How Poverty Taxes the Brain
theatlanticcities.com
How Poverty Taxes the Brain
1–10 of 175 posts
Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain
#2It's odd how HN upvotes both articles about learning how to think as well as articles that claim that people are doomed to their financial circumstances because of externalities.
It's a strange schizophrenia in a community pursuing entrepreneurialism.
Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain
#3>>low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests
Wouldn't highly busy people with a lot of stuff to worry about such as startup entrepreneurs, chief level executives also perform poorly on cognition tests? Doesn't that prove that when your mind is busy at any level of Maslow pyramid, cognition tests and other games become trivia to ignore?
So IMO, these results tell more on attitude towards cognition tests than cognitive power. Au contraire, it can be argued that, people in need focus more on what matters by ignoring noise including tests. So necessity is the mother of positive change and maybe of innovation?
Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain
#4This is really interesting when correlated with the arguments over WalMart wages vs Costco wages; your average WalMart shop floor employee already has a cognitive load issue "comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults."
Makes you think twice about what you pay your employees. Also it guides thinking on how employee benefits, like food available on campus, can benefit your company; especially in the information worker realm.
Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain
#5It's odd how HN upvotes both articles about learning how to think as well as articles that claim that people are doomed to their financial circumstances because of externalities. It's a strange schizophrenia in a community pursuing entrepreneurialism.
Both ideas can be valid at the same time. You can know how to think or be able to autonomously change your life, but at the same time you can also be severely limited or constrained by your circumstances. Humans have a degree of agency (assuming free will) but that doesn't mean they can always realistically escape the human condition.
Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain
#6This is a very interesting article, but the experiment, as described, doesn't seem to back up the thesis. They show that people who have less money are more taxed by financial questions, but that could just as easily be a cause not an effect of poverty. (ie, it could back the notion that it's trying to refute.) The article did mention a similar study in India where they tested people who were seasonally poor, but it didn't mention whether their scores changed after they received their harvests. That seems like the crucial point.
Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain
#7>>low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests Wouldn't highly busy people with a lot of stuff to worry about such as startup entrepreneurs, chief level executives also perform poorly on cognition tests? Doesn't that prove that when your mind is busy at any level of Maslow pyramid, cognition tests and other games become trivia to ignore? So IMO, t…
One (admittedly cynical and disrespectful) hypothesis could be that some of the low-income people are low-income precisely because they disliked abstract reasoning in the first place, thus making them less likely to pursue their education.
To be honest, there are dozens of different ways to interpret this data.
Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain
#8it might be interesting once it is independently replicated several times.
Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain
#9It's odd how HN upvotes both articles about learning how to think as well as articles that claim that people are doomed to their financial circumstances because of externalities. It's a strange schizophrenia in a community pursuing entrepreneurialism.
I wouldn't say doomed---they just have much harder hurdles to overcome.
We should both inspire people to overcome the hurdles, but also work on creating an environment with less artificial hurdles.
Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain
#10>>low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests Wouldn't highly busy people with a lot of stuff to worry about such as startup entrepreneurs, chief level executives also perform poorly on cognition tests? Doesn't that prove that when your mind is busy at any level of Maslow pyramid, cognition tests and other games become trivia to ignore? So IMO, t…
The study is not trying to prove that worried people do worse on tests. That's well-established, not news to anyone.
It's demonstrating that day-to-day financial decisions like "should spend $1500 to repair my car?" produce enough worry in poor people to have a strong cognitive effect, wheras they don't have that effect on rich people.