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How Poverty Taxes the Brain

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Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#61

Post by michaelfdeberry »

venomsnake wrote: post #42

Being poor is a full time job. I have fasted for weeks without problems and yet on the one occasion in the last 20 years where I was unable to buy food for three days the hunger was severe and overwhelming - the experiences had nothing in common. The cognitive load I have seen on friends struggling with poverty is immense - they are permanently mentally exhausted of all the hard decisions and complicated math needed…

> Here is an idea for a product - easy to use program that balances the budget as good as possible while taking into account the unique challenges that struggling people are faced with.

It's a good idea, but saving money often has an up front cost and I think an app to help the poor would fall into that category.

The people that would end up benefiting from such an app would be people that could afford to purchase a device to run the app.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#62

Post by Swizec »

scott_s wrote: post #26
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…

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…

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 buy $5 rice or $3 rice? Does that pack of tuna cost less per kilogram than that other pack of tuna even though they're the same brand? And so on.

Buying steak at a restaurant still feels like "Holy crap man, what are you doing, chicken will be just as nice and it's like half as expensive."

I suspect it will take years to unlearn this and I honestly envy people whose parents did not instill this kind of thinking in them. It looks easier.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#63

Post by crusso »

bobbinsIII wrote: post #46
bobbinsIII wrote: post #8

it might be interesting once it is independently replicated several times.

why downvote this? the rational response to yet another psychologal 'priming' study is extreme scepticism.

Some political/philosophical frameworks are extraordinarily resistant to frank discussion. Down-voting and shouting-out are the way that proponents of those frameworks deal with any uncomfortable questions that may at all detract from their presupposed conclusions.

Even though your comment was really innocuous, it implied that maybe the study was wrong. Maybe hard work and intelligence are the prime factors in success vs what happens to be in your bank account at the moment. Some people can't handle even that implication.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#64

Post by foobarbazqux »

floobynewb wrote: post #36
crusso wrote: post #2

It'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.

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.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#65

Post by anigbrowl »

padobson wrote: post #48

Now that all of these perspectives have come together, the implications for how we think about poverty – and design programs for people impacted by it – are enormous. So you mean it might be a bad idea to endlessly complicate the tax code and setup massive, complex bureaucracies all in the name of helping the poor? There's a chance they might not have the cognitive bandwidth to traverse these boondoggles designed to…

Most of the complications in the tax code are not in the name of helping the poor.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#66

Post by dragonwriter »

padobson wrote: post #48

Now that all of these perspectives have come together, the implications for how we think about poverty – and design programs for people impacted by it – are enormous. So you mean it might be a bad idea to endlessly complicate the tax code and setup massive, complex bureaucracies all in the name of helping the poor? There's a chance they might not have the cognitive bandwidth to traverse these boondoggles designed to…

> So you mean it might be a bad idea to endlessly complicate the tax code and setup massive, complex bureaucracies all in the name of helping the poor?

We don't do that in the name of helping the poor.

We do that in the name of avoiding helping the undeserving (whether the undeserving poor or others undeserving of the help), and/or in the name of attempting to influence the behavior of the poor with "help" as an encouragement for them to accept the influence.

Accepting those kind of bureaucratic structures with those kind of motivations is often a political compromise made with those otherwise unwilling to help the poor in order to get some help to the poor, but helping the poor isn't the motivation for those particular structures.

Its not the people that want to help the poor that oppose simpler options like Basic Income.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#67

Post by randomdata »

bartonfink wrote: post #37
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 don't think it's that people with money NEVER stress about spending money - it's a matter of degree. Most software engineers are good earners by US standards, and as such, going to the water park for $40 doesn't really register. Buying a $1 soda isn't even worth thinking about. However, buying a $20,000 car would certainly lead to some thoughts like "Can I afford this? What won't I be buying because of this car?" T…

I find having a good income just brings on the stress of ensuring that you are saving enough for when you no longer have a good income, and so that $1 soda is still a mental hurdle, even if you can easily afford it.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#68

Post by saraid216 »

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…

> 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 employees, and the employees benefit from the perks.

> The article makes me feel like the wealthy people don't have worries like that. I kind of envy that.

There was an excellent article a year or three ago about the stresses that the super-rich go through. I can't seem to find it anymore (I can't recall any keywords besides "super-rich"), but it gives you a sense of how their financial stress is of a different quality.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#69

Post by randomdata »

astine wrote: post #6

This 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…

As an anecdote, I make a software developer's income, but I also farm on the side. With some new expansion this year, virtually all of my cash assets are tied up in crops that are still growing and I'm going to struggle to finish out the remainder of the season. I'm probably considered "rich" on paper, but I have been feeling these effects start to creep into my own life regardless.

Re: How Poverty Taxes the Brain

#70

Post by afterburner »

theorique wrote: post #27

What is correlation and what is causation? Is it possible that less intelligent people are shunted (through education, etc) into lower-paying jobs? Thus, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

On a slight tangent, is the better education "rich" people are getting thanks to their money making them smarter in the first place though?

These things feed on each other, the feedback is a loop.

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