8 ms·

What Poverty Does to Your Brain

55 points by cdvonstinkpot 11y ago

sctb 11y ago
A recent related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673796
kirinan 11y ago
I lived this first hand. I grew up in extreme poverty (by the US standards anyways) where my electricity/water were cut off occasionally and occasionally would have to wonder if I was going to eat that night. Though this is still better than most of the world, it sucked. a lot. No christmas, no birthdays. The most interesting part is now im software engineer making really good money, I can still see the rest of my family with the same mindset that enabled that kind of poverty. While I live below my means, they regularly live above it. They lack the self control to regulate their spending, if they get money they spend it like it might go away if they don't. Its institutional in ways because their parents were poor. Although I broke the cycle, my brother didnt and shows a lot of the same patterns. This article hits the point head on. I wonder if there is a way to hack the cycle and reduce the institutional aspect of poverty.
- MaysonL 11y ago
  I wonder if there is a way to hack the cycle and reduce the institutional aspect of poverty. Check out what Harlem Children's Zone is doing: they seem to have at least the beginning of an answer.
  - kirinan 11y ago
    Thats brilliant, seems well founded in research and well implemented. I really hope that it can continue to scale to more and more places. 445 communities is a smashing success already!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - RussianCow 11y ago
    I doubt most people at that level of poverty are thinking about the interest rate.
    - zo1 11y ago
      As much as I think that government is partly to blame for a lot of systemic poverty problems, I'm going to have to agree with you. I think it's fairly obvious that the poor make bad "loans" even when the interest rates are higher. At the end, it's all about moderation and planning. One can plan for a high-interest loan, heck I've had one (14%) until recently. It's definitely been an incentive to save, and work on getting it re-financed on better terms.
  - MarkMc 11y ago
    Some people remain poor even with very high effective interest rates. Here is quote about poor fruit vendors in Chennai, India, who have an effective interest rate of 4.69% per day (from an excellent book about poverty called 'Poor Economics' [1]) ---------------------------- We have already seen, in the previous chapter, another example of people who had lucrative opportunities to save but did not use them: the fruit vendors from Chennai, who borrowed about 1,000 rupees ($45.75 USD PPP) each morning at the rate of 4.69 percent per day. Suppose that the vendors decided to drink two fewer cups of tea for three days. This would save them 5 rupees a day, which could be used to cut down on the amount they would have to borrow. After the first day with less tea, they would have to borrow 5 rupees less. This means that at the end of the second day, they would have to repay 5.23 rupees less (the 5 rupees they did not borrow, plus 23 paisas in interest), which, when added to the 5 rupees they saved that second day by again drinking less tea, would allow them to borrow 10.23 rupees less. By the same logic, by the fourth day, they would have 15.71 rupees that they could use for buying fruit instead of borrowing. Now, say they go back to drinking their two cups more tea but continue to plough the 15.71 rupees they had saved from three days of not drinking so much tea back into the business (that is, borrowing that much less). That accumulated amount continues to grow (just as the 10 rupees had turned into 10.71 after two days) and after exactly ninety days, they would be completely debt-free. They would save 40 rupees a day, which is the equivalent of about half a day's wages. All just for the price of six cups of tea! --------------------- [1] http://www.amazon.in/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-Poverty/dp/1610390938 http://www.amazon.in/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-Pover...
- tomp 11y ago
  There was a really good article a while ago (this one, I think [1]), about why the poor make bad choices. Basically, the gist of it is that long-term, it doesn't matter - even if they made "good" choices, they would still remain poor. So they make "bad" choices (unprotected sex, pregnancy, smoking, impulse buying) that give them short-term pleasure, and hope they will get by somehow. Do you think this would be possible for your family as well? For example, maybe your mindset is "save" because you earn a good salary and you know that if you save, in a few years you'll be well-off and will be able to afford exponentially more, whereas the rest of your family objectively has no way out of poverty, so they don't even try. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/21/linda-tirado-poverty-hand-to-mouth-extract http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/21/linda-tirado-...
  - themartorana 11y ago
    I think this is a pretty basic and important point. Even though money "doesn't by happiness" it can buy escape, even for short periods of time. That escape is as powerful as any drug when your day-to-day life is significantly depressed, with no foreseeable exit. So for some people, there's not much difference in $100 and $100,000 without education and impulse control.
  - evanpw 11y ago
    I agree that savings and restraint in spending are not the main issue. But on the other hand, if you: 1) Graduate high school, 2) Wait until age 21 to get married, and wait until marriage to have children; and 3) Have a full time job (any full time job), then you have a 2% chance of living in poverty, and a 75% chance to be middle class. So in order to argue that bad choices don't matter, you need to make the case that one of these three steps is impossible for most people who are poor. I think your best bet is #3. [1] http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/03/13-join-middle-class-haskins http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/03/13-join-m...
    - tomp 11y ago
      It's not clear from the article if those percentages include all of the society or just those that started out poor. If it's the former, it might be just correlation, not causation.
- pron 11y ago
  > I wonder if there is a way to hack the cycle and reduce the institutional aspect of poverty. Countries with lower poverty rates have traditionally done this with welfare, free healthcare and social programs all funded by high tax rates. It works, but it doesn't fit well with the American ethos of every man to himself, where "redistribution of wealth" is seen as an encroachment on liberty rather than its biggest facilitator (as it's seen in other countries).
  - themartorana 11y ago
    Mostly by people who receive a benefit of said redistribution. http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2011/apr/22/rachel-maddow/msnbc-host-rachel-maddow-says-texas-routinely-rece/ http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2011/apr/22/rache...
ArikBe 11y ago
Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington and Johannes Haushoffer wrote at length about the behavioral economics of poverty: http://static.squarespace.com/static/52522308e4b0bcf2bc4dab45/t/545d7e36e4b0a8163fff9112/1415413302956/Sheehy-Skeffington%2C+Haushofer+et+al+2014+Psychology+of+Poverty+%28all+chapters%29.pdf#page=98 http://static.squarespace.com/static/52522308e4b0bcf2bc4dab4... The whole PDF is in fact dedicated to outlining strategies for the reduction of poverty. The study quoted in the article about scarcity and cognitive performance by Mani et al can be found here: http://psych.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/research/shafir/pubs/PovertyImpedesCognitiveFunction.pdf http://psych.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/research/shafir... I used it as the main document guiding my Msc. thesis research into poverty, cognitive function, and healthy meal choice.
- garrettgrimsley 11y ago
  This is your MSc. thesis that you are referring to? For anyone else interested: http://thesis.eur.nl/pub/30170/MA-Thesis_Arik_Beremzon_416202ab.pdf http://thesis.eur.nl/pub/30170/MA-Thesis_Arik_Beremzon_41620...
littletimmy 11y ago
I don't know why the poor just don't kill the rich, to be honest. I'm not poor, but if my child was suffering because of abject poverty and lack of healthcare while some asshole was buying a $50000 Birkin bag, I'd probably tear up the person with the bag. Why do the poor not just revolt?
- reasonishy 11y ago
  Isn't that pretty much why we have welfare - to give the poor protection money to stop them attacking? Sure, you could spend more on police, but it's probably more cost effective to just give poor people money to keep them a bit more docile.
  - hyperpallium 11y ago
    Bread and circuses. Basic income could work even better, by giving more certainty. There's probably a better version of circuses too - it was TV, now the mainstream internet, but at least there's more opportunity to use the net to move forward.
- joshuapants 11y ago
  Please seek psychological help.
  - RodericDay 11y ago
    It's a perfectly legitimate thing to ponder, even in movies like Denzel Washington's "John Q", and Amazon Billionaire Nick Hanauer's essay "The Pitchforks Are Coming (For Us Plutocrats)" [0]. If you bury your head in the sand and pretend that people will never break the social contract because "inequality doesn't matter" and "macroeconomic indicators look fine", you're going to miss a big part of the picture. [0] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfork...
    - joshuapants 11y ago
tuyguntn 11y ago
Children from low-income households tend to have poorer academic performance and lower standardized test scores than kids from higher-income families For me this part is totally wrong, Dummy comparison, I don't know Scientist who's father was billionaire or even millionaire. Some of the kids from high-income families are even spoiled a lot (thinking about Paris Hilton). My academic performance was at top 1% at school, but I was almost at the bottom when sorted by family income. Its not poverty changes brain, its your parents mindset change your brain.
- jerrac 11y ago
  > Its not poverty changes brain, its your parents mindset change your brain. This is my experience. I grew up in "poverty", but my parents spent a lot of time with me, and now I'm a sysadmin making a decent living. Also, I never actually felt poor growing up. Sure it would have been nice to have a video game console or more movies, but I never felt like I was really deprived just because I didn't. I don't remember ever fearing that I wouldn't have a roof over my head, or food on the table. I think the only times we might have been close to that, extended family took us in. So, from personal experience, strong families are the best way to fix poverty.
- logane 11y ago
  Yep - causation != correlation - being poor in it of itself doesn't cause academic performance. It's the parental values, diet, distrations found in low income communities etc that cause poor performance, not just being poor. Also, I think that the author meant middle class / upper middle class when he talked about "higher-income families" - certainly, in my university the majority of the kids are from upper middle class families.
- jbapple 11y ago
  > For me this part is totally wrong The article discusses scientific findings. Your anecdotal experience does not change those findings.
  - tuyguntn 11y ago
    when statistics done using very small fraction of population or even represents some tiny part of the world (say 200 kids from USA or 10000 kids from UK) then it doesn't work in other parts of the world, look at how many poor people live in India, China but their economy is growing, sometimes I offer very abstract or dummy comparison, some of them: If poverty was the main reason for poor performance then China, India, Brazil should not grow in such pace Look at this study [1], This means that employees who are intrinsically motivated are three times more engaged than employees who are extrinsically motivated (such as by money). You may say this is not related to topic, but I guess they are related, overall what I want to say is high-income doesnt mean better performance, its your mindset and how your parents grow you affects your performance, numbers are wrong when conducted only in very small subset of population, they are just thoughts for other subset of population which are very similar in lifestyle and mindset. [1] - https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv
im3w1l 11y ago
>found that kids living in households just above the federal povertylevel had gray matter volumes that were 3 to 4 percentage points below the norm for their age group. The lower volume was concentrated in the brain's frontal and temporal lobes, regions that are implicated in behavioral and learning problems. Among kids living below the federal poverty line, gray matter volumes were 8 to 10 percent below the norm. On average, these kids performed 4 to 7 points worse on standardized tests. A partial explanation could also be that they grew up in poverty because their parents were too genetically stupid to earn good cash / living within their means. I think this hypothesis is supported by adoption studies.
- MaysonL 11y ago
  A partial explanation could also be that they grew up in poverty because their parents were too genetically stupid to earn good cash / living within their means. I think this hypothesis is supported by adoption studies. And a partial explanation for why you believe this is that you've been indoctrinated and propagandized and peer-group socialized into believing this. See the studies that compare incomes between adopted and biological children and adoptive and biological parents. Environment is by far the determninant.
  - reasonishy 11y ago
    Genes are by far the most important factor. If you've bred animals, you'll understand this. Take a couple of poor animals and breed them. They'll have poor offspring. You can do all you like in their environment, but they'll still be poor. Select high quality parents, and you'll have high quality offspring. Selective breeding works extremely well to produce the best quality animals/plants. I have no idea why we're in an age where it's so un-politically correct to say this about humans. Some people just seem to have their fingers in their ears when it comes to inconvenient facts that don't mesh with their "everyone is equal!" agenda. edit: Downvote away. I'm sure that'll change the obvious biological facts.
    - maxucho 11y ago
      Genes may play a factor, but they are certainly not the most important one, or even a significant one in this context. If you grow up in a poor family / poor neighborhood, you won't have access to the same education as those who grow up in middle-class areas. Education is far more important to what we consider "intelligence" in this context. Basic math, financial literacy, or even reading comprehension is far more a result of your education than it is of your genetic material. It's easy, as a product of good education and a safe environment, to look at people in poverty and say "I guess they're not as smart as me." This hides a far more uncomfortable truth, which is that everyone who doesn't grow up in poverty has access to better education, better opportunities, and a better environment than those in poverty. Try as you might to claim that people in poverty are just "stupider", it's simply impossible to make this comparison given that people on opposite ends of the financial spectrum grow up in totally different environments. It's short-sighted to attribute this to genetics and nothing else. I'm just going to hazard a guess that you didn't grow up in poverty, am I right? If you had, I'm sure you would have a very different idea about how difficult it is to grow up without all the advantages of a middle-class upbringing.
blfr 11y ago
They try to control for genetic factors by comparing children at lower ages first (We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same) but it is a very curious property of IQ that its heritability increases significantly with age.
cletus 11y ago
Any discussion about poverty is worth including decision fatigue [1]. I've never been so poor as to lose water/electricity or to ever worry about if I was going to eat that night but there was a time as a child where we weren't _that_ far off (in retrospect). So I don't presume to be able to speak from experience about true poverty but the after-effects of living even a relative (by Western standards) meager existence are interesting. Others have mentioned about those who are poor tend to spend all their money in case it goes away. The NYT piece mentions this as well. It's also why there are big purchases of TVs and the like around the time poor families in the US receive their EITC refunds. In my case I've had periods where I've been out of work and thankfully I could quickly adjust my expenses to my circumstances. The ability to live frugally is a useful one. On the flipside, I am a software engineer. I make a good living. I sit in a Manhattan apartment that I own and still part of me is planning for what to do if it all goes away. I guess having contingencies isn't a bad thing but I wonder if that's really what it is. Or is it just a subconscious expectation of a meager existence? Is that a result of a fairly humble childhood or something else? Maybe that's the software engineer part of me working out worst case outcomes. Or maybe it's the expectation of worst case outcomes that is applied quite usefully to software engineering? I really can't say. I do however see people who barrel along with the unstated expectation that the good times will continue forever. I can't say why they are this way. It does seem like it's a better way to live though because even though things may take a turn for the worse what is the sense in worrying about it? Fifty years the US had the "war on poverty" and despite the billions spent the poverty rate remains about the same. This does seem to suggest there are behavioural issues that either make someone more prone to being poor and making it harder to escape. In many cases I'm sure the problem is simply not knowing any better. I do wonder if genetic traits/dispositions play a part, particularly in the areas of impulse control, which itself tends to lead to increased violence, unwanted pregnancy and other outcomes that are likely to result in the continuing poverty Circumstances matter a lot. For example, I find the Freakonomics argument that legalized abortion led to reduce crime [2] to be compelling. Still I imagine if you took someone born in poverty and put them an an environment where they had every advantage of the affluent, their outcomes would be a lot better. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-fro... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk6gOeggViw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk6gOeggViw
Mz 11y ago
My mother's mother's family had some kind of low level noble title that was sold when the family fell on hard times. She grew up in serious poverty because she grew up in Germany during WWII and its aftermath. My father grew up in the Great Depression and fought in two wars. Having known serious privation, they both placed a high value on making sure people got fed well. When I was growing up, my father was often unemployed for months at a time. But they had put a very large down payment on the house we lived in, such that their house payment was about 40% of what the neighbors were paying for nearly identical houses. We had a garden and a good percentage of the meat we ate was game, often hunted by my father. So we tended to have not much money and generally had less income than the neighbors, but we ate a helluva lot better than other folks around us. I lived almost like people did 100 or more years ago, before work was about earning money per se, when it was much more about literally putting food on the table. I have a genetic disorder. It was diagnosed late in life, at age 35. I think it took me that long to get sick enough to get diagnosed in part because I was fed so well and I continued that tradition after I moved out. I am currently homeless, somewhat by choice and somewhat not. This has been on my mind a lot here lately: I wonder how much it is a real choice and how much it is a lack of viable options. The short version is that the options available to me failed to support my goal of getting well. And I am getting well. A very big part of how that is happening is based on eating right. Part of the upshot of getting well is that my brain works better. For six months, I was homeless in La Jolla, one of the two most expensive zip codes in the US. I was surrounded by college students from very wealthy families who did things like flew home to another continent for Christmas and told humorous stories about casually lost expensive electronics. These kids were often envious of what I was eating. They made remarks that made it pretty clear they really did not know how to properly feed themselves. I don't know the answer. But I don't think this is about money per se. We seem to think wealth is about having lots of stuff. As a society, I feel like we have lost our way in some important way. I wonder a lot how to solve that problem.

55 points by cdvonstinkpot 11y ago

sctb 11y ago

A recent related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673796

I lived this first hand. I grew up in extreme poverty (by the US standards anyways) where my electricity/water were cut off occasionally and occasionally would have to wonder if I was going to eat that night. Though this is still better than most of the world, it sucked. a lot. No christmas, no birthdays. The most interesting part is now im software engineer making really good money, I can still see the rest of my family with the same mindset that enabled that kind of poverty. While I live below my means, they regularly live above it. They lack the self control to regulate their spending, if they get money they spend it like it might go away if they don't. Its institutional in ways because their parents were poor. Although I broke the cycle, my brother didnt and shows a lot of the same patterns. This article hits the point head on. I wonder if there is a way to hack the cycle and reduce the institutional aspect of poverty.

MaysonL 11y ago
I wonder if there is a way to hack the cycle and reduce the institutional aspect of poverty. Check out what Harlem Children's Zone is doing: they seem to have at least the beginning of an answer.
- kirinan 11y ago
  Thats brilliant, seems well founded in research and well implemented. I really hope that it can continue to scale to more and more places. 445 communities is a smashing success already!
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- RussianCow 11y ago
  I doubt most people at that level of poverty are thinking about the interest rate.
  - zo1 11y ago
    As much as I think that government is partly to blame for a lot of systemic poverty problems, I'm going to have to agree with you. I think it's fairly obvious that the poor make bad "loans" even when the interest rates are higher. At the end, it's all about moderation and planning. One can plan for a high-interest loan, heck I've had one (14%) until recently. It's definitely been an incentive to save, and work on getting it re-financed on better terms.
- MarkMc 11y ago
  Some people remain poor even with very high effective interest rates. Here is quote about poor fruit vendors in Chennai, India, who have an effective interest rate of 4.69% per day (from an excellent book about poverty called 'Poor Economics' [1]) ---------------------------- We have already seen, in the previous chapter, another example of people who had lucrative opportunities to save but did not use them: the fruit vendors from Chennai, who borrowed about 1,000 rupees ($45.75 USD PPP) each morning at the rate of 4.69 percent per day. Suppose that the vendors decided to drink two fewer cups of tea for three days. This would save them 5 rupees a day, which could be used to cut down on the amount they would have to borrow. After the first day with less tea, they would have to borrow 5 rupees less. This means that at the end of the second day, they would have to repay 5.23 rupees less (the 5 rupees they did not borrow, plus 23 paisas in interest), which, when added to the 5 rupees they saved that second day by again drinking less tea, would allow them to borrow 10.23 rupees less. By the same logic, by the fourth day, they would have 15.71 rupees that they could use for buying fruit instead of borrowing. Now, say they go back to drinking their two cups more tea but continue to plough the 15.71 rupees they had saved from three days of not drinking so much tea back into the business (that is, borrowing that much less). That accumulated amount continues to grow (just as the 10 rupees had turned into 10.71 after two days) and after exactly ninety days, they would be completely debt-free. They would save 40 rupees a day, which is the equivalent of about half a day's wages. All just for the price of six cups of tea! --------------------- [1] http://www.amazon.in/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-Poverty/dp/1610390938 http://www.amazon.in/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-Pover...
tomp 11y ago
There was a really good article a while ago (this one, I think [1]), about why the poor make bad choices. Basically, the gist of it is that long-term, it doesn't matter - even if they made "good" choices, they would still remain poor. So they make "bad" choices (unprotected sex, pregnancy, smoking, impulse buying) that give them short-term pleasure, and hope they will get by somehow. Do you think this would be possible for your family as well? For example, maybe your mindset is "save" because you earn a good salary and you know that if you save, in a few years you'll be well-off and will be able to afford exponentially more, whereas the rest of your family objectively has no way out of poverty, so they don't even try. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/21/linda-tirado-poverty-hand-to-mouth-extract http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/21/linda-tirado-...
- themartorana 11y ago
  I think this is a pretty basic and important point. Even though money "doesn't by happiness" it can buy escape, even for short periods of time. That escape is as powerful as any drug when your day-to-day life is significantly depressed, with no foreseeable exit. So for some people, there's not much difference in $100 and $100,000 without education and impulse control.
- evanpw 11y ago
  I agree that savings and restraint in spending are not the main issue. But on the other hand, if you: 1) Graduate high school, 2) Wait until age 21 to get married, and wait until marriage to have children; and 3) Have a full time job (any full time job), then you have a 2% chance of living in poverty, and a 75% chance to be middle class. So in order to argue that bad choices don't matter, you need to make the case that one of these three steps is impossible for most people who are poor. I think your best bet is #3. [1] http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/03/13-join-middle-class-haskins http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/03/13-join-m...
  - tomp 11y ago
    It's not clear from the article if those percentages include all of the society or just those that started out poor. If it's the former, it might be just correlation, not causation.
pron 11y ago
> I wonder if there is a way to hack the cycle and reduce the institutional aspect of poverty. Countries with lower poverty rates have traditionally done this with welfare, free healthcare and social programs all funded by high tax rates. It works, but it doesn't fit well with the American ethos of every man to himself, where "redistribution of wealth" is seen as an encroachment on liberty rather than its biggest facilitator (as it's seen in other countries).
- themartorana 11y ago
  Mostly by people who receive a benefit of said redistribution. http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2011/apr/22/rachel-maddow/msnbc-host-rachel-maddow-says-texas-routinely-rece/ http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2011/apr/22/rache...

ArikBe 11y ago

Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington and Johannes Haushoffer wrote at length about the behavioral economics of poverty: http://static.squarespace.com/static/52522308e4b0bcf2bc4dab45/t/545d7e36e4b0a8163fff9112/1415413302956/Sheehy-Skeffington%2C+Haushofer+et+al+2014+Psychology+of+Poverty+%28all+chapters%29.pdf#page=98 http://static.squarespace.com/static/52522308e4b0bcf2bc4dab4... The whole PDF is in fact dedicated to outlining strategies for the reduction of poverty. The study quoted in the article about scarcity and cognitive performance by Mani et al can be found here: http://psych.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/research/shafir/pubs/PovertyImpedesCognitiveFunction.pdf http://psych.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/research/shafir... I used it as the main document guiding my Msc. thesis research into poverty, cognitive function, and healthy meal choice.

garrettgrimsley 11y ago
This is your MSc. thesis that you are referring to? For anyone else interested: http://thesis.eur.nl/pub/30170/MA-Thesis_Arik_Beremzon_416202ab.pdf http://thesis.eur.nl/pub/30170/MA-Thesis_Arik_Beremzon_41620...

littletimmy 11y ago

I don't know why the poor just don't kill the rich, to be honest. I'm not poor, but if my child was suffering because of abject poverty and lack of healthcare while some asshole was buying a $50000 Birkin bag, I'd probably tear up the person with the bag. Why do the poor not just revolt?

reasonishy 11y ago
Isn't that pretty much why we have welfare - to give the poor protection money to stop them attacking? Sure, you could spend more on police, but it's probably more cost effective to just give poor people money to keep them a bit more docile.
- hyperpallium 11y ago
  Bread and circuses. Basic income could work even better, by giving more certainty. There's probably a better version of circuses too - it was TV, now the mainstream internet, but at least there's more opportunity to use the net to move forward.
joshuapants 11y ago
Please seek psychological help.
- RodericDay 11y ago
  It's a perfectly legitimate thing to ponder, even in movies like Denzel Washington's "John Q", and Amazon Billionaire Nick Hanauer's essay "The Pitchforks Are Coming (For Us Plutocrats)" [0]. If you bury your head in the sand and pretend that people will never break the social contract because "inequality doesn't matter" and "macroeconomic indicators look fine", you're going to miss a big part of the picture. [0] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfork...
  - joshuapants 11y ago

tuyguntn 11y ago

Children from low-income households tend to have poorer academic performance and lower standardized test scores than kids from higher-income families For me this part is totally wrong, Dummy comparison, I don't know Scientist who's father was billionaire or even millionaire. Some of the kids from high-income families are even spoiled a lot (thinking about Paris Hilton). My academic performance was at top 1% at school, but I was almost at the bottom when sorted by family income. Its not poverty changes brain, its your parents mindset change your brain.

jerrac 11y ago
> Its not poverty changes brain, its your parents mindset change your brain. This is my experience. I grew up in "poverty", but my parents spent a lot of time with me, and now I'm a sysadmin making a decent living. Also, I never actually felt poor growing up. Sure it would have been nice to have a video game console or more movies, but I never felt like I was really deprived just because I didn't. I don't remember ever fearing that I wouldn't have a roof over my head, or food on the table. I think the only times we might have been close to that, extended family took us in. So, from personal experience, strong families are the best way to fix poverty.
logane 11y ago
Yep - causation != correlation - being poor in it of itself doesn't cause academic performance. It's the parental values, diet, distrations found in low income communities etc that cause poor performance, not just being poor. Also, I think that the author meant middle class / upper middle class when he talked about "higher-income families" - certainly, in my university the majority of the kids are from upper middle class families.
jbapple 11y ago
> For me this part is totally wrong The article discusses scientific findings. Your anecdotal experience does not change those findings.
- tuyguntn 11y ago
  when statistics done using very small fraction of population or even represents some tiny part of the world (say 200 kids from USA or 10000 kids from UK) then it doesn't work in other parts of the world, look at how many poor people live in India, China but their economy is growing, sometimes I offer very abstract or dummy comparison, some of them: If poverty was the main reason for poor performance then China, India, Brazil should not grow in such pace Look at this study [1], This means that employees who are intrinsically motivated are three times more engaged than employees who are extrinsically motivated (such as by money). You may say this is not related to topic, but I guess they are related, overall what I want to say is high-income doesnt mean better performance, its your mindset and how your parents grow you affects your performance, numbers are wrong when conducted only in very small subset of population, they are just thoughts for other subset of population which are very similar in lifestyle and mindset. [1] - https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv

im3w1l 11y ago

>found that kids living in households just above the federal povertylevel had gray matter volumes that were 3 to 4 percentage points below the norm for their age group. The lower volume was concentrated in the brain's frontal and temporal lobes, regions that are implicated in behavioral and learning problems. Among kids living below the federal poverty line, gray matter volumes were 8 to 10 percent below the norm. On average, these kids performed 4 to 7 points worse on standardized tests. A partial explanation could also be that they grew up in poverty because their parents were too genetically stupid to earn good cash / living within their means. I think this hypothesis is supported by adoption studies.

MaysonL 11y ago
A partial explanation could also be that they grew up in poverty because their parents were too genetically stupid to earn good cash / living within their means. I think this hypothesis is supported by adoption studies. And a partial explanation for why you believe this is that you've been indoctrinated and propagandized and peer-group socialized into believing this. See the studies that compare incomes between adopted and biological children and adoptive and biological parents. Environment is by far the determninant.
- reasonishy 11y ago
  Genes are by far the most important factor. If you've bred animals, you'll understand this. Take a couple of poor animals and breed them. They'll have poor offspring. You can do all you like in their environment, but they'll still be poor. Select high quality parents, and you'll have high quality offspring. Selective breeding works extremely well to produce the best quality animals/plants. I have no idea why we're in an age where it's so un-politically correct to say this about humans. Some people just seem to have their fingers in their ears when it comes to inconvenient facts that don't mesh with their "everyone is equal!" agenda. edit: Downvote away. I'm sure that'll change the obvious biological facts.
  - maxucho 11y ago
    Genes may play a factor, but they are certainly not the most important one, or even a significant one in this context. If you grow up in a poor family / poor neighborhood, you won't have access to the same education as those who grow up in middle-class areas. Education is far more important to what we consider "intelligence" in this context. Basic math, financial literacy, or even reading comprehension is far more a result of your education than it is of your genetic material. It's easy, as a product of good education and a safe environment, to look at people in poverty and say "I guess they're not as smart as me." This hides a far more uncomfortable truth, which is that everyone who doesn't grow up in poverty has access to better education, better opportunities, and a better environment than those in poverty. Try as you might to claim that people in poverty are just "stupider", it's simply impossible to make this comparison given that people on opposite ends of the financial spectrum grow up in totally different environments. It's short-sighted to attribute this to genetics and nothing else. I'm just going to hazard a guess that you didn't grow up in poverty, am I right? If you had, I'm sure you would have a very different idea about how difficult it is to grow up without all the advantages of a middle-class upbringing.

blfr 11y ago

They try to control for genetic factors by comparing children at lower ages first (We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same) but it is a very curious property of IQ that its heritability increases significantly with age.

cletus 11y ago

Any discussion about poverty is worth including decision fatigue [1]. I've never been so poor as to lose water/electricity or to ever worry about if I was going to eat that night but there was a time as a child where we weren't _that_ far off (in retrospect). So I don't presume to be able to speak from experience about true poverty but the after-effects of living even a relative (by Western standards) meager existence are interesting. Others have mentioned about those who are poor tend to spend all their money in case it goes away. The NYT piece mentions this as well. It's also why there are big purchases of TVs and the like around the time poor families in the US receive their EITC refunds. In my case I've had periods where I've been out of work and thankfully I could quickly adjust my expenses to my circumstances. The ability to live frugally is a useful one. On the flipside, I am a software engineer. I make a good living. I sit in a Manhattan apartment that I own and still part of me is planning for what to do if it all goes away. I guess having contingencies isn't a bad thing but I wonder if that's really what it is. Or is it just a subconscious expectation of a meager existence? Is that a result of a fairly humble childhood or something else? Maybe that's the software engineer part of me working out worst case outcomes. Or maybe it's the expectation of worst case outcomes that is applied quite usefully to software engineering? I really can't say. I do however see people who barrel along with the unstated expectation that the good times will continue forever. I can't say why they are this way. It does seem like it's a better way to live though because even though things may take a turn for the worse what is the sense in worrying about it? Fifty years the US had the "war on poverty" and despite the billions spent the poverty rate remains about the same. This does seem to suggest there are behavioural issues that either make someone more prone to being poor and making it harder to escape. In many cases I'm sure the problem is simply not knowing any better. I do wonder if genetic traits/dispositions play a part, particularly in the areas of impulse control, which itself tends to lead to increased violence, unwanted pregnancy and other outcomes that are likely to result in the continuing poverty Circumstances matter a lot. For example, I find the Freakonomics argument that legalized abortion led to reduce crime [2] to be compelling. Still I imagine if you took someone born in poverty and put them an an environment where they had every advantage of the affluent, their outcomes would be a lot better. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-fro... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk6gOeggViw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk6gOeggViw

Mz 11y ago

My mother's mother's family had some kind of low level noble title that was sold when the family fell on hard times. She grew up in serious poverty because she grew up in Germany during WWII and its aftermath. My father grew up in the Great Depression and fought in two wars. Having known serious privation, they both placed a high value on making sure people got fed well. When I was growing up, my father was often unemployed for months at a time. But they had put a very large down payment on the house we lived in, such that their house payment was about 40% of what the neighbors were paying for nearly identical houses. We had a garden and a good percentage of the meat we ate was game, often hunted by my father. So we tended to have not much money and generally had less income than the neighbors, but we ate a helluva lot better than other folks around us. I lived almost like people did 100 or more years ago, before work was about earning money per se, when it was much more about literally putting food on the table. I have a genetic disorder. It was diagnosed late in life, at age 35. I think it took me that long to get sick enough to get diagnosed in part because I was fed so well and I continued that tradition after I moved out. I am currently homeless, somewhat by choice and somewhat not. This has been on my mind a lot here lately: I wonder how much it is a real choice and how much it is a lack of viable options. The short version is that the options available to me failed to support my goal of getting well. And I am getting well. A very big part of how that is happening is based on eating right. Part of the upshot of getting well is that my brain works better. For six months, I was homeless in La Jolla, one of the two most expensive zip codes in the US. I was surrounded by college students from very wealthy families who did things like flew home to another continent for Christmas and told humorous stories about casually lost expensive electronics. These kids were often envious of what I was eating. They made remarks that made it pretty clear they really did not know how to properly feed themselves. I don't know the answer. But I don't think this is about money per se. We seem to think wealth is about having lots of stuff. As a society, I feel like we have lost our way in some important way. I wonder a lot how to solve that problem.