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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)

#81

Post by chiefalchemist »

blablabla123 wrote: post #74

This is discriminating. Articles with a similar sentiment have been posted here recently, authored by people on the other end of the capital spectrum. So count in that bias. One doesn't really need a study to show that accumulating more problems, one needs more brain power to deal with that. In fact it's part of the collective common sense things are like that. I'd rather like to see articles that summarize hiring an…

Such other articles would also be helpful. But as it is too many people still don't understand that poverty is __not__ their relatively easy life with less money. Poverty is not merely a financial condition.

You get it. I get it. Most people, especially those in positions of power and control (e.g., hiring manager) still do not.

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

#82

Post by mrob »

mynameishere wrote: post #80
adynatos wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You can't just call something a nightmare. You have to point out to these blindly privileged rich knuckleheads that the garbage man won't be taking out the garbage if UBI comes to pass. No shit. He won't. Not unless you pay him 300,000/year and that's a whole other kind of economic catastrophe.

It's no economic catastrophe. If the market price for garbage collection by people not threatened with starvation is 300000/collector/year then there is a very strong incentive to automate it.

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

#83

Post by xstartup »

jernfrost wrote: post #37

I think this is why social democracy works so well for reducing poverty. When I compare poverty relief programs in the US with how it works in Scandinavian countries (I live in Norway) I notice a very big difference in how it is delivered. The US uses a large patchwork of a multitude of smaller means tested programs. You frequently read about how people are telling each other about what programs one can apply to and…

Even if you apply Norway's policies to any other country, it will not magically become as prosperous as Norway.

It's a resource-rich nation, highly homogenous and part of EEA. Norway is able to ship low-value hazardous work to poor European countries without paying for their welfare/infra expenditure. Imports janitors and healthcare (the work which local aren't willing to do like wiping the ass of disabled people) workers from East Europe.

It's equivalent is of Uncle scourge swimming in gold and attributing his wealth to his ability to swim in gold.

Open your doors for third world low skilled immigrants then we'll see how much progress Norway is able to retain.

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

#84

Post by saintPirelli »

yellowapple wrote: post #76
saintPirelli wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rich people have it easier, that shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. But on the other hand it shouldn't come as a surprise either, that if you make decisions that propagate poverty, you will be more likely to end up poor.

More importantly: your children will end up poor through no fault of their own, and once you're there, the increased cognitive load of having to get by on less makes it much harder to break the cycle. The association between poverty and things like poor nutrition, fewer school choices, etc. certainly does not help, either. Not to mention that, as others said, making the "right" choices may not be financially feasible…

Again, yes, people start their lives from different positions and it is obviously much easier to win the race if you have pole position in your dad-sponsored car than when you are the water boy. Still I'm not willing to just assume that the distribution of capital in western countries is purely due to luck and some kind of capitalistic malevolence by "the rich" and that if you are poor your life is completely out of your hands, because of some kind of "structural oppression".

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

#85

Post by waistland01 »

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…

[flagged]

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

#86

Post by annabellish »

zeth___ wrote: post #25
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.

325 million people in the US. Give each person $10k so they can feed themselves and live in a tent. That's 3.25 trillion dollars. The total federal budget in 2015 was 3.8 trillion dollars [0]. After we disband the army, navy and air force, liquidate medicare, medicade and social security where do you think we should get the missing 1 trillion or so from? [0] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bu…

The best serious proposals I've seen tend to treat UBI as a form of "negative income tax". Say everyone gets $10k or $20k or whatever, enough to _live_, and then for every two dollars they earn they drop a dollar of "UBI".

If you get $10k guaranteed, then somebody earning $20k exactly thus has an effective income tax rate of 0%, neither recieving nor paying income tax to the government. Anything earned over that starts to be taxed as standard currently.

You'd need to fiddle with the specific numbers, the rates, et cetera, but most serious suggestions are not as trivial as "let's give everyone ten thousand dollars". The principle behind UBI is not that everyone should recieve the same chunk of money from the government, but to provide an income floor that cannot be gone under that should be sufficient to keep people healthy and able to manage. It's a "Universal Basic Income" in the sense that the basic income is universally set, and nobody can go beneath it - you absolutely can go _above_ it.

Relating it to the welfare state is a good comparison, I think. In the same way that socialised healthcare ensures that everyone's bare minimum healthcare is at least up to a good standard, UBI could ensure that everyone's bare minimum income is livable. That doesn't mean that somebody earning $150k/yr still needs that 10k of government assistance, because they are not in need of that income protection (at that moment - of course it immediately returns should they _stop_ earning that much).

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

#87

Post by vidarh »

xstartup wrote: post #83
jernfrost wrote: post #37

I think this is why social democracy works so well for reducing poverty. When I compare poverty relief programs in the US with how it works in Scandinavian countries (I live in Norway) I notice a very big difference in how it is delivered. The US uses a large patchwork of a multitude of smaller means tested programs. You frequently read about how people are telling each other about what programs one can apply to and…

Even if you apply Norway's policies to any other country, it will not magically become as prosperous as Norway. It's a resource-rich nation, highly homogenous and part of EEA. Norway is able to ship low-value hazardous work to poor European countries without paying for their welfare/infra expenditure. Imports janitors and healthcare (the work which local aren't willing to do like wiping the ass of disabled people) wo…

As someone else pointed out: The US is wealthier. If it was down to wealth alone, we'd expect the US to have far fewer problems.

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

#88

Post by vidarh »

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.

[flagged]

UBI is not a socialist invention. In fact you'll find a lot of opposition to it on the left for various reasons, ranging from opposition to enabling people to live off the back of others, to a belief it's a thin wedge to reduce welfare.

The socialist slogan is - as Marx pointedly remarked in "Critique of the Gotha Program" -, not an argument for equality but "from each according to ability, to each according to their need"; for substantial parts of the left, the idea of society paying people if they're not contributing is directly in opposition to a central concern of their ideologies to prevent people from doing just that.

As careful as one should be about talking for the dead: Had Marx been alive today, he'd probably join you in opposing UBI, for similar reasons.

Rather, the idea stems from people like Thomas Paine, and was bolstered by experiments in the US and Canada in the 60's.

Recently it was rediscovered first and foremost by liberals (in the European sense; in other words mostly centrists, again by European standard, followers of classical liberalism) explicitly as an alternative to left-wing welfare systems.

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

#89

Post by DanAndersen »

It should be noted that this paper was published in 2013, and that there have been some subsequent comments/criticisms of it. While the original paper is behind a paywall (does anyone know of a place to read it?), this comment on the paper by Wicherts and Scholten raises questions about the study and analysis:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6163/1169.4.full

>[...]We note that a highly relevant potential confound in the field study presented by Mani et al. is the possibility of retesting effects. The lack of any retesting effect in Mani et al.’s field study involving Indian farmers is clearly at odds with one of the more robust findings in the literature on cognitive testing (9). Retesting effects on the Raven’s tests are particularly profound among test-takers with little education (10).

>Mani et al. go beyond the data by concluding that “The poor…are less capable not because of inherent traits, but because the very context of poverty…impedes cognitive capacity.” We note that the correlation between income and IQ also appears in longitudinal studies in which IQ was measured years before incomes (11). Further research is needed to fully grasp whether poverty indeed affects cognitive performance, as proposed by Mani et al., or whether the effect found in their experiments is a test artifact. [...]

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I had similar doubts when reading the Princeton press release (though of course my doubts are only based on hunches and not rigorous statistical analysis). The experiment testing farmers pre-harvest and post-harvest has the potential issue of retesting/learning effects, because they had the same participants take the test both before harvest and then later after harvest. If they end up seeing an increase in performance from pre-harvest to post-harvest, that could also be due to learning/familiarity with the test and not just from the independent variable of altered poverty. I would want to see a similar study done either with separate (large) groups of participants pre/post-harvest, or to repeat the test over several harvest cycles so we can see if there is an oscillating rise/fall as it goes pre/post/pre/post-harvest.

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