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How Poverty Taxes the Brain

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Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#101

Post by Florin_Andrei »

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)…

Yeah, careful with using that ramen as a currency unit. It sure is cheap, but it's the kind of food that will mess up your health long-term.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#102

Post by Florin_Andrei »

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 have a fixed monthly allowance for whimsicalities. I tends to make things a lot more clear and simple. It also makes it more obvious that buying experiences is a MUCH bigger return on investment than buying stuff.

That Moto X you bought recently? It will keep you satisfied for a while - the same kind of satisfaction that comes from a large, copious meal, or really good sex with someone you're attracted to but not really attached to; but it won't make you happy or bring you peace. However, going out camping with the kids for one night - it's 10x cheaper and brings real happiness, peace, and clarity.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#103

Post by Florin_Andrei »

ufmace wrote: post #89
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…

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 ins…

> 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.

And then you get two kids and a mortgage, and that threshold drops like a comet into a neutron star.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#105

Post by [deleted] »

foobarbazqux wrote: post #64
floobynewb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where you say schizophrenia you probably mean split personality disorder. I am not even bothering to re-read your first sentence because of your perpetuation of this horrendous misuse of language.

Actually you're talking about the medical definition whereas he's using the colloquial definition. I agree that the mismatch is unfortunate and perpetuates stereotypes about the medical definition, but he isn't wrong to use the word like that, according to the dictionaries I've checked.

[deleted]

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#106

Post by ramchip »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #96
pfisch wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We all have our addictions. Being automatically prejudiced against one that happens to shorten your life isn't as useful as realizing you may be addicted to something far worse, e.g. spending most of your time thinking about dating or worrying how to shape yourself to fit the die that some institution has cast for your life, like college or work.

To be honest, I don't think these are worse than smoking at all. They sound more like phases in a normal person's life.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#107

Post by morgante »

The experiment really doesn't match up with what they're saying. It's certainly well studied that making difficult decisions taxes you mentally, and it's not surprising that spending $1,500 is a more difficult decision for someone with a lower net worth.

Where it falls apart is with the assumption that only the poor have to make difficult decisions. If anything, wealthier people spend a lot more time making decisions at work and receive commiserate cognitive load. Not sure working at McDonalds requires you to make any decisions at all.

Even if we're going to pretend that financial decisions are the only decisions in life, I still think the poor might expend less cognitive energy. Frequently they are poor because they specifically avoid making financial decisions. (Hence that's not a cognitive load.) On the flip side, people with more significant assets have to make more significant/difficult allocation decisions, etc.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#108

Post by JanneVee »

mason240 wrote: post #86
JanneVee wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have any statistics? I've seen cases where an article's premise has been taken apart with anecdotes and people upvote/support those also. Not often but I've seen it happen.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#109

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #101
angersock wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Yeah, careful with using that ramen as a currency unit. It sure is cheap, but it's the kind of food that will mess up your health long-term.

This is a weird statement: I ate at a ramen restaurant a couple of nights ago. It was quite healthy, I think I had pork, egg, spinach and seaweed in mine. There are plenty of good ramen restaurants branded from Japan. It is not the best food, but it is not the worst food either.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#110

Post by unono »

Poverty is a great opportunity for startups. There's huge pent up demand for crowd sourcing of the Mechanical Turk variety. There's no real reason a person shouldn't be able to work anytime, using just a smartphone, and earn a middle class income. This is going to be huge next year, 2014 will be the year of the crowd-work.
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