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Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age
- trax 7y agocall me when you replicate this
- ja3k 7y agoThe article acknowledges that the study does not show causation and it seems a little strange to think a causal arrow in this direction is more plausible than the other direction. It seems like people who do better at thinking and memory tasks should also do better at their jobs and interviews and therefore be less likely to experience an income drop. To speculate on income drop's effect on mental acumen one would want to measure intelligence at the beginning of a career and in middle age and then correlate the delta to number and size of income drops.
- loblollyboy 7y agoExactly. There are a lot of articles getting posted to HN that raise this same question. Beyond the 'how did this get posted here!' I'm starting to wonder how all of this gets funded and then published. I was the stupidest person in my department of 'hard' science, the self-righteous anger that these incite in me makes me feel better about that.
- dekhn 7y agoThe best thing to do when you see a study that counters your opinion on the causality of something, just swap the causality, and move on. Many association papers are just written to confirm the investigator's prior beliefs.
- mrguyorama 7y ago"The best thing to do when you see science you don't like, is pretend it reinforces your already existing biases" What?
- dash2 7y agoThis totally makes sense. If the paper shows that A correlates with B, and interprets this as A causes B, but doesn't show it; and if you think B causes A; then this is a great explanation for their result.
- sbierwagen 7y agoThere is a big big big gap between an individual newsworthy article, and science tested by multiple replications. Only 62% of articles published in Nature and Science actually replicated: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06075-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06075-z About a coin flip if you can believe a given headline at all. A single article is a data point, not ironclad unimpeachable argument-ending fact.
- dekhn 7y agoI would argue that the DNA paper by W&C was an ironclad unimpeachable argument-ending fact. The nice thing is that you could take their structure, run it forward through the scattering algorithm, and see that the simulated data looked identical to the measured data. Further, the simple prediction the paper made (that duplex DNA could form a template for DNA replication) turned out to be so audaciously true... (I could quibble and say the W&C structure is technically wrong, because it was done in non-physiological conditions, and subsequent studies did find very minor structural details for B-DNA when done correctly...)
- sbierwagen 7y agoDid I say that no authoritative papers have ever been published?
- hrktb 7y ago> should also do better at their jobs and interview Would this apply to group layoffs from blue colar industries, or general downturn in specific industries ? (for instance drivers as Uber/Lyft entered the market, and now that revenues are also lowering) It seems to me there could be an awful lot of cases where income drop has little to do with a worker's brain health or memory capacities. We are contemplating automating whole industries, subsequent layoffs will also be par for the course, whatever performance the worker was showing.
- kolbe 7y agoHere's the thing about statistics: the effect doesn't need to be seen across everyone. If 50% of people with low cognitive skills experience high income volatility, but only 20% of people with high cognitive skill do, then you'd get results consistent with this "study"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- etagobla 7y agoAll this tells me is the real percentage of people on this Math and Science Forum who don't read the article before making some politicized comment. It shocks me. Actually, we could remedy most of these comments by thinking about the title for a couple seconds.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> people on this Math and Science Forum This is not a “Math and Science Forum”.
- Noumenon72 7y agoThe worst thing about this Politics and Rachel by the Bay Forum is how people don't even read the site description.
- etagobla 7y agoCan I engage in friendship with your heart?
- hmschreck 7y agoThe cognitive impact of wealth has been pretty well studied, and there is already a very good population being studied for this - farmers in some places are pretty well off immediately after harvest/sale, and just before the next harvest, are usually back to a baseline state, or even struggling to pay bills again. Not only do they exhibit better long-term thinking when they are flush with cash, they tend be overall more cognitively capable.
- Mirioron 7y agoBut farmers also have a self-selection bias in them. The average person is not a farmer.
- mtVessel 7y agoAgreed. It seems far more likely the population with income swings suffered from latent, "sub-clinical" cognitive issues that merely became more pronounced later in life.
- tiku 7y agoWell it could be a lot of different things. No money for good food, sports and a lot of stress that accompanies having no steady source of income etc..
- helpPeople 7y agoSure, eating flour mixed with water is cheaper than vegetables. But I don't think people do that. Instead people wrongly think fast food is cheaper than home cooked food. Not sure your point of "no money for good food" Source- calories and protein and vitamins per dollar Edit- fast food is not necessarily faster. Carrots and protein shakes are faster than waiting in line for example.
- anonuser123456 7y ago>Instead people wrongly think fast food is cheaper than home cooked food. Fast food is cheaper than home cooked food when you factor in time & mental effort. Cooking at home requires skills that many people do not have.
- ackshually 7y agoThis this this. It's all well and good cooking and prepping etc when you're in a comfortable house and have stocked kitchen space to yourself at home, but when you realise that a lot of people eating out every day don't have access to space in a kitchen that isn't busy with the four other people they live with, that don't get home until 7pm at night and have to leave at 7am in the morning to get to work etc, and you realise that unless cooking is your hobby in those situations you wouldn't have time to decompress after work and make a nutritious meal and also prep lunch for the following day etc. Yes weekend meal prep is a thing too - but freezer space is at a premium in shared households and there's always the threat of a roommate or family member taking the food for themselves.
- abledon 7y agoseems like people need to enter a 'team' mindset, where you share cooking duties with roommates etc.. trying to help each other pull themselves out of poverty. ofc this is 0.1% likely to happen, but when it does, i think it would work.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sebastianconcpt 7y agoResearchers found when compared to people with no income drops, people with two or more income drops had smaller total brain volume. People with one or more income drops also had reduced connectivity in the brain, meaning there were fewer connections between different areas of the brain.
- GGfpc 7y agoWhy do I feel this will be used to discriminate people with poor backgrounds?
- scotty79 7y agoPoverty harms children. It's possible it harms young adults as well. The sooner we dismiss the notion that we need the poverty to motivate us to work and adopt some form of basic income, the better. It might be cheaper too than current system when you consider all the harm that poverty does to economy and workers.
- Onanymous 7y agoGiving money to poor you only create more of those. People should be given a chance, not money.
- chr1 7y agoExactly, but if basic income becomes reality, it won't happen because people will want to help the poor, but because the amount of work required to produce food will become so small that people by their mere existence will generate more value, similar to the way people can get email accounts with gigabytes of storage for free.
- Mirioron 7y agoI think that when most people think of basic income, they don't think of the type of society you mentioned. That's something we hopefully will get to in the future, but we're still quite far from it. If we get basic income, then it's probably going to be much sooner than that, which is going to have widespread implications on society. Many of which we don't know. I even think that most people would have no problem with a basic income type system when most basic goods are incredibly cheap to produce. After all, if it costs a penny out of your paycheck, then would you really mind if that covered the basic needs of everyone? The main issue I could see related to that would be if this somehow encourages population growth.
- chr1 7y agoPopulation growth is a good thing, it will force us to build cities on mars, irrigate sahara, build floating cities on the ocean. And will help to make "produce once, use infinitely" things: art, software, science cheaper. It wouldn't be a side effect of basic income but the main purpose.
- chr1 7y agoGetting low grades on exams is also linked to thinking problems in later years, we should automatically assign the same grade to all children to help them to become smarter </s>
- gmadsen 7y agoare you suggesting poor people are inherently less intelligent?
- Muller20 7y agonot necesarily, but the two things can be correlated.
- AlexTWithBeard 7y agoIt's interesting how "poor people are often stupid" triggers an outrage, but "stupid people are often poor" is seen as a logical statement.
- Dirlewanger 7y agoPeople don't want to face cold hard truths. IQ is not perfect by any means, but one of the best predictors of overall success in life. Yet when it's overlapped with socioeconomic standing, it suddenly becomes a racist measurement.
- yelloweyes 7y agoWhat causes low IQ though? Just going to take a guess here and say that < 5% of people actually have "genetic stupidity". Most "low IQ" people are low IQ because they went through traumatizing hardships early in life. >People don't want to face cold hard truths. Yeah, no shit. People are too busy trying to survive instead of trying to figure out life's "truths".
- Mirioron 7y ago
- EndXA 7y agoFor those looking for a summary of the original study (https://n.neurology.org/content/early/2019/10/02/WNL.0000000000008463 https://n.neurology.org/content/early/2019/10/02/WNL.0000000...), here's the info from the abstract: > Objective: Income volatility presents a growing public health threat. To our knowledge, no previous study examined the relationship among income volatility, cognitive function, and brain integrity. > Methods: We studied 3,287 participants aged 23–35 years in 1990 from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults prospective cohort study. Income volatility data were created using income data collected from 1990 to 2010 and defined as SD of percent change in income and number of income drops ≥25% (categorized as 0, 1, or 2+). In 2010, cognitive tests (n = 3,287) and brain scans (n = 716) were obtained. > Results: After covariate adjustment, higher income volatility was associated with worse performance on processing speed (β = −1.09, 95% confidence interval [CI] −1.73 to −0.44) and executive functioning (β = 2.53, 95% CI 0.60–4.50) but not on verbal memory (β = −0.02, 95% CI −0.16 to 0.11). Similarly, additional income drops were associated with worse performance on processing speed and executive functioning. Higher income volatility and more income drops were also associated with worse microstructural integrity of total brain and total white matter. All findings were similar when restricted to those with high education, suggesting reverse causation may not explain these findings. > Conclusion: Income volatility over a 20-year period of formative earning years was associated with worse cognitive function and brain integrity in midlife.
- vertis 7y agoI went through a few years of unstable income in my early twenties (circa 2000), it wasn't altogether bad, just very very sporadic. When I think back on those years I had all kinds of bad behaviours that were not rational. For example, not paying bills because something more urgent might come up. Not looking at balances because it was easier to not know. I would go from feeling rich one month because a freelance client had paid a bill, to not having a cent a month later. There were times when it felt like I was running a pyramid scheme on myself. Needing to use money from a previous job to buy computer hardware to sell to the next client. In retrospect, I was also too proud to ask for help. I let things get way out of control before my mother ended up taking out a personal loan to bail me out at one point. If I had asked for help earlier it would have been a cheaper problem to solve. It took years to shed some of the residual behaviours, even after I started earning decent money. Despite having savings and reliable income I would still let bills run until they were overdue. These days I'm a lot more proactive about personal finances and good money management, but it's hard to tell how much of that is just maturity, and how much is the fact that I no longer have problems with unstable income.
- throwaway_law 7y agoAnd as a young person in your early 20's this is all bad enough, but I am going to read into it a little more and infer you were single. Now imagine if you had children to feed, the additional stress and additional expense probably would have broke you (financially, which happened anyway, and mentally). Not to mention knowing the effect of all this stress on your children and their developing minds. This study is an odd way of looking at what is already established and known...instability has a detrimental cognitive and psychological effect on people, in particular children, but its not limited to children and extends to people with fully developed brains.
- seltzered_ 7y ago>Not to mention knowing the effect of all this stress on your children and their developing minds. I believe Gabor Mate talks in depth on this particular topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9B5mYfBPlY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9B5mYfBPlY is one interview, which references https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/129/2/e460?sso=1&sso_redirect_count=1&nfstatus=401&nftoken=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&nfstatusdescription=ERROR%3a+No+local+token https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/129/2/e460?ss...
- coldtea 7y agoCue the "I was from a poor family and I got into Stanford, everybody should be able to it" from people who don't understand how life, statistics, outliers, and relative effort required (for a middle/class rich kid playing in "easy mode" to succeed, versus a poor kid playing the "extra hard mode"). People who confuse what's possible but 10x more difficult for some income groups/backgrounds, to be the same as being equally possible and as easy. Or that think that just because some outliers managed to win the hard mode, everybody should be able to (and are just lazy if they don't) - while ignoring lucky breaks and mitigating circumstances in their case, e.g. you might be poor, but not have a parent sick to take care of. Or you might be an immigrant, but have parents working their ass off to get you to college. Or you might have a stable family as opposed to abuse. Or your teachers might not care at all to encourage you. This is not about telling people not to try. This is about recognizing that even trying is not "equally easy", and that outlier success stories doesn't mean the game is not rigged against those from poor backgrounds. And perhaps finding ways to fix this issues (e.g. reducing poverty, abuse, stress factors for poor people, better educational districts, and so on). https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilswo...
- mgoetzke 7y agoAbsolutely. But it is great for the extremely rich to be able to point to the few new e.g billionaires each generation as examples that anything is possible and if you are not then you must be lazy.
- JackFr 7y agoI’m not sure what that has to do with the article. If you read it, the study starts at age 23 and only measures relative income drops.
- coldtea 7y ago>I’m not sure what that has to do with the article. It doesn't. It has with the common responses to those type of articles.
- qaq 7y ago
- azeotropic 7y agoAlternative (and to my mind more likely) hypothesis: poor brain health causes bad decision making and unstable income.
- stebann 7y agoI was thinking the same, as an extra ingredient in the recipe. Nutrition and good health habits (avoid smoking, avoid excessive drinking of alcohol or sodas, sleep the necessary for your well-being, practice some sport, etc) are essentials you can't ignore.
- programminggeek 7y agoNote that peer groups have a lot to do with thinking problems in general. If you are poor or broke and hang out with poor or broke people, your thinking will be different. Also, people tend to hang out with other people making roughly the same as them, which compounds the problem.
- situational87 7y agoIs sticking a shotgun in your mouth because one doctor visit consumed all your life's savings a "thinking problem"? Because I'm seeing a lot of that I don't think it's just a problem some pill will fix.
- neuland 7y agoI'm not sure how to parse this. But I do want to say that you can overcome losing your life savings or losing a loved one or other significant losses. It's emotionally hard. But it can even be a moment of personal growth. Stoic philosophy is a good resource for western audiences looking to handle problems coping with loss.
- bananocurrency 7y agoI don't think stoic philosophy is going to do much for financial problems that break your hierarchy of needs.
- neuland 7y agoA starving man can still be happy. Edit: I'm not saying coping with loss is easy, especially if that is a loss of your ability to support yourself. The context of this conversation is someone killing themselves, and I think it'd be great if we came together and tried to convince people to live.
- AlexTWithBeard 7y agoTL,DR: Income correlates with mental abilities.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoI assume that's not you summarizing for people and instead saying that you thought it was too long and didn't read it, following up with a horrid comment?
- AlexTWithBeard 7y agoI wish you were right. But nope. I read it twice looking for a spark of meaning beyond that I wrote in my comment.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pointerpointer 7y agoThe lack of money gives people with lower income a problem that the brain cannot solve. Not everyone can 'just get a job' that easily. I've experienced periods in my life where I kept thinking in circles to find a way to get some money for our basic needs. The only solution was to simply keep trying and waiting for some luck or fate. Of course that fucks your brain! I knew a professor in Berlin who was living in the streets, homeless. Try to imagine his mind. After all his work, passion and skill this simple but ridiculous money problem is in-solvable. And no one will help him, he is lost for life. Most rich people have no clue about this problem. They think everybody can work and create a future, while at the same time this professor in the streets has no chances. Who has a thinking problem here?
- nickthemagicman 7y agoThis is accurate and fascinating. That's exactly how it feels. Like an problem that you can't solve even though one is capable and skilled.
- bitL 7y ago"schlechte Zeiten für die Heiligen"
- amelius 7y agoDoesn't Germany have an adequate social security system?
- fulafel 7y agoIt's not great after the time limited benefits run out. You can survive on the 400 eur/mo if you're in good mental health & can consistently do good financial planning ahead, but that's often not the case.
- sjg007 7y agoThis study followed 23 to 35 year olds. This is post college for most people. Probably a good reason to not go to grad school (income drop) unless you have a financial buffer!
- kd3 7y agoLiving in survival mode has a severely negative impact on growth and on the brain/thinking. This is why poor people often stay poor and make bad decisions. The brilliant stem cell biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton describes in chapter 6 of his book “The Biology of Belief” why an organism cannot simultaneously be in a state of growth and protection: "By now you won’t be surprised to learn that I first became aware of how important growth and protection behaviors are in the laboratory where my observations of single cells have so often led me to insights about the multicellular human body. When I was cloning human endothelial cells, they retreated from toxins that I introduced into the culture dish, just as humans retreat from mountain lions and muggers in dark alleys. They also gravitated to nutrients, just as humans gravitate to breakfast, lunch, dinner and love. These opposing movements define the two basic cellular responses to environmental stimuli. Gravitating to a life-sustaining signal, such as nutrients, characterizes a growth response; moving away from threatening signals, such as toxins, characterizes a protection response. It must also be noted that some environmental stimuli are neutral; they provoke neither a growth nor a protection response. My research at Stanford showed that these growth/protection behaviors are also essential for the survival of multicellular organisms such as humans. But there is a catch to these opposing survival mechanisms that have evolved over billions of years. It turns out that the mechanisms that support growth and protection cannot operate optimally at the same time. In other words, cells cannot simultaneously move forward and backward. The human blood vessel cells I studied at Stanford exhibited one microscopic anatomy for providing nutrition and a completely different microscopic anatomy for providing a protection response. What they couldn’t do was exhibit both configurations at the same time. [Lipton, et al, 1991) In a response similar to that displayed by cells, humans unavoidably restrict their growth behaviors when they shift into a protective mode. If you’re running from a mountain lion, it’s not a good idea to expend energy on growth. In order to survive — that is, escape the lion — you summon all your energy for your fight or flight response. Redistributing energy reserves to fuel the protection response inevitably results in a curtailment of growth." In other words, living in a constant state of survival (as unsteady income might cause), severely restricts a person’s capabilities to grow in a healthy way.
- cellular 7y agoWait...they didn't test them before?! Maybe their income dropped because of their lower thinking !
- dlphn___xyz 7y agowho doesn't go through unsteady income in young adulthood? if anything it teaches you how to prioritize with few resources.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoI didn't. I was a military wife in young adulthood. We had a steady income with good benefits. Unsteady income for me came in my forties when I began doing freelance work post-divorce to accommodate a health issue.
- Noumenon72 7y agoI didn't. I got a job at a plastic factory making $9.55 an hour and worked there for 15 years. I had saved enough to start contributing to an IRA my first year there.
- d--b 7y agoThis is not a comment to undermine the effect of the hardship of having a precarious situation, but it must be said that scientifically, it is impossible to conclude a causality vs a correlation. I am not saying that this is true, but it is possible that people with unsteady incomes are more risk-taking, which in itself is a psychological traits which may be linked to poorer performance in iq-like test in middle age.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 7y agoI'm sure there is a correlation, but I can't see how income could possibly be linked causally to brain function directly. Eaten nothing but packets of ramen for months on end probably takes more of a toll on the brain than a light wallet.
- droithomme 7y agoStudy summary opens with a political objective then summarizes a mass population correlation study, and ends up strongly promoting that correlation as causative and in support of the author's pet political program objective. Wouldn't call this science.
- jablinski 7y agoOh how I can relate. It's been about a year now since I closed my failed startup, and still no webdev job after many interviews. After a year of countless applications, interviews and networking with no result (insanely repetitive and people can sense the desperation) things start to spiral. I get this sense from friends and family that they begin to think something's wrong with me and distance themselves - not to mention being unable to afford to do much. There is something about spending too much time on the same problem that may drive a person insane. I think it might create deep valleys over certain neural pathways that are shared with other important functions. For example after a year of grinding on the same problem of "get job" my mind has become hyper sensitive to patterns and hidden meanings like never before. I'll see a leaf blowing in the wind and my mind will sometimes slip into interpreting it as some symbolic message from the universe to help me find a job. In a way I can sort of understand these homeless guys that walk the streets talking to themselves - they might just be further along, so deep in this pattern recognition psychosis from trying to survive that their brains are telling them the whole world is talking to them directly.
- seph-reed 7y ago> I can sort of understand these homeless guys that walk the streets talking to themselves Good for you man. I honestly believe that every person should lose their mind at least once. Once you've built up some insane reality, it'll always be there, and the space between is (IMO) kind of special. It's amazing how one can hold two completely contradictory storylines of the world in their head. And for me it helps with groking how different the inside of other peoples minds can be. How real it can feel. How fake my real is. How just as plausible their real could be. For those interested, one of the easiest cheapest ways to lose your mind is to go live out in the woods for a while (bush fever). Seriously, if you've never had your bubble burst, it might do you some good.
- Blakestr 7y agoYou are describing what is known as the "dark night of the soul.". (though traditionally this is a spiritual sense I think the deepness of what you're describing could be spiritual as well.)
- Teichopsia 7y agoThis is as good a time to vent as any other. One of the things I find difficult is sharing. Even to close friends, but I don't feel the need to. Maybe I just have been hanging out with the wrong people lately, which I have stopped seeing recently - and to which I have been feeling better since. I'll have to give some thought into the the word "difficult" I decided to use - but I'll leave that for some other time. I have been teaching myself programming on and off for a few years now. After having had some health issues last year, I ended up five days in a public hospital and stopped programming until earlier this year when I took it up again. The experience in that hospital was bizarrely amusing, but I won't digress. I'm guessing the onset was due to some combination of stress and/or burnout. After the hospital it took months to recuperate. In that time I didn't have much energy would do some light reading and came across an article, right here on HN about sourdough. All in all, having a hobby helps. And I'm quite fortunate to have a family that provides food and a roof. But it is taxing on so many levels not to be able to help out, to provide. And with the upcoming holidays it gets hard. It hits me hard. F*. When I started writing this I did not expect it to take that turn. Let's get back on track. Right. I picked up programming again earlier this year. Funnily, things started to click. I don't know why, maybe the break helped. Anyhow, looking for jobs is another thing that takes a toll on you. I've never worked in the industry, nor have I had a job for too long. I try to search for jr. jobs and when I do find one, the rejection after rejection does not make it easy. And despite the sorrow sounding note of this, this is just me venting to strangers on the net. And by the age of the thread, few people will read, if any at all. I stopped talking to the few acquaintances. People who weren't contributing anything positive in my life. And I have to say, I have been more productive since. I'm currently learning django. Reading Eloquent Javascript and practicing my vim skills - which I took up recently out of necessity. Funnily I found myself trying to use vim keybindings last time I opened up Visual Studio Code. And that's not to mention all the other tabs that are open. A back-burner of things I want to learn. Things may get tough, as they always will. But it's all about knowing when to slow down. Take a deep breath, and every now and then, vent.
- bcheung 7y agoAm I missing something? This study just seems to say that smarter people have more income stability. Doesn't seem all that surprising. The study doesn't make any mention of doing tests throughout their lifespans so it's hard to claim that income stability impairs brain function. At best there is a correlation and it makes more sense to me that impaired brain function leads to income instability, not the other way around.
- known 7y agoPoverty reduces IQ by 13 points https://archive.is/bmj11 https://archive.is/bmj11
- known 7y agoWhy the world should adopt a basic income http://archive.li/5QVPj http://archive.li/5QVPj