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Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

princeton.edu

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Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#61

Post by dorchadas »

tuesdayrain wrote: post #18
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is so much to gain by doing so, for everyon Not for everyone. For young people. The way we’ll get UBI is by repurposing Social Security and possibly Medicare funds for its purpose. That, in turn, requires millenials turn out to vote.

If UBI leads to increased productivity, everyone would benefit. Not just people who need it.

If we had UBI and a single payer system, I think we would see lots of productivity. And not just in direct monetary means, but also in terms of cultural output and people finally are free of being tied to a job and can take a chance. Same with new businesses that'll be popping up.

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#62

Post by dorchadas »

adynatos wrote: post #41
hellofunk wrote: post #12

Basic income. The older I get the more I strongly hope that the future finds some version of the ideas currently in research and testing regarding basic life support to all peoples. There is so much to gain by doing so, for everyone, whether you personally need it or not.

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Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#63

Post by DoreenMichele »

saintPirelli wrote: post #58
DoreenMichele wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, one serious medical crisis can simultaneously make you exhausted and unable to think straight while plunging you into poverty that is nigh impossible to escape. For many Americans, the only bad life choice they made was being born here, then routine attrition took care of the rest because if you live long enough, you are pretty much guaranteed to have a serious health issue. It's just a matter of time.

Yes, bad things happen to people. I absolutely agree. I fail to see how that statement is related to the article or my comment on it though.

It means it isn't a chicken and egg problem. It isn't a question of which came first: bad decisions or poverty? You can be comfortably well off, do all the right things and find your life suddenly coming unraveled through no fault of your own.

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#64

Post by dnh44 »

cdoxsey wrote: post #56
dd36 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is more wealthy. Moreover, perhaps Norway is wealthier because of its support systems.

Norway is wealthy because of oil: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_N...

Lots of countries have abundant natural resources. Most of those resources are exploited by private interests though.

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#65

Post by cdoxsey »

Poverty can also be a trap because the simple solution (just giving someone money to alleviate poverty) isn't the same as earned success.

When you feel like you've earned money through hard work and you feel like you're a contributor and needed and respected by your peers it brings a significant amount of satisfaction and happiness in life, which in turn drives you to be more productive and alters the way you think about your resources.

When you're given wealth, you don't feel like you've earned it, you have no buy-in, and you feel like a burden to those around you. You can see the difference starkly with those who earn wealth and those who inherit it. All to often the next generation squanders it.

I think we should give money to those in need, in fact I think it's a moral imperative. But I also think it's important to remember the more complex human psychology behind the scenes. In addition to satisfying basic needs how can we get this person a meaningful way to contribute and feel like they're earning what they're given in the future. How can we plug them into a community that can sustain them through tough times, and likewise that they can support?

Consider http://streetsteam.org/model which supplies the homeless with work cleaning city streets:

> We believe that treating people with dignity and empowering them to be a part of the solution to their struggles is a major factor in their ultimate success.

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#66

Post by saintPirelli »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #63
saintPirelli wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, bad things happen to people. I absolutely agree. I fail to see how that statement is related to the article or my comment on it though.

It means it isn't a chicken and egg problem. It isn't a question of which came first: bad decisions or poverty? You can be comfortably well off, do all the right things and find your life suddenly coming unraveled through no fault of your own.

You can also be uncomfortably poor, win the lottery and find your life suddenly becoming amazing through no fault of your own.

You shouldn't use edge cases to discuss a general rule.

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#67

Post by WalterBright »

dd36 wrote: post #52
gaius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing about the "young people" argument: the young, because time, live in a world built by the old. Everything from the physical infrastructure to the social institutions. So if paying for pensions is a wealth transfer from young to old, usage of the built environment is the opposite flow. In other words, the people who built say the roads did so for a package of renumeration that included a salary and a p…

And debt is an intergenerational tax that fully offsets your argument. The young didn’t run deficits.

With a fiat money system, there's no requirement to ever pay it off. It isn't like credit card debt. The central bank just issues more money.

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#68

Post by vertex-four »

cdoxsey wrote: post #65

Poverty can also be a trap because the simple solution (just giving someone money to alleviate poverty) isn't the same as earned success. When you feel like you've earned money through hard work and you feel like you're a contributor and needed and respected by your peers it brings a significant amount of satisfaction and happiness in life, which in turn drives you to be more productive and alters the way you think a…

Note that Streets Team doesn't pay anybody - nobody's earning anything. I see people forced into "volunteering" or working below minimum wage regularly in the UK in order to receive benefits.

Forcing people to work for near-nothing is detrimental to their health - it doesn't help anyone feel like they're earning a living, since they're not, and in fact in practice this practice is just the Government giving companies near-free human labour, with the threat to said humans of killing them (by removing the resources they need to survive). There's also a remarkable amount of people who can't work and maintain their health at the same time (mental illness), who should be on disability benefits but have been denied them, who are badly affected by policies like this one.

Go far enough down this line and we have the workhouses of the past.

By all means - provide people with the opportunity to access work (The Big Issue et al), or the ability to volunteer and develop their skills and resume. But don't force them to in order to access the money they need to survive.

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#69

Post by JanisL »

weddpros wrote: post #10
maym86 wrote: post #2

All programmers here know how hard it is to get work done when you need to focus and are in a disruptive environment. It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead.

This is my concern with the article: maybe the impairment doesn't necessarily depend on scarcity/money... Maybe it's more a matter of bandwidth, in which case blaming Poverty only sounds quite ideological. 1- Does the bandwidth problem go away when you fix poverty (costly but easy to measure)? 2- Does the problem go away when you lessen perceived stress instead? (teach meditation/auto-hypnosis and measure if it helps…

Anecdotally, reducing poverty has greatly improved the ability of me and some people I've known in similar economic situations to be productive as professional software developers. Being distracted by issues arising due to having no money has never been a benefit to productivity in my experience (and I'm specifically talking about the psychological side of things here, obviously if you lack the money to buy things that are productivity boosters poverty impact is much more tangible). Stress on the other hand has a different effect which is sometimes positive and sometimes negative. The way in which stress operates is fundamentally different. Specifically the notion of getting into a state of flow is very much about having the optimal amount of arousal/stress, too much leads to overwhelm and too little leads to boredom and disengagement. The issue with scarcity (of which poverty is a form) shows through even when you are working on something interesting because it's more of a background annoyance. Meditation definitely helps you feel better and widens the window in which you can get into those states of concentrated flow (because it increases your capacity to focus) but it's a bit orthogonal to the scarcity issues. Meditation greatly helps with stress levels and focus but not so much bandwidth. (I've found meditation only really helps bandwidth in the cases of pathological stress where the stress gets to the point where the brain starts to shut down but that's a different category of stress to day-to-day stress and perhaps is better described with a different wording)

Re: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

#70

Post by JanisL »

saintPirelli wrote: post #66
DoreenMichele wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means it isn't a chicken and egg problem. It isn't a question of which came first: bad decisions or poverty? You can be comfortably well off, do all the right things and find your life suddenly coming unraveled through no fault of your own.

You can also be uncomfortably poor, win the lottery and find your life suddenly becoming amazing through no fault of your own. You shouldn't use edge cases to discuss a general rule.

I think the argument people are making is that it's a lot less of an edge case than people think.
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