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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)

#121

Post by throwawayj90 »

yellowapple wrote: post #78
saintPirelli wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Last I checked, it's significantly more likely to become poor through no fault of one's own than to become rich through no fault of one's own.

Well sure, you’re only born once (being born into money is the best way to become rich), but losing your job or your house or your health are all things that can happen throughout most of you’re life.

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

#122

Post by zappo2938 »

bequanna wrote: post #115
jimnotgym wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Poverty can also be a trap because... Actually there is contrary evidence. A study was carried out on the streets of London where they gave larger sums of cash no-strings-attached, and it showed that people in general took that money and used it to set themselves up in a job. One started a gardening business, for instance [0]. The idea that work is what people need is very Victorian, and reminds me of the tread-mil…

> If I can find a single days work I lose all of it. I can't speak to social programs outside of the US, but here, most of our programs (SNAP, Section-8, unemployment benefits) are on a sliding scale. This allows for benefits to somewhat decrease as earnings increase. That said, I anecdotally have noticed a couple things: 1. Many low income people actually aspire to be accepted into these programs, especially Section…

I can recall two students I knew at Stuyvesant who lived in a couple of the more violent public housing projects who went on to college. My anecdote proves your anecdote wrong. That said I will need for you to come with studies and real data that show you are not wrong. This is because what you are saying has very real world implications that will hurt children who do need sometime up to 18 years of housing assistance so that they can also go on to college and become productive members of society.

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

#123

Post by throwawayj91 »

xstartup wrote: post #53
jl2718 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There go those poor people with their defective brains making bad decisions again. Bullshit. Poor people make bad decisions because they have more opportunities to do so, and less opportunities to make good decisions. Rich people don’t have to decide a damn thing to end up on top, just do what you’re told, work hard, and go with the flow; have your quarter-life identity crisis after you get your MBA and take that VP…

Rich people don’t have to decide a damn thing to end up on top, just do what you’re told, work hard, and go with the flow; have your quarter-life identity crisis after you get your MBA and take that VP job at GS It's so true as a rich man, I never needed to study much. If I need to make a deal, I ask my rich friends/family members for a referral to a lawyer, most of the time the lawyer itself is a member of the exten…

> Once upon a time I applied for a credit card but I defaulted on payment, not because of lack of cash but because I never studied how a credit card works.

> But navigating life, making friends, marrying a beautiful woman is a lot easier for me than understanding credit card rules.

I mean this nicely: if you don’t know how a credit card works to the point of default, you shouldn’t have a credit card. I mean, it’s in the name: credit. You say you don’t understand credit card rules, but that’s not even a rule, that’s just the basic function of the card. It doesn’t take study, it takes three seconds of grabbing someone off the street and asking “how does a credit card work?” As someone not from money, it is incredibly frustrating to read that you hired someone to deal with a basic problem that we all learn how to manage in high school, when some of us have ACTUAL problems that we can’t afford to just make vanish.

> If I even see the slightest mark on my skin, I ask my family doctor and they offer me best recommendation.

Please learn when to see a doctor. Most marks on your skin are benign or normal, and when something is really wrong you can tell (e.g. infection, irregular mole/growth, etc.) Everything else is a waste of healthcare time and dollars.

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

#124

Post by Arbitrary4657 »

bequanna wrote: post #115
jimnotgym wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Poverty can also be a trap because... Actually there is contrary evidence. A study was carried out on the streets of London where they gave larger sums of cash no-strings-attached, and it showed that people in general took that money and used it to set themselves up in a job. One started a gardening business, for instance [0]. The idea that work is what people need is very Victorian, and reminds me of the tread-mil…

> If I can find a single days work I lose all of it. I can't speak to social programs outside of the US, but here, most of our programs (SNAP, Section-8, unemployment benefits) are on a sliding scale. This allows for benefits to somewhat decrease as earnings increase. That said, I anecdotally have noticed a couple things: 1. Many low income people actually aspire to be accepted into these programs, especially Section…

You're a rent-seeker, eh? Surely you know everything about poverty then. Usury is a sin.

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

#126

Post by saintPirelli »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #72
saintPirelli wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The last statistics I saw indicated that more than half of all US bankruptcies were due to high medical bills and even having "good" insurance by American standards was no guarantee of protection. That hardly constitutes an edge case.

Maybe edge case wasn't the right wording. What I meant was that in a discussion about whether x leads to y, saying "z could happen to you though" isn't exactly on the point.

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

#127

Post by simonsarris »

"Poverty decreases IQ" studies are contentious and not well replicated. Why does it keep getting repeated in 2018?

This Princeton article is from 2013 and talking about the paper, "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function". Here is some December 2013 commentary doubting the paper:

> Mani et al. (Research Articles, 30 August, p. 976) presented laboratory experiments that aimed to show that poverty-related worries impede cognitive functioning. A reanalysis without dichotomization of income fails to corroborate their findings and highlights spurious interactions between income and experimental manipulation due to ceiling effects caused by short and easy tests. This suggests that effects of financial worries are not limited to the poor.

Comment on "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function". Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259207757_Comment_o...

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

#128

Post by jfz »

ryandrake wrote: post #94
jVinc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whether you personally need it or not. The point of basic income is that everyone needs it to be there. You personally may not need the added income as the head of a multinational hugely successful electronics company selling luxury mobile phones and reaping in billions. But who's going to have enough money to buy your phones when 50% of people are out of work because your companies like your own have cut workforce…

How does society prevent rioting when we reach 50% labor participation? How about 10% or 1%. Each will happen, possibly within our lifetimes, because of automation and extreme efficiency improvements.

How do you know? Massive productivity increases over the last 40 years have not reduced labor participation in the slightest.

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

#129

Post by hn0 »

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.

It doesn't fully offset it. Avoiding debt by not investing leads to lower future growth prospects, resulting in opportunity loss. Debt is contractual and can be restructured.

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

#130

Post by hn0 »

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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