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How Poverty Taxes the Brain

theatlanticcities.com

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Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#81

Post by Carltonian »

homosaur wrote: post #58
Carltonian wrote: post #51

I'm witnessing this tax first hand right, but the tax is in a more literal sense. Some background: Right now my commute is about 35 minutes through Southern California (I live in Riverside and drive south to the Inland Empire). On Tuesday, my car was totaled. I was in the middle lane on a 3 lane highway when I saw someone coming up behind me a couple of miles before my exit, so I got over to the slow lane. Right as t…

You do have time to read, though. You just stated you have 2 hours on a bus.

True, and I'm already 10 chapters into Moby Dick, but it's just not the best environment for that. It feeds back into the article. There's a reason studying is synonymous with a quiet place, or with people also studying with you. Doing it under less ideal circumstances than that creates overhead on your attempts to "get ahead" that people with means do not have to deal with. Not making excuses for myself, I am of means, but I can definitely see how an uphill situation quickly becomes a complete vertical situation.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#82

Post by jes »

This article made me think about David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) system / methodology.

One of the ideas in GTD is that by getting organized and using a trusted reminder system, you free up some subconscious processing capacity.

I have found GTD to be helpful.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#83

Post by Daishiman »

kstenerud wrote: post #40
angersock wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried to push code after not eating for three days because paying taxes wiped you out? It's a very different sort of distraction.

As a matter of fact, I have. Except that I still owed the taxman a lot of money, and was hitting up everyone I knew for loans to keep him off my back just a bit longer, all while working 16+ hour days, 7 days a week in an incubator, trying to get a new business off the ground so that I could get some money coming in and eventually pay everyone back. I learned a LOT of lessons in frugality, and as of last year I'm fin…

Good, you had the energy, youth and education to know how to acquire loans without getting shorted, working 16 hours without preoccupation for other things aside from your own well-being (your business very much counts as that), and in the context of an incubator.

Now think of someone with little formal education who has been taught all his life that there is not way to solve those issues because you don't know anyone who has gotten out of that shithole.

What motivation would you have?

People seem to underestimate how important is to have a glimmer of hope that a situation is insurmountable. Sitting in a couch watching TV is not an irrational response for spending decades under that situation without any possibility of clawing your way out.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#84

Post by _ls7m »

saraid216 wrote: post #68
3825 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why you don't need to pay your programmers too much but you do need to pay them enough that they can focus more on their job and not on trivial items. In hindsight, nicely presented lunches, gym (and perhaps babysitting?) on campus apparently serve a very real purpose. It makes sense that they are minimizing distractions. (When you think of it this way, employees should not have to pay income tax for free lun…

> In hindsight, nicely presented lunches, gym (and perhaps babysitting?) on campus apparently serve a very real purpose. It makes sense that they are minimizing distractions. One of the less savory goals of these perks is to make sure that you go back to work as soon as possible after you're done with your things. A different perspective is that it's win-win: your employer benefits from less downtime in their employe…

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-f...

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#85

Post by [deleted] »

Carltonian wrote: post #81
homosaur wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do have time to read, though. You just stated you have 2 hours on a bus.

True, and I'm already 10 chapters into Moby Dick, but it's just not the best environment for that. It feeds back into the article. There's a reason studying is synonymous with a quiet place, or with people also studying with you. Doing it under less ideal circumstances than that creates overhead on your attempts to "get ahead" that people with means do not have to deal with. Not making excuses for myself, I am of mea…

[deleted]

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#86

Post by mason240 »

JanneVee wrote: post #16
schoper wrote: post #12

No it doesn't. I've been poor. There is no 1 standard deviation IQ penalty. "The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty..." Again, no. The poorer members of our society have more limitations on average. This is usually IQ, but will often be something like physical disability (ie., blindness), ugliness, or poor socialization, inherent or…

So you as an anecdote trumps multiple people in the sample for the research?

It's funny how anecdotes in a comment section that support an article's premise are always upvoted/supported, but any anecdote that runs counter to it is always met with a hostile reaction.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#87

Post by mikeash »

lightbritefight wrote: post #71
Swizec wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an even more interesting observation: I have grown up not quite in poverty, but still in a single parent home with mum having to work multiple jobs at times to support me and my sister. Thinking about money has rubbed off on me. Nowadays I personally have zero money problems on account of my freelancing business doing great. But going to the grocery store habits learned over half of my life still kick in. Do I bu…

Easier doesn't mean better. You learned risk aversion and prioritization skills from your mothers habits. The fact is that you don't need to employ that aversion at the moment, but its a tool you have if you do need it. The number of people I see who blow though heroic gobs of money astonishes me sometimes. I realize that my metric is entirely variable, but I'm talking about paying 2-3x for a similar good simply beca…

There are a lot of people out there who make a ton of money and still stuggle financially. For some people, income is like RAM or CPU power: whatever you upgrade to, you'll fill it all up soon.

I also play little games in the store with trying to find deals and such, even though I don't need to. It's far better than the other way around. Certainly there's a middle ground, but it seems to be really hard to hit.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#88

Post by pfisch »

angersock wrote: post #56
scott_s wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I observe this at the grocery store. The ones I visit have people from a wide range of economic status. When I go in, I grab what I need and don't think about price - it's almost always just the staples like bread, milk, fruit and eggs, and I know with certainty that I can afford it. And that I don't think about price is literally true until I'm told how much it costs, then I pay it, then I promptly stop thinking abo…

One of the most interesting domestic exercises is to think about how much different items cost in terms of other items. A steak dinner (say, $50) is worth just a bit more than 3 double-meat Chipotle burritos with drink and chips and guac (say, $14). Each of those burrito meals is worth a bit more than 4 dozen eggs (say, fancy-pants eggs at $3/dz.) Each of those dozen eggs is worth 20 packs of shitty ramen ($.15/pack)…

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say smoking tobacco is most certainly not a good investment.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#89

Post by ufmace »

3825 wrote: post #34
angersock wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you're financially stable you are like someone programming in a high level language who has tedious tasks like memory management taken care of for you. " This is exactly the correct metaphor. I had to, at one point, stop using my coworking space and start working from home because I couldn't deal with the occasional overhead of "Huh, shit, I forget to bring lunch--can I afford to eat out today? Do I have enough g…

This is why you don't need to pay your programmers too much but you do need to pay them enough that they can focus more on their job and not on trivial items. In hindsight, nicely presented lunches, gym (and perhaps babysitting?) on campus apparently serve a very real purpose. It makes sense that they are minimizing distractions. (When you think of it this way, employees should not have to pay income tax for free lun…

I always thought that, at least for me, there's a level of cost below which I can just buy something on a whim without worrying about whether I can afford it at all, and above which I need to think about it for a minute. When I was in college, that level was about $10. It was a kinda weird transition when I got my first professional job out of college, and I had to get used to that threshold being closer to $1000 instead. I can see how it can be stressful if you're broke enough that your threshold for this is more like $1.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#90

Post by khuey »

msandford wrote: post #43
Retric wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your thinking at to low a level, the choices that have real impact are things like: Where should I live? (Buy? Roommates?) What kind of car should I get? (Make? Age?) Sould I learn? (To cook, draw, lisp?) What kind of Heath insurance do I get? (none?) What cellphone plan do I get. What do I do for entertainment? Should I start packing lunch? Each of these can be with 100,000+$ at retirement should I get a soda while…

I was trying to give a single example that fit within the framework of small decisions, but yes there are definitely bigger decisions too. I would argue that the soda vs water is easily worth $100k at retirement. Two times a day a person might make that choice. That's $4 a day, 365 days a year or $1460. Or $43,800 after 30 years. Once you add in some kind of compounding interest (I know there is very little yield ava…

Probably worth a lot more than $100k once you look at the effect 2 sodas a day has on your health.
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