12 ms·

Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (2013)

274 points by known 8y ago

maym86 8y ago
All programmers here know how hard it is to get work done when you need to focus and are in a disruptive environment. It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead.
- JanisL 8y ago
  Absolutely, given the huge decrease in capacity from disruptive environments it's just insanity that people create work spaces filled with distractions. When framed from the perspective of "hey do you want to have every employee in your company be one standard deviation less capable" the true costs become much more apparent.
- weddpros 8y ago
  This is my concern with the article: maybe the impairment doesn't necessarily depend on scarcity/money... Maybe it's more a matter of bandwidth, in which case blaming Poverty only sounds quite ideological. 1- Does the bandwidth problem go away when you fix poverty (costly but easy to measure)? 2- Does the problem go away when you lessen perceived stress instead? (teach meditation/auto-hypnosis and measure if it helps) 3- Solutions to this problem should have applications in the teaching world, when exam-stress can reduce bandwidth, yet we can't just make exams easier "It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead": sometimes the opposite is true, like when you decide to burry yourself with work to escape hardships... It's a matter of mind state, so learning to control it should help.
  - JanisL 8y ago
    Anecdotally, reducing poverty has greatly improved the ability of me and some people I've known in similar economic situations to be productive as professional software developers. Being distracted by issues arising due to having no money has never been a benefit to productivity in my experience (and I'm specifically talking about the psychological side of things here, obviously if you lack the money to buy things that are productivity boosters poverty impact is much more tangible). Stress on the other hand has a different effect which is sometimes positive and sometimes negative. The way in which stress operates is fundamentally different. Specifically the notion of getting into a state of flow is very much about having the optimal amount of arousal/stress, too much leads to overwhelm and too little leads to boredom and disengagement. The issue with scarcity (of which poverty is a form) shows through even when you are working on something interesting because it's more of a background annoyance. Meditation definitely helps you feel better and widens the window in which you can get into those states of concentrated flow (because it increases your capacity to focus) but it's a bit orthogonal to the scarcity issues. Meditation greatly helps with stress levels and focus but not so much bandwidth. (I've found meditation only really helps bandwidth in the cases of pathological stress where the stress gets to the point where the brain starts to shut down but that's a different category of stress to day-to-day stress and perhaps is better described with a different wording)
  - maym86 8y ago
    "Learning to control it" ("it" being the stress of poverty) just sounds like another overhead you are expecting people to deal with that people in a more stable situation don't have to worry about.
    - weddpros 8y ago
      Stress of poverty is only one form of stress, of which there are many: I'm almost 47, I've suffered poverty but also infidelity, a stroke, the loss of my dad and rejection from family. Maybe you think poverty is "easy to fix", with money... but you can choose to take control of all forms of stress instead, and get prepared for worse than poverty.
- shagie 8y ago
  As a developer, our job is making decisions (about code / requirements). This is directly related to decision fatigue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue ) - the "not wanting to think about other things when you get home. If one has the resources to reduce the cognitive load of other decisions (eat out rather than have to do meal planning), well... that's the advantage of having a well paying job. The flip side is where problems occur. When someone is dealing with other REALLY IMPORTANT decisions (pay rent? pay food? pay utilities? medical bills? - pick two or three), making other decisions for a white collar job becomes harder to get and harder to keep. This then leads off into tangents of basic income, guaranteed housing, universal medical care, etc... All of those things reduce some of the difficulty of making those really important decisions.
  - maym86 8y ago
    Exactly my point. Thanks for adding more detail.
pililla 8y ago
I can vouch for that. As a company founder who has not raised any funding, meeting payroll and other expenses month on month is so mentally exhausting that it leaves little for other tasks. I think, in a way, the brains of startup founders and those below poverty lines work in the same way.
- cyphunk 8y ago
  I'm going to frame this comment and put it on a wall
- zq 8y ago
  This is the peak of hacker news
- camillomiller 8y ago
  Holy shit, this not a joke comment, right?
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  It's cynical, funny and kind of true.
- gaius 8y ago
  I might #hnwatch this one myself!
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  This needs to be on https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says
- have_faith 8y ago
  Not sure whether to vote up or down
- dang 8y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17379724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17379724 and marked it off-topic.
crazy_monkey 8y ago
Nice article, but awful title... It could be parsed either way. "Poverty reduces brainpower" or "Poverty makes navigating other areas require less brainpower"
JanisL 8y ago
At one point in the past I was most definitely dealing with poverty and I found it a lot more difficult to get development tasks done at work. The reduced mental capacity is really noticeable but importantly it's also temporary. Since then I've kept an eye out for disadvantaged people who do good development work. If they are able to produce things despite having a reduced capacity it's such a good sign that they have real talent. Poverty can be dealt with more easily than a lack of talent. There's a great book called "scarcity" by by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, that explains the mechanisms behind this, would highly recommend reading it.
- kranner 8y ago
  Mullainathan and Shafir are indeed co-authors on the study cited in this article. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976 I also second the recommendation for 'Scarcity'.
hellofunk 8y ago
Basic income. The older I get the more I strongly hope that the future finds some version of the ideas currently in research and testing regarding basic life support to all peoples. There is so much to gain by doing so, for everyone, whether you personally need it or not.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > There is so much to gain by doing so, for everyon Not for everyone. For young people. The way we’ll get UBI is by repurposing Social Security and possibly Medicare funds for its purpose. That, in turn, requires millenials turn out to vote.
  - tuesdayrain 8y ago
    If UBI leads to increased productivity, everyone would benefit. Not just people who need it.
    - dorchadas 8y ago
      If we had UBI and a single payer system, I think we would see lots of productivity. And not just in direct monetary means, but also in terms of cultural output and people finally are free of being tied to a job and can take a chance. Same with new businesses that'll be popping up.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    I think it would be simpler to repurpose the military budget.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Here's the thing about the "young people" argument: the young, because time, live in a world built by the old. Everything from the physical infrastructure to the social institutions. So if paying for pensions is a wealth transfer from young to old, usage of the built environment is the opposite flow. In other words, the people who built say the roads did so for a package of renumeration that included a salary and a pension. Now you are proposing to renege on half of that deal. Fine - but stop using the roads you didn't pay to build in the first place. Stop using the technology that you didn't pay to do the basic research for. Not such an attractive deal now is it?
polski-g 8y ago
Any social study that doesn't control for genes is a worthless study. Do a twin study or don't even bother.
- jernfrost 8y ago
  This study accounts for that in all the experiments described. They send financial problems at random to people. That means the genes of the individuals will be random. The sugar farmers in India also present a good random experiment because they are not picking people based on whether they are rich or poor already, but based on how things turn out from one rather random event: the harvest. Saying categorically: "Any social study that doesn't control for genes is a worthless study. Do a twin study or don't even bother." Just shows ignorance on the matter. 1) Genetics wont affect a lot of studies. 2) Twin studies are not the gold standard you seem believe it is. Adopted children in twin studies are usually not adopted into a random environment, since the requirements are high. When the environment is stable and has little variation, then most of the variation you measure will be heritable, thus falsely setting heritability very high.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't post shallow dismissals. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
xstartup 8y ago
If it's true then... Obviously, if a person's brain is affected by poverty, the market isn't going to offer them the equal opportunity when that opportunity can go to the person (rich) whose brain is not limited by poverty. UBI won't help them much! They'll still feel poor even if they've money to meet the absolute basics for a good quality of life. I think a possible solution is to make it a law that a marriage is "must" and "can only" take place between a rich and poor person. That way you can keep forcing equality at generation level till inequality is eradicated. Achieving equality completely at "economic level" isn't possible unless you get done with the social signaling and things like class which can even stop a poor but smart person from rising faster to the top rung.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Women typically make less than men. They routinely marry men who are wealthier than them. These marriages have not magically resulted in gender equality. Your premise flat out doesn't work, even before we get into how ridiculous this proposal is.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Women typically make less than men. They routinely marry men who are wealthier than them. Maybe back in the 1950s when a doctor married a nurse and a businessman married his secretary. Nowadays it is far more likely that two doctors will marry, or two business executives.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      Everything I have read indicates that female doctors still typically make less than male doctors, etc. The gap is smaller, not gone.
      - chongli 8y ago
        Instead of the doctor marrying the nurse it's now the surgeon marrying the pediatrician. People tend to marry others of similar status, not necessarily income level.
jl2718 8y ago
I understand that these super-priveleged elite think they are helping the poor by giving them an excuse for their condition, but this is nothing but insult. If you take out ‘poor’ and replace it with ‘negro’ you get exactly the same kind of pandering pseudoscientific p-hacked contemptuous bullshit that was used to justify one group’s superiority over another for centuries, as well as the absolute insolvency of their condition, necessitating a system of permanent child-like welfare dependence. You may feel good about your empathy, but few that would deserve it appreciate it one bit. The desire for pity is a mental disease of the wealthy. Don’t put it on poor people to adopt your sickness. Trust that rich people’s brains are just as distracted, and their decisions, given the same information and experience, are probably just as bad.
saintPirelli 8y ago
I guess this turns the discussion around poverty into a 'chicken and egg' discussion. Which one was first? One's poverty or one's inability to make good life choices? So conservatives will say the latter and liberals will say the first, because you've probably been oppressed by someone and we are already back at square one.
- jl2718 8y ago
  There go those poor people with their defective brains making bad decisions again. Bullshit. Poor people make bad decisions because they have more opportunities to do so, and less opportunities to make good decisions. Rich people don’t have to decide a damn thing to end up on top, just do what you’re told, work hard, and go with the flow; have your quarter-life identity crisis after you get your MBA and take that VP job at GS. Poor people don’t have any easy answers, and rich people would probably do a lot worse in their situation.
  - xstartup 8y ago
    Rich people don’t have to decide a damn thing to end up on top, just do what you’re told, work hard, and go with the flow; have your quarter-life identity crisis after you get your MBA and take that VP job at GS It's so true as a rich man, I never needed to study much. If I need to make a deal, I ask my rich friends/family members for a referral to a lawyer, most of the time the lawyer itself is a member of the extended family, at least that's what it feels like. So, if the task is outside his expertise, he recommends me a very good person. They completely dissect the problem and analyze it from multiple angles, I find their insights helpful much like the insights from Hacker news members. Same way, we know most bankers by their face in our city. If I even see the slightest mark on my skin, I ask my family doctor and they offer me best recommendation. Once upon a time I applied for a credit card but I defaulted on payment, not because of lack of cash but because I never studied how a credit card works. So, what I did? I just hired a guy with employment contract set out to prevent such losses due to high interests on a credit card etc... He works with my financial planner now. If you read through my comments, you'll see how dumb I really am. But navigating life, making friends, marrying a beautiful woman is a lot easier for me than understanding credit card rules. My sympathy with people who are stuck with same issues as me. In my family also there are only a few truly smart people, rest have inherited most of their wealth.
jernfrost 8y ago
I think this is why social democracy works so well for reducing poverty. When I compare poverty relief programs in the US with how it works in Scandinavian countries (I live in Norway) I notice a very big difference in how it is delivered. The US uses a large patchwork of a multitude of smaller means tested programs. You frequently read about how people are telling each other about what programs one can apply to and how. In short becoming poor in the US means navigating a maze of small programs and understanding and having the energy to apply to all of these. In a social democratic system most of these small means tested programs are replaced by large non-means tested programs. They aren't really programs but rather universal rights for everyone. There is much less to navigate. 1) Everybody gets heavily subsidized child care. There is nothing to apply for. Which reduces the economic burden of having children. 2) Health care while pregnant or anything related to children is completely free. For grownups you only pay small fees for doctors visits. You can't get into financial ruin over cancer treatment e.g. 3) Once you pay above a certain level for medication you don't pay anymore. There is a cost roof to the patient. Which prevents financial ruin due to medication. There is nothing to apply for or be eligible for. It just kicks in automatically. 4) If you are unemployed and struggle with getting a job, you get government aid to retrain or get new skills. It is not means tested. 5) Education is free and you get very favorable loans and stipends, everybody get the same regardless of income. It is only the conditions of the study which affects it. E.g. if you live away from home you get more than if you live at home. If you chose to study abroad you get more e.g. to cover tuition. E.g. I studied in the US and the Norwegian government payed most of the tuition. It means even if you are poor getting a decent education is not a major obstacle. You don't have to hunt for scholarships and spend weeks filling them out. 6) Sick pay and unemployment benefits are quite generous so you don't go to economic ruin because you get sick or unemployed for a while. Of course some people do fall between the cracks in social democracy as well. But it takes a lot more effort to end up in poverty. More things need to go wrong. Typically the ones who end up on the street are drug addicts and alcoholics. But even most of them are offered accommodations. However I still think universal basic income is worth exploring. Our system is by no means perfect. A significant problem is that because the welfare services are so generous, they are expensive and there is a lot of worry about abuse, especially from foreigners who have a more cynical view towards welfare programs because they have grown up in states where the common man in screwed over in every possible way. Exploiting the system then does not seem unfair. This lead to more monitoring and a harder push towards means testing and requiring certain actions by the recipient. They are very pushy on unemployed people e.g. They have to demonstrate that they are actively seeking work. If you are sick for longer periods you need meetings with a medical professional and the employer to come up with possible arrangements that could allow you to function at work.
deleted 8y ago
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galfarragem 8y ago
Can't we derive this conclusion from Maslow's theory of needs? It's all there.
- rando444 8y ago
  Scrolled down looking for this. My thoughts exactly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
cdoxsey 8y ago
Poverty can also be a trap because the simple solution (just giving someone money to alleviate poverty) isn't the same as earned success. When you feel like you've earned money through hard work and you feel like you're a contributor and needed and respected by your peers it brings a significant amount of satisfaction and happiness in life, which in turn drives you to be more productive and alters the way you think about your resources. When you're given wealth, you don't feel like you've earned it, you have no buy-in, and you feel like a burden to those around you. You can see the difference starkly with those who earn wealth and those who inherit it. All to often the next generation squanders it. I think we should give money to those in need, in fact I think it's a moral imperative. But I also think it's important to remember the more complex human psychology behind the scenes. In addition to satisfying basic needs how can we get this person a meaningful way to contribute and feel like they're earning what they're given in the future. How can we plug them into a community that can sustain them through tough times, and likewise that they can support? Consider http://streetsteam.org/model http://streetsteam.org/model which supplies the homeless with work cleaning city streets: > We believe that treating people with dignity and empowering them to be a part of the solution to their struggles is a major factor in their ultimate success.
- vertex-four 8y ago
  Note that Streets Team doesn't pay anybody - nobody's earning anything. I see people forced into "volunteering" or working below minimum wage regularly in the UK in order to receive benefits. Forcing people to work for near-nothing is detrimental to their health - it doesn't help anyone feel like they're earning a living, since they're not, and in fact in practice this practice is just the Government giving companies near-free human labour, with the threat to said humans of killing them (by removing the resources they need to survive). There's also a remarkable amount of people who can't work and maintain their health at the same time (mental illness), who should be on disability benefits but have been denied them, who are badly affected by policies like this one. Go far enough down this line and we have the workhouses of the past. By all means - provide people with the opportunity to access work (The Big Issue et al), or the ability to volunteer and develop their skills and resume. But don't force them to in order to access the money they need to survive.
- 8y ago
blablabla123 8y ago
This is discriminating. Articles with a similar sentiment have been posted here recently, authored by people on the other end of the capital spectrum. So count in that bias. One doesn't really need a study to show that accumulating more problems, one needs more brain power to deal with that. In fact it's part of the collective common sense things are like that. I'd rather like to see articles that summarize hiring and admission biases based on socio economic background. Especially also when it comes to management positions, there the gap is even more extreme. Ironically people there earn extra money, so they can buy the problems away...
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Such other articles would also be helpful. But as it is too many people still don't understand that poverty is __not__ their relatively easy life with less money. Poverty is not merely a financial condition. You get it. I get it. Most people, especially those in positions of power and control (e.g., hiring manager) still do not.
DanAndersen 8y ago
It should be noted that this paper was published in 2013, and that there have been some subsequent comments/criticisms of it. While the original paper is behind a paywall (does anyone know of a place to read it?), this comment on the paper by Wicherts and Scholten raises questions about the study and analysis: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6163/1169.4.full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6163/1169.4.full >[...]We note that a highly relevant potential confound in the field study presented by Mani et al. is the possibility of retesting effects. The lack of any retesting effect in Mani et al.’s field study involving Indian farmers is clearly at odds with one of the more robust findings in the literature on cognitive testing (9). Retesting effects on the Raven’s tests are particularly profound among test-takers with little education (10). >Mani et al. go beyond the data by concluding that “The poor…are less capable not because of inherent traits, but because the very context of poverty…impedes cognitive capacity.” We note that the correlation between income and IQ also appears in longitudinal studies in which IQ was measured years before incomes (11). Further research is needed to fully grasp whether poverty indeed affects cognitive performance, as proposed by Mani et al., or whether the effect found in their experiments is a test artifact. [...] --- I had similar doubts when reading the Princeton press release (though of course my doubts are only based on hunches and not rigorous statistical analysis). The experiment testing farmers pre-harvest and post-harvest has the potential issue of retesting/learning effects, because they had the same participants take the test both before harvest and then later after harvest. If they end up seeing an increase in performance from pre-harvest to post-harvest, that could also be due to learning/familiarity with the test and not just from the independent variable of altered poverty. I would want to see a similar study done either with separate (large) groups of participants pre/post-harvest, or to repeat the test over several harvest cycles so we can see if there is an oscillating rise/fall as it goes pre/post/pre/post-harvest.
patkai 8y ago
Poverty is like drowning.
jimnotgym 8y ago
In his influential book on Universal Income, "Utopia for Realists", Rutger Bregman discusses this at some length (referencing the same study). I have to say I have experienced it myself, and not having enough money for the essentials is so all consuming that you cannot possibly perform well at work and make good life decisions. I have succeeded at work under these conditions, but I gave up everything else, hobbies, leisure time, and worse of all time with my children. Maybe my kids will do worse in their exams because I didn't have the mental capacity left to see where they needed help. Maybe this will make them poorer too.
- tsenkov 8y ago
  I am sure you have given your kids a great example of succeeding in a tough situation and taking care of a family. Edit: Don't know why was my post down-voted. My intention was only to give emotional support to a fellow human being that goes/went through pain that I personally have struggled with and know all too well.
  - jimnotgym 8y ago
    Thank you for that, it was a nice comment and I up-voted. It is interesting, my eldest always seems to think we are poor now, since she was old enough to have remembered the worst of it. I earn above average wage now, but she is scarred by it. My reaction is not to victim-blame other poor people who didn't get through, but to campaign for a system which helps people succeed. And that system is not, categorically, anything with strings attached or any 'work-makes-you-free' Victorian BS. Working out of poverty is miserable and I don't feel a lot better for having done it, but I do bear plenty of scars.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
dghughes 8y ago
At the moment there is post at #1 about people's notions of an ideal life. It seems to contrast with this article. People want a simple life with good health not to acumulate stuff. But really you have to think what is poverty? It's such a vague word as is the word poor. There are people who live a subsistence lifestyle and they're happy. But there are people with mobile phones, big screen TV, computers, in an apartment who are poor. From my perspective we in a western society require more things to live too many things. For example Internet access for basic government services, by your employer and schools. Wages haven't kept pace with life. Costs seems to be rising faster than the lowest pay can cope with. My father is from a generation where you work long hours to make more money, simple as that. But these days the wage from any paying job may not be enough even working overtime. Even 20 years ago most people didn't have a cell phone, Internet was not widespread, you weren't paying for Netflix or a dozen other things eating away at your paycheque. To me it seems technology plus stagnant low skill job wages have amplified poverty.
pokemongoaway 8y ago
Maybe you should be all consumed by not having enough money to eat, if you don't... What's the implication here... That we need to supply these underpowered brains with government money by means of redistribution? :P
simonsarris 8y ago
"Poverty decreases IQ" studies are contentious and not well replicated. Why does it keep getting repeated in 2018? This Princeton article is from 2013 and talking about the paper, "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function". Here is some December 2013 commentary doubting the paper: > Mani et al. (Research Articles, 30 August, p. 976) presented laboratory experiments that aimed to show that poverty-related worries impede cognitive functioning. A reanalysis without dichotomization of income fails to corroborate their findings and highlights spurious interactions between income and experimental manipulation due to ceiling effects caused by short and easy tests. This suggests that effects of financial worries are not limited to the poor. Comment on "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function". Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259207757_Comment_on_Poverty_Impedes_Cognitive_Function https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259207757_Comment_o...
- amelius 8y ago
  > "Poverty decreases IQ" studies are contentious and not well replicated. Why does it keep getting repeated in 2018? The reason might be common sense. The evolution of the human brain was possible for a great part because humans started to cook their food. Poverty reduces nutritional intake. Therefore the studies make sense. This means that (imho) somebody should prove the opposite to make this completely logical meme go away.
  - savanaly 8y ago
    That's not how science works.
  - dionidium 8y ago
    This isn't just wrong, it's fundamentally wrong. The burden is on those who wish to forward a positive claim. The meme won't go away because it nicely confirms a popular and comforting narrative.
    - wwweston 8y ago
      What we're talking about here isn't "a popular and comforting narrative," it's a description of a plausible model involving mechanisms that are at least partially understood. Once you're at that point, whether a challenge to that model or the model itself constitutes a claim that bears the greater burden of proof isn't as clear as it might be for any arbitrary claim.
Nec28 8y ago
I love HN.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
Aren’t these “Poverty decreases IQ” studies providing a rational reason to discriminate against poor people in society. There is already discrimination against poor people due to their environment, why provide fodder to discriminate against their intellect?

274 points by known 8y ago

All programmers here know how hard it is to get work done when you need to focus and are in a disruptive environment. It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead.

JanisL 8y ago
Absolutely, given the huge decrease in capacity from disruptive environments it's just insanity that people create work spaces filled with distractions. When framed from the perspective of "hey do you want to have every employee in your company be one standard deviation less capable" the true costs become much more apparent.
weddpros 8y ago
This is my concern with the article: maybe the impairment doesn't necessarily depend on scarcity/money... Maybe it's more a matter of bandwidth, in which case blaming Poverty only sounds quite ideological. 1- Does the bandwidth problem go away when you fix poverty (costly but easy to measure)? 2- Does the problem go away when you lessen perceived stress instead? (teach meditation/auto-hypnosis and measure if it helps) 3- Solutions to this problem should have applications in the teaching world, when exam-stress can reduce bandwidth, yet we can't just make exams easier "It's much harder to get work done when you're dealing with a lot of overhead": sometimes the opposite is true, like when you decide to burry yourself with work to escape hardships... It's a matter of mind state, so learning to control it should help.
- JanisL 8y ago
  Anecdotally, reducing poverty has greatly improved the ability of me and some people I've known in similar economic situations to be productive as professional software developers. Being distracted by issues arising due to having no money has never been a benefit to productivity in my experience (and I'm specifically talking about the psychological side of things here, obviously if you lack the money to buy things that are productivity boosters poverty impact is much more tangible). Stress on the other hand has a different effect which is sometimes positive and sometimes negative. The way in which stress operates is fundamentally different. Specifically the notion of getting into a state of flow is very much about having the optimal amount of arousal/stress, too much leads to overwhelm and too little leads to boredom and disengagement. The issue with scarcity (of which poverty is a form) shows through even when you are working on something interesting because it's more of a background annoyance. Meditation definitely helps you feel better and widens the window in which you can get into those states of concentrated flow (because it increases your capacity to focus) but it's a bit orthogonal to the scarcity issues. Meditation greatly helps with stress levels and focus but not so much bandwidth. (I've found meditation only really helps bandwidth in the cases of pathological stress where the stress gets to the point where the brain starts to shut down but that's a different category of stress to day-to-day stress and perhaps is better described with a different wording)
- maym86 8y ago
  "Learning to control it" ("it" being the stress of poverty) just sounds like another overhead you are expecting people to deal with that people in a more stable situation don't have to worry about.
  - weddpros 8y ago
    Stress of poverty is only one form of stress, of which there are many: I'm almost 47, I've suffered poverty but also infidelity, a stroke, the loss of my dad and rejection from family. Maybe you think poverty is "easy to fix", with money... but you can choose to take control of all forms of stress instead, and get prepared for worse than poverty.
shagie 8y ago
As a developer, our job is making decisions (about code / requirements). This is directly related to decision fatigue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue ) - the "not wanting to think about other things when you get home. If one has the resources to reduce the cognitive load of other decisions (eat out rather than have to do meal planning), well... that's the advantage of having a well paying job. The flip side is where problems occur. When someone is dealing with other REALLY IMPORTANT decisions (pay rent? pay food? pay utilities? medical bills? - pick two or three), making other decisions for a white collar job becomes harder to get and harder to keep. This then leads off into tangents of basic income, guaranteed housing, universal medical care, etc... All of those things reduce some of the difficulty of making those really important decisions.
- maym86 8y ago
  Exactly my point. Thanks for adding more detail.

pililla 8y ago

I can vouch for that. As a company founder who has not raised any funding, meeting payroll and other expenses month on month is so mentally exhausting that it leaves little for other tasks. I think, in a way, the brains of startup founders and those below poverty lines work in the same way.

cyphunk 8y ago
I'm going to frame this comment and put it on a wall
zq 8y ago
This is the peak of hacker news
camillomiller 8y ago
Holy shit, this not a joke comment, right?
sonnyblarney 8y ago
It's cynical, funny and kind of true.
gaius 8y ago
I might #hnwatch this one myself!
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
This needs to be on https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says
have_faith 8y ago
Not sure whether to vote up or down
dang 8y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17379724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17379724 and marked it off-topic.

crazy_monkey 8y ago

Nice article, but awful title... It could be parsed either way. "Poverty reduces brainpower" or "Poverty makes navigating other areas require less brainpower"

JanisL 8y ago

At one point in the past I was most definitely dealing with poverty and I found it a lot more difficult to get development tasks done at work. The reduced mental capacity is really noticeable but importantly it's also temporary. Since then I've kept an eye out for disadvantaged people who do good development work. If they are able to produce things despite having a reduced capacity it's such a good sign that they have real talent. Poverty can be dealt with more easily than a lack of talent. There's a great book called "scarcity" by by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, that explains the mechanisms behind this, would highly recommend reading it.

kranner 8y ago
Mullainathan and Shafir are indeed co-authors on the study cited in this article. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976 I also second the recommendation for 'Scarcity'.

hellofunk 8y ago

Basic income. The older I get the more I strongly hope that the future finds some version of the ideas currently in research and testing regarding basic life support to all peoples. There is so much to gain by doing so, for everyone, whether you personally need it or not.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> There is so much to gain by doing so, for everyon Not for everyone. For young people. The way we’ll get UBI is by repurposing Social Security and possibly Medicare funds for its purpose. That, in turn, requires millenials turn out to vote.
- tuesdayrain 8y ago
  If UBI leads to increased productivity, everyone would benefit. Not just people who need it.
  - dorchadas 8y ago
    If we had UBI and a single payer system, I think we would see lots of productivity. And not just in direct monetary means, but also in terms of cultural output and people finally are free of being tied to a job and can take a chance. Same with new businesses that'll be popping up.
- rhizome 8y ago
  I think it would be simpler to repurpose the military budget.
- gaius 8y ago
  Here's the thing about the "young people" argument: the young, because time, live in a world built by the old. Everything from the physical infrastructure to the social institutions. So if paying for pensions is a wealth transfer from young to old, usage of the built environment is the opposite flow. In other words, the people who built say the roads did so for a package of renumeration that included a salary and a pension. Now you are proposing to renege on half of that deal. Fine - but stop using the roads you didn't pay to build in the first place. Stop using the technology that you didn't pay to do the basic research for. Not such an attractive deal now is it?

polski-g 8y ago

Any social study that doesn't control for genes is a worthless study. Do a twin study or don't even bother.

jernfrost 8y ago
This study accounts for that in all the experiments described. They send financial problems at random to people. That means the genes of the individuals will be random. The sugar farmers in India also present a good random experiment because they are not picking people based on whether they are rich or poor already, but based on how things turn out from one rather random event: the harvest. Saying categorically: "Any social study that doesn't control for genes is a worthless study. Do a twin study or don't even bother." Just shows ignorance on the matter. 1) Genetics wont affect a lot of studies. 2) Twin studies are not the gold standard you seem believe it is. Adopted children in twin studies are usually not adopted into a random environment, since the requirements are high. When the environment is stable and has little variation, then most of the variation you measure will be heritable, thus falsely setting heritability very high.
dang 8y ago
Please don't post shallow dismissals. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

xstartup 8y ago

If it's true then... Obviously, if a person's brain is affected by poverty, the market isn't going to offer them the equal opportunity when that opportunity can go to the person (rich) whose brain is not limited by poverty. UBI won't help them much! They'll still feel poor even if they've money to meet the absolute basics for a good quality of life. I think a possible solution is to make it a law that a marriage is "must" and "can only" take place between a rich and poor person. That way you can keep forcing equality at generation level till inequality is eradicated. Achieving equality completely at "economic level" isn't possible unless you get done with the social signaling and things like class which can even stop a poor but smart person from rising faster to the top rung.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
Women typically make less than men. They routinely marry men who are wealthier than them. These marriages have not magically resulted in gender equality. Your premise flat out doesn't work, even before we get into how ridiculous this proposal is.
- gaius 8y ago
  Women typically make less than men. They routinely marry men who are wealthier than them. Maybe back in the 1950s when a doctor married a nurse and a businessman married his secretary. Nowadays it is far more likely that two doctors will marry, or two business executives.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Everything I have read indicates that female doctors still typically make less than male doctors, etc. The gap is smaller, not gone.
    - chongli 8y ago
      Instead of the doctor marrying the nurse it's now the surgeon marrying the pediatrician. People tend to marry others of similar status, not necessarily income level.

jl2718 8y ago

I understand that these super-priveleged elite think they are helping the poor by giving them an excuse for their condition, but this is nothing but insult. If you take out ‘poor’ and replace it with ‘negro’ you get exactly the same kind of pandering pseudoscientific p-hacked contemptuous bullshit that was used to justify one group’s superiority over another for centuries, as well as the absolute insolvency of their condition, necessitating a system of permanent child-like welfare dependence. You may feel good about your empathy, but few that would deserve it appreciate it one bit. The desire for pity is a mental disease of the wealthy. Don’t put it on poor people to adopt your sickness. Trust that rich people’s brains are just as distracted, and their decisions, given the same information and experience, are probably just as bad.

saintPirelli 8y ago

I guess this turns the discussion around poverty into a 'chicken and egg' discussion. Which one was first? One's poverty or one's inability to make good life choices? So conservatives will say the latter and liberals will say the first, because you've probably been oppressed by someone and we are already back at square one.

jl2718 8y ago
There go those poor people with their defective brains making bad decisions again. Bullshit. Poor people make bad decisions because they have more opportunities to do so, and less opportunities to make good decisions. Rich people don’t have to decide a damn thing to end up on top, just do what you’re told, work hard, and go with the flow; have your quarter-life identity crisis after you get your MBA and take that VP job at GS. Poor people don’t have any easy answers, and rich people would probably do a lot worse in their situation.
- xstartup 8y ago
  Rich people don’t have to decide a damn thing to end up on top, just do what you’re told, work hard, and go with the flow; have your quarter-life identity crisis after you get your MBA and take that VP job at GS It's so true as a rich man, I never needed to study much. If I need to make a deal, I ask my rich friends/family members for a referral to a lawyer, most of the time the lawyer itself is a member of the extended family, at least that's what it feels like. So, if the task is outside his expertise, he recommends me a very good person. They completely dissect the problem and analyze it from multiple angles, I find their insights helpful much like the insights from Hacker news members. Same way, we know most bankers by their face in our city. If I even see the slightest mark on my skin, I ask my family doctor and they offer me best recommendation. Once upon a time I applied for a credit card but I defaulted on payment, not because of lack of cash but because I never studied how a credit card works. So, what I did? I just hired a guy with employment contract set out to prevent such losses due to high interests on a credit card etc... He works with my financial planner now. If you read through my comments, you'll see how dumb I really am. But navigating life, making friends, marrying a beautiful woman is a lot easier for me than understanding credit card rules. My sympathy with people who are stuck with same issues as me. In my family also there are only a few truly smart people, rest have inherited most of their wealth.

jernfrost 8y ago

I think this is why social democracy works so well for reducing poverty. When I compare poverty relief programs in the US with how it works in Scandinavian countries (I live in Norway) I notice a very big difference in how it is delivered. The US uses a large patchwork of a multitude of smaller means tested programs. You frequently read about how people are telling each other about what programs one can apply to and how. In short becoming poor in the US means navigating a maze of small programs and understanding and having the energy to apply to all of these. In a social democratic system most of these small means tested programs are replaced by large non-means tested programs. They aren't really programs but rather universal rights for everyone. There is much less to navigate. 1) Everybody gets heavily subsidized child care. There is nothing to apply for. Which reduces the economic burden of having children. 2) Health care while pregnant or anything related to children is completely free. For grownups you only pay small fees for doctors visits. You can't get into financial ruin over cancer treatment e.g. 3) Once you pay above a certain level for medication you don't pay anymore. There is a cost roof to the patient. Which prevents financial ruin due to medication. There is nothing to apply for or be eligible for. It just kicks in automatically. 4) If you are unemployed and struggle with getting a job, you get government aid to retrain or get new skills. It is not means tested. 5) Education is free and you get very favorable loans and stipends, everybody get the same regardless of income. It is only the conditions of the study which affects it. E.g. if you live away from home you get more than if you live at home. If you chose to study abroad you get more e.g. to cover tuition. E.g. I studied in the US and the Norwegian government payed most of the tuition. It means even if you are poor getting a decent education is not a major obstacle. You don't have to hunt for scholarships and spend weeks filling them out. 6) Sick pay and unemployment benefits are quite generous so you don't go to economic ruin because you get sick or unemployed for a while. Of course some people do fall between the cracks in social democracy as well. But it takes a lot more effort to end up in poverty. More things need to go wrong. Typically the ones who end up on the street are drug addicts and alcoholics. But even most of them are offered accommodations. However I still think universal basic income is worth exploring. Our system is by no means perfect. A significant problem is that because the welfare services are so generous, they are expensive and there is a lot of worry about abuse, especially from foreigners who have a more cynical view towards welfare programs because they have grown up in states where the common man in screwed over in every possible way. Exploiting the system then does not seem unfair. This lead to more monitoring and a harder push towards means testing and requiring certain actions by the recipient. They are very pushy on unemployed people e.g. They have to demonstrate that they are actively seeking work. If you are sick for longer periods you need meetings with a medical professional and the employer to come up with possible arrangements that could allow you to function at work.

deleted 8y ago

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galfarragem 8y ago

Can't we derive this conclusion from Maslow's theory of needs? It's all there.

rando444 8y ago
Scrolled down looking for this. My thoughts exactly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

cdoxsey 8y ago

Poverty can also be a trap because the simple solution (just giving someone money to alleviate poverty) isn't the same as earned success. When you feel like you've earned money through hard work and you feel like you're a contributor and needed and respected by your peers it brings a significant amount of satisfaction and happiness in life, which in turn drives you to be more productive and alters the way you think about your resources. When you're given wealth, you don't feel like you've earned it, you have no buy-in, and you feel like a burden to those around you. You can see the difference starkly with those who earn wealth and those who inherit it. All to often the next generation squanders it. I think we should give money to those in need, in fact I think it's a moral imperative. But I also think it's important to remember the more complex human psychology behind the scenes. In addition to satisfying basic needs how can we get this person a meaningful way to contribute and feel like they're earning what they're given in the future. How can we plug them into a community that can sustain them through tough times, and likewise that they can support? Consider http://streetsteam.org/model http://streetsteam.org/model which supplies the homeless with work cleaning city streets: > We believe that treating people with dignity and empowering them to be a part of the solution to their struggles is a major factor in their ultimate success.

vertex-four 8y ago
Note that Streets Team doesn't pay anybody - nobody's earning anything. I see people forced into "volunteering" or working below minimum wage regularly in the UK in order to receive benefits. Forcing people to work for near-nothing is detrimental to their health - it doesn't help anyone feel like they're earning a living, since they're not, and in fact in practice this practice is just the Government giving companies near-free human labour, with the threat to said humans of killing them (by removing the resources they need to survive). There's also a remarkable amount of people who can't work and maintain their health at the same time (mental illness), who should be on disability benefits but have been denied them, who are badly affected by policies like this one. Go far enough down this line and we have the workhouses of the past. By all means - provide people with the opportunity to access work (The Big Issue et al), or the ability to volunteer and develop their skills and resume. But don't force them to in order to access the money they need to survive.
8y ago

blablabla123 8y ago

This is discriminating. Articles with a similar sentiment have been posted here recently, authored by people on the other end of the capital spectrum. So count in that bias. One doesn't really need a study to show that accumulating more problems, one needs more brain power to deal with that. In fact it's part of the collective common sense things are like that. I'd rather like to see articles that summarize hiring and admission biases based on socio economic background. Especially also when it comes to management positions, there the gap is even more extreme. Ironically people there earn extra money, so they can buy the problems away...

chiefalchemist 8y ago
Such other articles would also be helpful. But as it is too many people still don't understand that poverty is __not__ their relatively easy life with less money. Poverty is not merely a financial condition. You get it. I get it. Most people, especially those in positions of power and control (e.g., hiring manager) still do not.

DanAndersen 8y ago

It should be noted that this paper was published in 2013, and that there have been some subsequent comments/criticisms of it. While the original paper is behind a paywall (does anyone know of a place to read it?), this comment on the paper by Wicherts and Scholten raises questions about the study and analysis: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6163/1169.4.full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6163/1169.4.full >[...]We note that a highly relevant potential confound in the field study presented by Mani et al. is the possibility of retesting effects. The lack of any retesting effect in Mani et al.’s field study involving Indian farmers is clearly at odds with one of the more robust findings in the literature on cognitive testing (9). Retesting effects on the Raven’s tests are particularly profound among test-takers with little education (10). >Mani et al. go beyond the data by concluding that “The poor…are less capable not because of inherent traits, but because the very context of poverty…impedes cognitive capacity.” We note that the correlation between income and IQ also appears in longitudinal studies in which IQ was measured years before incomes (11). Further research is needed to fully grasp whether poverty indeed affects cognitive performance, as proposed by Mani et al., or whether the effect found in their experiments is a test artifact. [...] --- I had similar doubts when reading the Princeton press release (though of course my doubts are only based on hunches and not rigorous statistical analysis). The experiment testing farmers pre-harvest and post-harvest has the potential issue of retesting/learning effects, because they had the same participants take the test both before harvest and then later after harvest. If they end up seeing an increase in performance from pre-harvest to post-harvest, that could also be due to learning/familiarity with the test and not just from the independent variable of altered poverty. I would want to see a similar study done either with separate (large) groups of participants pre/post-harvest, or to repeat the test over several harvest cycles so we can see if there is an oscillating rise/fall as it goes pre/post/pre/post-harvest.

patkai 8y ago

Poverty is like drowning.

jimnotgym 8y ago

In his influential book on Universal Income, "Utopia for Realists", Rutger Bregman discusses this at some length (referencing the same study). I have to say I have experienced it myself, and not having enough money for the essentials is so all consuming that you cannot possibly perform well at work and make good life decisions. I have succeeded at work under these conditions, but I gave up everything else, hobbies, leisure time, and worse of all time with my children. Maybe my kids will do worse in their exams because I didn't have the mental capacity left to see where they needed help. Maybe this will make them poorer too.

tsenkov 8y ago
I am sure you have given your kids a great example of succeeding in a tough situation and taking care of a family. Edit: Don't know why was my post down-voted. My intention was only to give emotional support to a fellow human being that goes/went through pain that I personally have struggled with and know all too well.
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  Thank you for that, it was a nice comment and I up-voted. It is interesting, my eldest always seems to think we are poor now, since she was old enough to have remembered the worst of it. I earn above average wage now, but she is scarred by it. My reaction is not to victim-blame other poor people who didn't get through, but to campaign for a system which helps people succeed. And that system is not, categorically, anything with strings attached or any 'work-makes-you-free' Victorian BS. Working out of poverty is miserable and I don't feel a lot better for having done it, but I do bear plenty of scars.
  - deleted 8y ago
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dghughes 8y ago

At the moment there is post at #1 about people's notions of an ideal life. It seems to contrast with this article. People want a simple life with good health not to acumulate stuff. But really you have to think what is poverty? It's such a vague word as is the word poor. There are people who live a subsistence lifestyle and they're happy. But there are people with mobile phones, big screen TV, computers, in an apartment who are poor. From my perspective we in a western society require more things to live too many things. For example Internet access for basic government services, by your employer and schools. Wages haven't kept pace with life. Costs seems to be rising faster than the lowest pay can cope with. My father is from a generation where you work long hours to make more money, simple as that. But these days the wage from any paying job may not be enough even working overtime. Even 20 years ago most people didn't have a cell phone, Internet was not widespread, you weren't paying for Netflix or a dozen other things eating away at your paycheque. To me it seems technology plus stagnant low skill job wages have amplified poverty.

pokemongoaway 8y ago

Maybe you should be all consumed by not having enough money to eat, if you don't... What's the implication here... That we need to supply these underpowered brains with government money by means of redistribution? :P

simonsarris 8y ago

"Poverty decreases IQ" studies are contentious and not well replicated. Why does it keep getting repeated in 2018? This Princeton article is from 2013 and talking about the paper, "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function". Here is some December 2013 commentary doubting the paper: > Mani et al. (Research Articles, 30 August, p. 976) presented laboratory experiments that aimed to show that poverty-related worries impede cognitive functioning. A reanalysis without dichotomization of income fails to corroborate their findings and highlights spurious interactions between income and experimental manipulation due to ceiling effects caused by short and easy tests. This suggests that effects of financial worries are not limited to the poor. Comment on "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function". Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259207757_Comment_on_Poverty_Impedes_Cognitive_Function https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259207757_Comment_o...

amelius 8y ago
> "Poverty decreases IQ" studies are contentious and not well replicated. Why does it keep getting repeated in 2018? The reason might be common sense. The evolution of the human brain was possible for a great part because humans started to cook their food. Poverty reduces nutritional intake. Therefore the studies make sense. This means that (imho) somebody should prove the opposite to make this completely logical meme go away.
- savanaly 8y ago
  That's not how science works.
- dionidium 8y ago
  This isn't just wrong, it's fundamentally wrong. The burden is on those who wish to forward a positive claim. The meme won't go away because it nicely confirms a popular and comforting narrative.
  - wwweston 8y ago
    What we're talking about here isn't "a popular and comforting narrative," it's a description of a plausible model involving mechanisms that are at least partially understood. Once you're at that point, whether a challenge to that model or the model itself constitutes a claim that bears the greater burden of proof isn't as clear as it might be for any arbitrary claim.

Nec28 8y ago

I love HN.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

Aren’t these “Poverty decreases IQ” studies providing a rational reason to discriminate against poor people in society. There is already discrimination against poor people due to their environment, why provide fodder to discriminate against their intellect?