we have control over.

As for inflation and unemployment, basically all mainstream economists agree
that there is something called NAIRU, the non-accelerating inflation rate of
unemployment. It's the rate of unemployment below which inflation starts to
accelerate. The Wikipedia article isn't very helpful but here it is:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAIRU](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAIRU)

and related:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve)

Here are Excel files of historical NAIRU rates targeted by the Federal
Reserve:

[http://www.phil.frb.org/research-and-data/real-time-
center/g...](http://www.phil.frb.org/research-and-data/real-time-
center/greenbook-data/nairu-data-set.cfm)

Here is a paper on NAIRU (opening section is a reasonably good general
introduction) by Greg Mankiw, who is not my favorite economist but very widely
respected [pdf]:

[http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/jep.ballmankiw...](http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/jep.ballmankiw.pdf)

The section on why NAIRU exists basically concludes "nobody knows."
Unfortunately this is macroeconomics so there's a lot of just-becausing.

I'm not sure if it's a good theory or not but it's widely believed by
economists, especially central bankers. So if unemployment goes above a given
rate, which changes depending on circumstances (I think the latest estimate is
6.5%), they're going to tighten the money supply anyway so that growth and
especially job growth slow down.

So essentially, it's an unstated national policy in almost every country _not_
to have full employment.

~~~
msandford
Okay I'm glad to see that it's not something you espouse yourself necessarily,
but rather a phenomena that central bankers believe in and thus act
accordingly to. Macro stuff is weird and generally wrong IMO but I didn't go
through any formal economics. That might make me more qualified or less,
depending on your point of view.

At any rate thanks for helping me understand the NAIRU rather than just
calling me an idiot.

I agree completely that the macro environment is hugely influential. Saving
and frugality are beneficial at one interest rate or naive and foolish at
another. It's really strange how the "common sense" idea that you shouldn't
spend money you don't have is 100% true at 10% interest but only about 5% true
at 1% interest. Especially with inflation at a couple percent.

------
astine
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
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.

------
dsq
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...](http://www.george-
orwell.org/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_London/)

The Road to Wigan Pier

[http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/](http://www.george-
orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/)

~~~
kenshiro_o
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).

------
victoriap
>>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?

~~~
angersock
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
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.

~~~
Daishiman
Good, you had the energy, youth and education to know how to acquire loans
without getting shorted, working 16 hours without preoccupation for other
things aside from your own well-being (your business very much counts as
that), and in the context of an incubator.

Now think of someone with little formal education who has been taught all his
life that there is not way to solve those issues because you don't know
_anyone_ who has gotten out of that shithole.

What motivation would you have?

People seem to underestimate how important is to have a glimmer of hope that a
situation is insurmountable. Sitting in a couch watching TV is not an
irrational response for spending _decades_ under that situation without any
possibility of clawing your way out.

------
padobson
_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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

------
tankenmate
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.

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

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

------
johnfuller
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.

------
morgante
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.

~~~
ljf
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.

------
unono
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
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.

~~~
unono
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.

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

~~~
Carltonian
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.

~~~
dllthomas
I've been making some good progress coding on the bus, fwiw... but a new,
light-ish laptop with battery life certainly helps with that, so that's more
an argument for why more people with means should be taking the bus more
rather than any kind of dismissal of your thesis.

~~~
Carltonian
(Sorry for the late reply) I spent too much time over the past few months
putting a budget together, and I'm about to head back to school to finish the
last year of my degree while working, after which I'm likely getting married,
so I'm being frugal. My response to my car crash was, "get through this
spending as little money as possible. Also make going without a car hurt so
that paying for rental car coverage next time is easier". I also thought the
ordeal would be handled by my insurance by last Friday, but the police report
hasn't been finished and is holding everything up.

As for the laptop, I've got a Samsung Chromebook (the small, ARM one) running
Ubuntu and I recommend it. It's ARM, which makes getting things running a bit
hard, and it's not the beefiest, so if you want to wait for the new ones this
year that will likely be x86 and beefier for $250, you can do that too. I
don't take it on the bus though. That was the first bit of advice I got from
someone else on the bus.

~~~
dllthomas
_" Also make going without a car hurt so that paying for rental car coverage
next time is easier."_

On the flip side, I like to make sure I can get by without a car. Of course,
my understanding is that's a whole ton easier up here (Bay Area) than down
there.

Congrats on the impending nuptials!

------
smtddr
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.

~~~
ljf
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
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
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.

------
BetaCygni
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.

------
rsiqueira
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.

------
jobu
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...](http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130627224702-13780238-a-harvard-
economist-s-surprisingly-simple-productivity-secret))

------
ALee
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](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.

------
jrn
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](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory)

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

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

~~~
crusso
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.

------
joshdance
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.

------
GigabyteCoin
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.

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

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

------
theorique
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.

~~~
smallish
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.

~~~
bobbinsIII
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.

~~~
smallish
Good point. What I mean to say is that the question of "who's smarter, rich or
poor?" is not relevant to the study in question, and can't explain the
results.

------
venomsnake
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
> 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
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).

------
amerika_blog
Actual article:

[http://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/30_aug...](http://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/30_august_2013?sub_id=0dfUZ0WPCi6D&folio=976#pg76)

Posting this does not necessarily convey agreement.

------
crusso
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.

~~~
floobynewb
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.

~~~
foobarbazqux
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.

------
schoper
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
> > 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?

~~~
schoper
It's not a moral calculus, Dan.

