

What Poverty Does to Your Brain - cdvonstinkpot
http://www.attn.com/stories/2442/effects-poverty-brain-mental-health

======
kirinan
I lived this first hand. I grew up in extreme poverty (by the US standards
anyways) where my electricity/water were cut off occasionally and occasionally
would have to wonder if I was going to eat that night. Though this is still
better than most of the world, it sucked. a lot. No christmas, no birthdays.
The most interesting part is now im software engineer making really good
money, I can still see the rest of my family with the same mindset that
enabled that kind of poverty. While I live below my means, they regularly live
above it. They lack the self control to regulate their spending, if they get
money they spend it like it might go away if they don't. Its institutional in
ways because their parents were poor. Although I broke the cycle, my brother
didnt and shows a lot of the same patterns. This article hits the point head
on. I wonder if there is a way to hack the cycle and reduce the institutional
aspect of poverty.

~~~
tomp
There was a really good article a while ago (this one, I think [1]), about why
the poor make bad choices. Basically, the gist of it is that long-term, it
doesn't matter - even if they made "good" choices, they would still remain
poor. So they make "bad" choices (unprotected sex, pregnancy, smoking, impulse
buying) that give them short-term pleasure, and hope they will get by somehow.

Do you think this would be possible for your family as well? For example,
maybe your mindset is "save" because you earn a good salary and you know that
if you save, in a few years you'll be well-off and will be able to afford
exponentially more, whereas the rest of your family objectively has no way out
of poverty, so they don't even try.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/21/linda-
tirado-...](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/21/linda-tirado-
poverty-hand-to-mouth-extract)

~~~
evanpw
I agree that savings and restraint in spending are not the main issue. But on
the other hand, if you:

1) Graduate high school,

2) Wait until age 21 to get married, and wait until marriage to have children;
and

3) Have a full time job (any full time job),

then you have a 2% chance of living in poverty, and a 75% chance to be middle
class. So in order to argue that bad choices don't matter, you need to make
the case that one of these three steps is impossible for most people who are
poor. I think your best bet is #3.

[1]
[http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/03/13-join-m...](http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/03/13-join-
middle-class-haskins)

~~~
tomp
It's not clear from the article if those percentages include all of the
society or just those that started out poor. If it's the former, it might be
just correlation, not causation.

~~~
evanpw
I'm pretty sure it's the former. I don't find it plausible that these three
things wouldn't have a causal effect on income, but it's a fair point that it
would be more useful to see those percentages broken down by starting income
level.

------
littletimmy
I don't know why the poor just don't kill the rich, to be honest. I'm not
poor, but if my child was suffering because of abject poverty and lack of
healthcare while some asshole was buying a $50000 Birkin bag, I'd probably
tear up the person with the bag. Why do the poor not just revolt?

~~~
jeremyt
Because people have an innate sense of right and wrong. The concept that you
should not kill someone else in order to take with they have has been shown to
be almost universal across time and culture.

~~~
13of40
I don't think that's the whole story. I read a really eye-opening book a while
back that was essentially an insider's guide to surviving in prison, and one
of the things that stuck with me was the idea that people behave themselves
(for the most part) in that environment because there's always somewhere
"further down" in the system they can send you as punishment. It's the same on
the outside. In the US, at least, you have to be really, really poor before
being in prison for the rest of your life is a better option. Most poor people
have lives, friends, family, a daily routine, freedoms, possessions, etc.,
that they'd be putting at risk if they decided to start murdering random rich
people. Especially at scale.

------
Mz
My mother's mother's family had some kind of low level noble title that was
sold when the family fell on hard times. She grew up in serious poverty
because she grew up in Germany during WWII and its aftermath. My father grew
up in the Great Depression and fought in two wars. Having known serious
privation, they both placed a high value on making sure people got fed well.

When I was growing up, my father was often unemployed for months at a time.
But they had put a very large down payment on the house we lived in, such that
their house payment was about 40% of what the neighbors were paying for nearly
identical houses. We had a garden and a good percentage of the meat we ate was
game, often hunted by my father.

So we tended to have not much money and generally had less income than the
neighbors, but we ate a helluva lot better than other folks around us. I lived
almost like people did 100 or more years ago, before work was about earning
money per se, when it was much more about literally putting food on the table.

I have a genetic disorder. It was diagnosed late in life, at age 35. I think
it took me that long to get sick enough to get diagnosed in part because I was
fed so well and I continued that tradition after I moved out.

I am currently homeless, somewhat by choice and somewhat not. This has been on
my mind a lot here lately: I wonder how much it is a real choice and how much
it is a lack of viable options. The short version is that the options
available to me failed to support my goal of getting well.

And I am getting well. A very big part of how that is happening is based on
eating right. Part of the upshot of getting well is that my brain works
better.

For six months, I was homeless in La Jolla, one of the two most expensive zip
codes in the US. I was surrounded by college students from very wealthy
families who did things like flew home to another continent for Christmas and
told humorous stories about casually lost expensive electronics. These kids
were often envious of what I was eating. They made remarks that made it pretty
clear they really did not know how to properly feed themselves.

I don't know the answer. But I don't think this is about money per se. We seem
to think wealth is about having lots of stuff. As a society, I feel like we
have lost our way in some important way.

I wonder a lot how to solve that problem.

------
ArikBe
Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington and Johannes Haushoffer wrote at length about the
behavioral economics of poverty:

[http://static.squarespace.com/static/52522308e4b0bcf2bc4dab4...](http://static.squarespace.com/static/52522308e4b0bcf2bc4dab45/t/545d7e36e4b0a8163fff9112/1415413302956/Sheehy-
Skeffington%2C+Haushofer+et+al+2014+Psychology+of+Poverty+%28all+chapters%29.pdf#page=98)

The whole PDF is in fact dedicated to outlining strategies for the reduction
of poverty.

The study quoted in the article about scarcity and cognitive performance by
Mani et al can be found here:

[http://psych.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/research/shafir...](http://psych.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/research/shafir/pubs/PovertyImpedesCognitiveFunction.pdf)

I used it as the main document guiding my Msc. thesis research into poverty,
cognitive function, and healthy meal choice.

~~~
garrettgrimsley
This is your MSc. thesis that you are referring to? For anyone else
interested:

[http://thesis.eur.nl/pub/30170/MA-
Thesis_Arik_Beremzon_41620...](http://thesis.eur.nl/pub/30170/MA-
Thesis_Arik_Beremzon_416202ab.pdf)

------
im3w1l
>found that kids living in households just above the federal povertylevel had
gray matter volumes that were 3 to 4 percentage points below the norm for
their age group. The lower volume was concentrated in the brain's frontal and
temporal lobes, regions that are implicated in behavioral and learning
problems. Among kids living below the federal poverty line, gray matter
volumes were 8 to 10 percent below the norm. On average, these kids performed
4 to 7 points worse on standardized tests.

A _partial_ explanation could also be that they grew up in poverty because
their parents were too genetically stupid to earn good cash / living within
their means. I think this hypothesis is supported by adoption studies.

~~~
MaysonL
_A partial explanation could also be that they grew up in poverty because
their parents were too genetically stupid to earn good cash / living within
their means. I think this hypothesis is supported by adoption studies._

And a partial explanation for why you believe this is that you've been
indoctrinated and propagandized and peer-group socialized into believing this.
See the studies that compare incomes between adopted and biological children
and adoptive and biological parents. Environment is by far the determninant.

~~~
reasonishy
Genes are by far the most important factor. If you've bred animals, you'll
understand this. Take a couple of poor animals and breed them. They'll have
poor offspring. You can do all you like in their environment, but they'll
still be poor. Select high quality parents, and you'll have high quality
offspring. Selective breeding works extremely well to produce the best quality
animals/plants.

I have no idea why we're in an age where it's so un-politically correct to say
this about humans. Some people just seem to have their fingers in their ears
when it comes to inconvenient facts that don't mesh with their "everyone is
equal!" agenda.

edit: Downvote away. I'm sure that'll change the obvious biological facts.

~~~
maxucho
Genes may play a factor, but they are certainly not the most important one, or
even a significant one in this context. If you grow up in a poor family / poor
neighborhood, you won't have access to the same education as those who grow up
in middle-class areas. Education is far more important to what we consider
"intelligence" in this context. Basic math, financial literacy, or even
reading comprehension is far more a result of your education than it is of
your genetic material.

It's easy, as a product of good education and a safe environment, to look at
people in poverty and say "I guess they're not as smart as me." This hides a
far more uncomfortable truth, which is that everyone who doesn't grow up in
poverty has access to better education, better opportunities, and a better
environment than those in poverty. Try as you might to claim that people in
poverty are just "stupider", it's simply impossible to make this comparison
given that people on opposite ends of the financial spectrum grow up in
totally different environments. It's short-sighted to attribute this to
genetics and nothing else.

I'm just going to hazard a guess that you didn't grow up in poverty, am I
right? If you had, I'm sure you would have a very different idea about how
difficult it is to grow up without all the advantages of a middle-class
upbringing.

~~~
Thriptic
I don't think it's correct to say one way or the other what the critical
driver is, as to my knowledge we don't have the necessary data to make such
statements. Both genetics and environment likely play a role. We as a society
have decided that it is unethical / not in our societal best interest to
perform the experiments necessary to further investigate the mechanism, and so
we should focus our efforts on alleviating environmental drivers of the
problem. With that being said, to write off theoretical heritable causes of
poverty or low intelligence just because they makes us uncomfortable would be
bad science. We should be transparent about the limitations of our data and
admit that as a society we are content with not knowing the answer to this
question.

~~~
reasonishy
The other issue is that society has become so detached from nature that a lot
of people are completely oblivious. If you breed animals, questions like this
are pretty obvious and easy to answer.

------
blfr
They try to control for genetic factors by comparing children at lower ages
first ( _We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same_
) but it is a very curious property of IQ that its heritability increases
significantly with age.

------
sctb
A recent related discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673796](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673796)

------
cletus
Any discussion about poverty is worth including _decision fatigue_ [1].

I've never been so poor as to lose water/electricity or to ever worry about if
I was going to eat that night but there was a time as a child where we weren't
_that_ far off (in retrospect).

So I don't presume to be able to speak from experience about true poverty but
the after-effects of living even a relative (by Western standards) meager
existence are interesting.

Others have mentioned about those who are poor tend to spend all their money
in case it goes away. The NYT piece mentions this as well. It's also why there
are big purchases of TVs and the like around the time poor families in the US
receive their EITC refunds.

In my case I've had periods where I've been out of work and thankfully I could
quickly adjust my expenses to my circumstances. The ability to live frugally
is a useful one.

On the flipside, I am a software engineer. I make a good living. I sit in a
Manhattan apartment that I own and still part of me is planning for what to do
if it all goes away. I guess having contingencies isn't a bad thing but I
wonder if that's really what it is. Or is it just a subconscious expectation
of a meager existence? Is that a result of a fairly humble childhood or
something else? Maybe that's the software engineer part of me working out
worst case outcomes. Or maybe it's the expectation of worst case outcomes that
is applied quite usefully to software engineering?

I really can't say.

I do however see people who barrel along with the unstated expectation that
the good times will continue forever. I can't say why they are this way. It
does seem like it's a better way to live though because even though things may
take a turn for the worse what is the sense in worrying about it?

Fifty years the US had the "war on poverty" and despite the billions spent the
poverty rate remains about the same. This does seem to suggest there are
behavioural issues that either make someone more prone to being poor and
making it harder to escape.

In many cases I'm sure the problem is simply not knowing any better. I do
wonder if genetic traits/dispositions play a part, particularly in the areas
of impulse control, which itself tends to lead to increased violence, unwanted
pregnancy and other outcomes that are likely to result in the continuing
poverty

Circumstances matter a lot. For example, I find the Freakonomics argument that
legalized abortion led to reduce crime [2] to be compelling.

Still I imagine if you took someone born in poverty and put them an an
environment where they had every advantage of the affluent, their outcomes
would be a lot better.

[1]: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-
fro...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-
decision-fatigue.html)

[2]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk6gOeggViw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk6gOeggViw)

------
tuyguntn
_Children from low-income households tend to have poorer academic performance
and lower standardized test scores than kids from higher-income families_

For me this part is totally wrong, Dummy comparison, I don't know Scientist
who's father was billionaire or even millionaire. Some of the kids from high-
income families are even spoiled a lot (thinking about Paris Hilton).

My academic performance was at top 1% at school, but I was almost at the
bottom when sorted by family income.

Its not poverty changes brain, its your parents mindset change your brain.

~~~
jbapple
> For me this part is totally wrong

The article discusses scientific findings. Your anecdotal experience does not
change those findings.

~~~
tuyguntn
when statistics done using very small fraction of population or even
represents some tiny part of the world (say 200 kids from USA or 10000 kids
from UK) then it doesn't work in other parts of the world, look at how many
poor people live in India, China but their economy is growing, sometimes I
offer very abstract or dummy comparison, some of them:

If poverty was the main reason for poor performance then China, India, Brazil
should not grow in such pace

Look at this study [1], _This means that employees who are intrinsically
motivated are three times more engaged than employees who are extrinsically
motivated (such as by money)._

You may say this is not related to topic, but I guess they are related,
overall what I want to say is high-income doesnt mean better performance, its
your mindset and how your parents grow you affects your performance, numbers
are wrong when conducted only in very small subset of population, they are
just thoughts for other subset of population which are very similar in
lifestyle and mindset.

[1] - [https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-
motiv](https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv)

