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

princeton.edu

161–170 of 178 posts

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

#161
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…

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

Taking a pill when you are ill is also not the same as doing your own medical research. I just never heard that used as a reason for denying people pills.

I can imagine good reasons for not giving poor people money (such as: the money is needed somewhere else), but "then they would not feel what my pet psychological theory says is the optimal state of mind" is not among them.

Feeling that you earned money is nice, but it is not the most important feeling in the world. People can feel good about doing stuff they can't easily convert to money. For example, poor people helping each other is in my opinion a good thing, but usually not very profitable. Or taking care of your kids... okay, one could argue that this will bring some profit in the future... yeah, maybe, but you and the kids need to eat something today.

(Also, it feels unfair to blame people fully for their inability to make money, when they live in a society where everything is regulated -- such as jobs they could hypothetically do, but they do not have the required education, or cannot pass some other artificial barrier to entry.)

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

#162
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes it is like a credit card. You have to make payments and it reduces your cash flow. The Federal Reserve prints money not the government. And payments aren’t made with printed money.

In modern fiat money, the money isn't printed. It's created by issuing bonds and then counting those bonds as an asset. The money is created when the bank loans out money based on those bond assets.

If you believe it needs to be ever paid back, it hasn't been paid back since 1914. It just grows ever larger.

The initial 1914 version pegged the fiat money to gold. Like all pegging systems, they eventually collapse catastrophically, and this one did in 1929.

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to your point, I think there would be ways to give more granular, specific assistance instead of just throwing money at people. Buying things like housing, food, and healthcare at scale makes sense for a government to do, as it should be cheaper. (The level of corruption in the current U.S. government might negate that, but it doesn't have to be that way. It's society's responsibility to hold its government to…

> just throwing money at people That's an overly emotive phrase that misrepresents what anyone has suggested. > Maybe a small amount of direct money, but just to cover gaps in essentials. You also have to pay a significant amount for auditors and social workers to make sure the system is working sanely. In other words, do exactly what the research shows does not work as well. Attach strings, maintain tight control, e…

I think you misunderstand how I'm aiming this. I would honestly rather explore more socialist approaches, or at least worker co-ops, because I feel that corporate capitalism carries within its nature its own destabilization through regulatory capture and social discord.

However, because I am speaking about the U.S. we're facing a hyper-moralized work culture, at least in part from its Protestant origins, where just being nice or generous to people because that's what humans deserve isn't enough. I am trying to make the argument from pragmatism and efficiency. Human motivation is also complicated and not everyone reacts to incentives uniformly. The current attempts to moralize through means testing of benefits hold a grain of truth but are mostly misguided and costly.

There are major perspective, educational, and ideological barriers to contend with. I'm not advocating means testing as other people in this post have been referring to. I am advocating making freely available, to anyone who needs it, shelter, food, or healthcare and having support from social workers at that point to guide them towards work, school, or other activities with the goal of actualizing their talents. Generally any sum given in UBI would face being whittled down to an (inaccurate) estimate for providing those same things anyways, unless the UBI was a direct dividend from the overall productivity of the country, or perhaps from a dedicated carbon tax.

Currently, social workers dealing with low socioeconomic status folks spend a huge amount of their time helping people find programs, fill out paperwork for benefits, and navigate intricate bureaucratic mazes that contain massive gaps in coverage. (A patchwork, as someone else commented) They could instead be spending that time helping people achieve a place in society, and correct multiple generations of neglect, ignorance, and trauma. Just handing money to people doesn't give them much agency by itself. They are still usually in a massive information asymmetry and in sick communities with addiction, trauma, crime, and ignorance. People need a sense of belonging and purpose to bring out their talents and motivation, and you have to raise up whole communities at once. Our current system alienates the hell out of people instead. The often depressing fates of lottery winners are exemplar of what happens when ordinary folks receive lots of money in isolation. Rich people also often do very stupid things, but their surrounding wealthy community and armies of assistants usually prevent that from spiraling into ruin. That's a key difference.

UBI without addressing those community factors is likely to end badly or not do nearly what people expect it to do, and will just stoke the status resentment that's already reaching critical mass here. Our current political situation was by and large affected by level of educational attainment and status resentment. You can't cut that Gordian Knot by just giving everyone an allowance and calling it done.

I would be interested in the research you're referring to though, and whether it applies specifically to the intergenerational poverty in the U.S. I wonder whether it's representative of all the communities it would affect. I don't doubt that some people would deal with free money in a positive way, especially people who have just fallen from the previous middle class and don't have layers and layers of barriers and trauma, but saying that just giving money, at country scale, to all poor communities would just fix their problems is a very idealistic claim to make. The socio part of socio-economic status exists for a reason: it's not just a distribution problem but the secondary effects of that compounded generationally with many other tricky cultural issues.

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 assistanc…

> 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. What exactly am I saying?

>I own dozens of rental properties, some of them low income where we accept tenants

You are saying you happily take money from the government. I see you as the biggest welfare recipient. You PROFIT from it which I don't have a problem with. I do too. If you don't think that is healthy don't have section 8 rentals. It's funny that my policy is GOOD for your bottom line.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure you have given your kids a great example of succeeding in a tough situation and taking care of a family. Edit: Don't know why was my post down-voted. My intention was only to give emotional support to a fellow human being that goes/went through pain that I personally have struggled with and know all too well.

Thank you for that, it was a nice comment and I up-voted. It is interesting, my eldest always seems to think we are poor now, since she was old enough to have remembered the worst of it. I earn above average wage now, but she is scarred by it. My reaction is not to victim-blame other poor people who didn't get through, but to campaign for a system which helps people succeed. And that system is not, categorically, any…

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

#166
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Learning to control it" ("it" being the stress of poverty) just sounds like another overhead you are expecting people to deal with that people in a more stable situation don't have to worry about.

Stress of poverty is only one form of stress, of which there are many: I'm almost 47, I've suffered poverty but also infidelity, a stroke, the loss of my dad and rejection from family.

Maybe you think poverty is "easy to fix", with money... but you can choose to take control of all forms of stress instead, and get prepared for worse than poverty.

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

#167
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an appealing argument, it's only flaw is that it is nonsensical. The current 'old' also inherited a built environment and a great deal of basic research, and if you project back far enough (not far!) they barely paid anything for it either. Those working in the 40s and early 50s paid almost nothing (in terms of having to pay taxes for other people's benefits) for the infrastructure that they inherited. It als…

The current 'old' also inherited a built environment and a great deal of basic research The current generation of pensioners paid towards the previous generation of pensioners without quibbling. It’s only millennials who take it all for granted and don’t want to pay what’s fair.

> The current generation of pensioners paid towards the previous generation of pensioners

The gaping holes in public-sector pension funds beg to differ.

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

#168
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 24% under 18. Dropping them doesn't even begin to address the massive shortfall.

Surely it addresses 24% of the shortfall? That is nearly a quarter in one answer. You are making it look much more achievable.

A quarter is irrelevant when we are talking orders of magnitude compared to current social programs.

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

#169
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A bond is a liability to the issuer not an asset. From the issuer's (government) perspective it is a liability. From society's perspective it is both a liability and an asset .

If it’s used to invest then whatever is purchased is the offsetting asset. Sadly, it’s being used to fund current operations which has no offsetting asset. The offset is retained earnings. That can and needs to be fixed. It’s how state governments run and they do a lot of investing.

There's nothing sad about using it to heal the sick, house or feed the poor.

Moreover, there's not necessarily anything "good" about having taxes pay for operational costs if those operational costs are cluster bombs on yemeni children.

There's not even necessarily anything intrinsically good about paying back those bonds in dollars that are of equal or greater value. Sometimes (e.g. in times of great wealth inequality) letting inflation eat huge chunks out of the value of outstanding bonds is the best course of action for society as a whole.

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

#170
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

only if you subscribe to the notion that current social democracies are not socialist. "opposition to enabling people to live off the back of others"? strange, the left implements that everywhere already. and of course marx would be opposed, because his belief in LTV is an entirely different kind of wrong.

Most current social democracies are not promoting UBI. Many social democratic parties are in fact opposed to it.

> "opposition to enabling people to live off the back of others"? strange, the left implements that everywhere already.

"The left" is not a single thing, but represented by dozens of ideologies that are wildly different.

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