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How Poverty Taxes the Brain

theatlanticcities.com

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Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#121

Post by mabhatter »

scott_s wrote: post #100
dredmorbius wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each of those dozen eggs is worth 20 packs of shitty ramen Careful: at a point, qualitative aspects matter. Your eggs are proteins and fats (both of which are essential to survival -- your body cannot manufacture certain proteins and EFAs). Ramen is virtually 100% carbohydrate. While it's going to provide you with energy, it's not going to sustain other essential bodily functions. And I really have a hard time parsin…

As far as nutritional value goes, eggs are a great deal. Packed with protein your body can use and easy to prepare.

you know, you could grow a whole baby chicken from one of those!

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#122

Post by dllthomas »

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…

I've been making some good progress coding on the bus, fwiw... but a new, light-ish laptop with battery life certainly helps with that, so that's more an argument for why more people with means should be taking the bus more rather than any kind of dismissal of your thesis.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#124

Post by saraid216 »

_ls7m wrote: post #84
saraid216 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

...I was literally off by one word. /facepalm

Thanks.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#125

Post by msandford »

slurry wrote: post #116
msandford wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but one thing that's always bugged me is how we account for sub-optimal decisions. What I mean is that if I make 60k per year and I choose to spend very little of it by driving an un-fancy car and cooking all my meals at home and living in a small apartment (perhaps with a roommate) I might be able to save half my net income. Or I could spend nearly all of that income on a big…

If you're curious about causality could have saved yourself the trouble of constructing these thought experiments by reading the abstract: "[W]e examined the cognitive function of farmers over the planting cycle. We found that the same farmer shows diminished cognitive performance before harvest, when poor, as compared with after harvest, when rich. This cannot be explained by differences in time available, nutrition…

The argument wasn't that drinking soda caused poverty. It was a thought experiment about the idea that a person's decisions are cumulative and that a person could lean ever so slightly towards saving and slowly dig themselves out of poverty, or ever so slightly towards spending and find themselves in poverty. And that it wouldn't necessarily take hundreds of year for those decisions to add up, that perhaps it could happen in a few years or a decade.

I definitely don't understand the link between unemployment and inflation. Could you elaborate a bit how full employment causes inflation? I'm not being purposefully dense; I just don't get it.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#126

Post by tsotha »

msandford wrote: post #94
nickthemagicman wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're trolling or just extremely naive and idealistic. You're still operating under the assumption that you have choices when you're in poverty. Imagine working two jobs 80 hours a week and pulling in $2000 at minimum wage. 700-rent 200-car note 80-insurance 500-food 200- utilities 200-gas Where are you going to make 'choices' to get ahead assuming all of your time and money are gone? This is the cyc…

I think the reason we don't see eye-to-eye on this is this line right here: > 700-rent 200-car note 80-insurance 500-food 200- utilities 200-gas When I look at that I still see room to squeeze it cheaper. Rent could go down with a roommate (or several). A $200 car note is pretty substantial. $500 for food is also a lot more than needs to be spent. I think that when you look at that, it's a bare-minimum kind of thing…

I think this is exactly right. There's almost always somewhere you can cut - when I was a student I lived on $11k per year in today's dollars. $2000/month seems kind of luxurious.

And I didn't suffer any of the wrenching decision making overhead in the article. Decisions were easy - "Is there any way I can avoid buying this?" No? Then I bought it.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#127

Post by ajslater »

ritchiea wrote: post #14

I can speak to this. For a while in 2010 I was completely broke after leaving my first job out of college, which I hated, and having some other employment opportunities fall through. Having that little money changes your decision making process about absolutely everything. Obviously every financial decision is effected, even the tiniest purchases weigh into bigger questions like "will I have enough money in my bank a…

There is a definition of "social class" I read in the last few years that separates income or wealth from social class. The definitive marker in this definition is the length of time you are able to plan for. Naturally wealth affects this, but is not the be all end all. This definition separates the spendy nouveau riche who blow millions on status markers as still being 'lower class', where thrifty thoughtful people of modest current means would be of a 'higher' social class.

Thoughtful thrifty people of great means are able to think in terms of what their grandchildren or foundation might be doing. The impoverished, disadvantaged of education (Like the SOB who stole my motorcycle only to crash it immediately) might be thinking minutes or hours into the future.

Having been in various economic conditions under varying amounts of stress, I find ritchiea's post dead on the money.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#128

Post by r0s »

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…

Or just, avoid stress by working a reasonable amount of time and planning your meals.

I think they call that working smarter.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#129

Post by smm2000 »

angersock wrote: post #18
victoriap wrote: post #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, t…

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.

Most poor people (not enough food to eat level poor, not 40k is poverty in SF kind poor) do not pay any taxes and actually get money back from the government (unearned income tax credit).

Before I moved to US I lived in a poor Eastern European country. When I was in university my food budget was ~$70 and my total budget was around 150-160 dollars/month. Eating out was not really an option even once a month. 2k/month is as far from real poverty as I am from Bill Gates.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#130

Post by ljf »

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.

I used to commute nearly an hour each way on the tube in London, and read endlessly. Until someone asked me about the books I'd read lately and in could barely recall then story lines. Yes at the time I was engaged and was enjoying the story and act of reading, but it just didn't go in to my mind in the same way that reading at home or on the beach does.

So I stopped reading and started cycling. Much better use of my time, and I was forced to spend that time with my thoughts (and watching my safety on the road) I was better off mentally than when I was kidding myself that I was being productive.

I'm not saying you can't read or work on a commute, but it did not work for me in the slightest.

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