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How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive

• marcodiego 6y ago
  Not being able to focus on what you're doing is enough to decrease productivity. Even for non-intelectual jobs. Other mechanisms can be light depression, impossibility to rest when not working or inability to improve qualification.
  • scollet 6y ago
    I learned CS on an empty stomach. The second year I was on 3 winning hackathon teams with exceptional code output on novel ideas. I can only attribute those moments of success to free food (and plenty of energy drinks). Edit: +hackathon ...I haven't had breakfast yet.
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  >We've written before in the Planet Money newsletter about growing evidence that our welfare programs may not be up to the task. A study last year by the California Policy Lab found evidence that a huge percentage of poverty-stricken Californians are not getting the Earned Income Tax Credit because of the difficulty of filling out tax forms. Mullainathan and his colleagues' work is a reminder that policymakers should recognize the cognitive burden on many of those who live in poverty and make it easier for them to get assistance.
• hahahahe 6y ago
  Poverty also makes learning difficult. Students shouldering numerous burdens of poverty are simply not prioritizing education over day to day survival. We talk a lot about how the US is falling behind in education. Well, solving poverty is a key component of that puzzle.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• wilsocr88 6y ago
  I agree with this on principle, but I just can't shake the feeling that this sort of conveniently "incidentally" leftist NPR story is slanted, and therefor untrustworthy. I've been gaslit by too much media for too long to trust anything I read from anything even slightly mainstream. Everything is politically compromised, with few exceptions (WHO, CDC, UN, the list goes on).
  • monoideism 6y ago
    I also agree with this on principle, but like you, I can no longer trust most major media channels. I've seen too much blatant lying and agenda-pushing from them the past few years.
    • wilsocr88 6y ago
      It's a pretty huge problem: How do we move forward or know how to act or what to do if we can't get any unfiltered and unbiased factual information whatsoever?
  • gregd 6y ago
    Slanted toward what? Advocating for pulling people out of poverty? Advocating for keeping people in poverty? I'm genuinely interested in understanding why you think this story is slanted and in what direction you think it slanted you and why you think it matters.
    • wilsocr88 6y ago
      The purpose of stories like this seems to be to lay a groundwork of "facts" that, when worded a certain way in a headline, give the appearance of an underlying bed of evidence which slants toward leftist issues at best, and flat-out campaigns for them at worst. NPR is why people say, straight-faced, things like "reality has a liberal slant".
  • ajmadesc 6y ago
    I mean, WHO tried to convince people that cov19 wasn't transmissible through the air for a couple months, and they accepted fake infection /death numbers from CCP no?
• bko 6y ago
  > The researchers then monitored the workers' on-the-job performance, comparing them to a group of workers that didn't get paid upfront. The researchers find that the workers who were paid upfront were significantly more productive, making 6.2% more plates per hour. The biggest effect was seen with the poorest workers. Even more, the plates they made were less likely to be marred by mistakes, indicating they were more attentive on the job. > The authors conclude that giving workers cash upfront helped alleviate the mental burden of their financial problems and freed them to be more productive. It echoes findings from other studies on the psychological consequences of poverty, but it is novel because it looked at the effects of it at a real job rather than in a laboratory setting. I'm not sure I would come up with that conclusion based on the study. My interpretation would be that the workers were grateful for the advance or felt there was a catch. But then again, if you had the opposite effect you could argue that they had no accountability. Or a more narrow interpretation would be that workers that are paid up front are more productive. That's the problem with interpreting these studies, you can always make a story. I think it would the argument for the debt alleviation would just be a cash grant, not tied to the work. I'm not sure why they didn't do that.
  • socialdemocrat 6y ago
    The conclusions are pretty sound IMHO because they match so well other studies of this kind. E.g. when doing IQ tests on people who are poor part of the year and much better off the other half of the year, once can see a 14 point difference in score. That is quite profound. Basically the stress of poverty pulls people down in every possible way. It is not just in terms of producing plates, but also in your ability to perform mental tasks. There are also other studies that show that people who are paid below what they feel they are worth, will perform less well. Basically human productivity seems to work in thresholds. If you are above the threshold, then increases in salary does not improve your performance. Being paid a million or 2 million makes little difference. But if you are getting way below what you seem descent and normal for the type of work you are doing or you feel unfairly compensated relative to other workers, then performance has been shown to typically lag. Basically there is a price to pay when engaging in unfairness. It affects people. We can even find the same results within animals. An animal can be fine eating one kind of food, but when that animal learns that that a peer is getting significantly better food, it will often get very upset, angry and stressed.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• adamnemecek 6y ago
  The US doesn’t care about productivity but more about maintaining some sort of class system. It took me a while to realize this. Also a surprising number of people in the US believe that poverty is a moral failure of some sort. I never actually understood this.
  • _qulr 6y ago
    > Also a surprising number of people in the US believe that poverty is a moral failure of some sort. Yep, there's a marriage in the US between business and religion that seems contradictory until you realize that these people believe the "invisible hand" of the market is God.
    • TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      > that these people Who? I’ve never met anyone who believes that.
      • true_religion 6y ago
        I think he may be referencing how Calvonist faiths believed that God's grace manifested as good fortune, therefore if you were rich you were likely blessed by God. I don't know how much of that theory remains true with American protestants today.
      • adamnemecek 6y ago
        Half of the country.
      • Mountain_Skies 6y ago
        >Poor people vote against their own best interests because they don't see themselves as poor, they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. You'll see the above quote very frequently in any discussion about class and wealth in the US. It's a glib strawman that makes those writing it feel intellectually superior to and condescending to their targets at the same time. Until those on the various sides of ideological divides actually try to understand each other instead of coming up with smug strawman models that diminish the other side's agency, the conflict will continue. Thing is, there are some who benefit from this endless conflict and it is in their best interest to see it continue. They're usually not the ones posting quotes like above as they sit on the sidelines, only occasionally tossing in an ideological grenade or two should any side start gaining the upper hand.
• esotericn 6y ago
  This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely killed it, I was paid well for the time, everyone was happy. When I moved on and was given the respect and decision making ability that I wanted - same thing. Absolutely smashed it out of the park, money flowing from every plug socket. Whenever I've been in a working environment that has cost cutting, or bureaucratic bollocks, or management that decide what's best for the employees rather than asking them - my productivity has been horrendous, the company has lost money. Every single time I've worked without return - burnout. Every time, without fail. This extends outside of work. The last year has been a period in which I've gone from wanting to take part in society, work on big problems like climate change, sacrifice for the greater good, donate my time and money, to just thinking - you know what? No-one outside of your immediate circle cares. They never did, and never will. They will throw you under the bus immediately and comprehensively as soon as there's even the slightest microscopic threat to their wellbeing. And they'll cast the blame on you. They'll say it's your failing. They'll say - never mind our responsibilities to you - you need to do your bit regardless. Well, you know what? Fuck you guys, I'm getting mine now.
  • throwanem 6y ago
    Okay. And what does that have to do with the article under discussion?
    • esotericn 6y ago
      The entire article is about people who are treated as human beings being more effective at their jobs. I'm saying that this applies at every level of the scale, in work, love, friendship, society, everything. We are wasting mind-bendingly tremendous amounts of talent in our world simply because of tunnel-vision mindsets. And it saddens me that as hard as I try, I can't change this. I've spent my career trying. The well has run dry, and now I'm one of them. :/
• ignoranceprior 6y ago
  how I imagine (straw) hyper-capitalists think: "why is poverty bad? not because we have empathy for poor people, nah, just because poor people are not being optimally productive worker bees"
  • fatsdomino001 6y ago
    Keep in mind capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.
    • throwanem 6y ago
      I've heard this claim before, but I've never seen it substantiated. Would you like to do so?
      • Mountain_Skies 6y ago
        The difficulty is going to be around definitions. There are claims that communism has killed X million people, where both the definition of communism and what constitutes cause are very loose. On the flip side you have people who advocate for communism who claim it's never been tried and everything that has ever called itself communism wasn't true communism. You'll face the same issue with capitalism. The confounding factor I see here is what do we call China? They've experienced an incredible increase in wealth under their communist system but is what they have really communism? It certainly has lots of attributes of both theoretical capitalism and western capitalism as practiced mixed in with communist concepts. Whatever it is, China, for better and worse, is a very different country than it had been because in part due their hybrid economic system.
        • DC1350 6y ago
          Chinese people only became wealthy after major economic reforms that abandoned anything related to communism except for the name and aesthetic
          • 6y ago
• sunstone 6y ago
  Sure, and universal health care helps even more but it doesn't fill the pockets of the members of the medical associations the way private health care does. Regulatory capture in its rawest form.
  • pgsimp 6y ago
    Wait, what - you say it is "regulation" that there is no universal health care? How so? It seems to me "universal health care" would be the regulation. What is stopping people from getting together and forming their own "universal health care" group? There must be millions who are in favor of it? Get 100 million people together, and offer health care to each other. What's stopping you?
    • chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      > What is stopping people from getting together and forming their own "universal health care" group? There must be millions who are in favor of it? Get 100 million people together, and offer health care to each other. What's stopping you? Some of them would have to put a lot of money at risk. When they do that, they usually want something in return. Well this is how corporations were invented. And those are regulated.
      • landemva 6y ago
        "What's stopping you?" Typically the State medical device licensing boards will stop you. Try this: get 1000 families to chip in for an MRI and techs to run it for the benefit of the 1000 and their families. When you apply for State permit to turn it on, that board will look at competition in the area and not allow it. The rules don't allow too much competition to drive down prices, so only the mega-corps typically can play the game.
        • pgsimp 6y ago
          Then why don't the universal health care people advocate for the abolishment of such laws?
• nabla9 6y ago
  This is just once piece of growing evidence that poverty damages health, cognition, and productivity. * Being poor reduces raw cognitive capability including memory and decision making. * Being poor increases stress, leads to bad decisions and short term thinking. * Even relative poverty can have this effect. It may be because social status is so important factor in human well-being. It used to be a joke that you can remove poverty by giving people money. It was common to think that patronizing is the only way because poor are lazy bums and lower beings who need to be managed. Same data with same correlations as before. It's just the direction of causality that may need to change.
  • ehsankia 6y ago
    So much of conservative policy just seems very shortsighted to me. Cutting the pandemic team, cutting the cybersecurity team; homelessness, prisons and so on costing orders of magnitude more than it would cost to eliminate or reduce them. It's just that people can't stomach less well off people getting a hand, or prisoners being treated nicely. But now we're left with the largest pandemic in a century, one of the largest governmental hack ever and will end up paying trillions to fix it instead of the millions of prevent it. I read a comment last week about how if fire departments didn't exist already, there is absolutely no chance that they would get introduced in this modern era of politics.
    • jpxw 6y ago
      I think it’s worth pointing out that there is nothing “conservative” about cutting funding to a pandemic response team. “Republican”, perhaps. But not “conservative”. Note that many countries with broadly left wing governments, such as those in Europe, were also not prepared for the pandemic, and will also pay a high cost.
    • kevin__ 6y ago
      I think a large part of the problem with conservative policy positions (at least in the US) is that they're mostly unchanged from 30-40 years ago. Despite mountains of evidence on things like work requirements for government benefits, multiplier effects of stimulus spending vs tax cuts, benefits of expanding healthcare coverage, and many more, the conservative positions remain the same. I would guess this is likely because these positions are more based on philosophy than they are on actual economics or other evidence-based fields. This was a reasonable position when there wasn't strong evidence to either prove or disprove these arguments, but at some point the evidence becomes overwhelming, and those positions should no longer be considered serious. We're long passed that point on a number of issues, but it sure doesn't seem like anything will change anytime soon.
• alexashka 6y ago
  I wish we'd frame it as 'it sucks to live among people who are living in poverty'. It doesn't matter to me whether they are 10% more or less productive - that's not a compelling argument for me or anyone besides middle management really. To me, the very mindset of boiling humans down to 'productivity' aka profit is a toxic way to look at life. We're well past needing to force people to work the fields for food, so why are we still treating human productivity as a valuable metric? It probably comes from 'the free market is the best we've got, free market success is decided by profit'. Well yes, but remember why we're using the free market in the first place - winning at any cost was never the goal. The goal was to improve the quality of life within a society by letting supply and demand guide people's choices. It's turned into a strange ideology of celebrating winning and viewing anyone who isn't winning as a loser, rather than your teammate, your neighbour, dare I say your friend.
• naebother 6y ago
  Are the workers that are getting paid in advance 6.2% more productive or are the workers not getting paid in advance 6.2% less productive because of that? Both scenarios make sense to me. I can envision working better if I don't have to constantly worry about my financial situation. But I can also envision working less if I know some people are getting paid in advance, but not me. Either way, boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I poop on company time.
  • wutbrodo 6y ago
    > Are the workers that are getting paid in advance 6.2% more productive or are the workers not getting paid in advance 6.2% less productive because of that? This question isn't meaningful. "Less" and "more" are relative terms. There's no way to choose which one is occurring in the absolute.
    • username90 6y ago
      It does matter a lot, changing things usually creates a short term improvement but over time that improvement goes away. This is a very common problem when evaluating teaching methods etc, basically any change at all will make teachers and kids excited and improve learning, but once those changes becomes standard the improvements go away and sometimes even reverse.
      • imtringued 6y ago
        The problem with the article is indeed that this is just a one time change. It's effectively a mini loan from the employer and you can only get it once.
• tester756 6y ago
  I'm not sure what's more shocking those results or that it ain't obvious in {current_year} anybody that escaped poverty could tell you about that "overhead", I guess? __________ We can go further - generally people who spend 8-12h/day on warehouse working + commute don't go back to home and spend time on advanced mathematics, theoretical computer science and stuff.
• bpodgursky 6y ago
  What about the Dinosaurs though?
• jpxw 6y ago
  It’s worth pointing out that it’s not clear whether stimulus checks or minimum wage increases reduce poverty. So I am not sure it makes sense to use the conclusions of this study to justify that action, as this article tries to.
• sjg007 6y ago
  This professors grad students must be well paid!
• gregd 6y ago
  As someone who grew up in extreme poverty (eating ketchup soup made with ketchup packets and hot water, extreme), there are so many ways that poverty affected me, outside of this simple article. The best way I can describe it is that poverty makes you start out life in a giant hole and you're given nothing to help you dig out of that hole to reach the surface where you can then start thriving. I honestly feel that at 54 years old, I'm finally thriving and not merely surviving in this whole of poverty. Yes, it's taken me this long to get here. I never went to the dentist on a regular basis. It wasn’t until I had an abscessed tooth and was in extreme pain, that my welfare mother took me to a backwoods, rudimentary small town dentist. I remember sitting in the dental chair with the high-pitched whine of the dentist drill and smoke that smelled like burning hair, pouring out of my mouth. It traumatized me. To this day, I still have issues with my mouth and am finally at a point where I can begin getting it taken care of. I got a job working at the elementary school in 9th grade one summer. I spent the summer scraping gum off of the bottoms of chairs and desks using a container of something that froze the gum so I could scrape it. I also spent long hot summer days crouched over on the black tarmac, painting the foul lines with yellow paint. I was hunched for so long that I developed back problems and of course, couldn’t afford to get it taken care of. I’ve had back problems ever since and it wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I could finally afford to see a Chiropractor and find some relief. And to top it all off, the State of California cut my moms welfare off because I managed to earn $2000 that summer. Guess how much I ended up getting to spend on new school clothes? Only about $200 from what I can remember. It wasn’t until the past few years that I stopped looking at the price of things I was putting in my cart and making a mental calculation of the total cost of the shopping cart EVERY TIME I went shopping. I no longer do this and get whatever I want from the store. I developed a weird sense of wanting to have choices. My wife couldn’t understand why I would open three different tubes of toothpaste until she finally realized what it was I was doing. I never had so many choices and I loved it. I could go on and on but I won't. I think it's pretty easy from here to extrapolate just what poverty did to my productivity overall.
  • nickthemagicman 6y ago
    I feel you so much. My parents died or bailed on me as a kid. I spent many years living in a van as an adult. Now that I have a house, just having a shower every day is like the greatest luxury to me. Forget the 4 seasons, Porsches, Rolexes. I lay in the shower for hours sometimes.
• giantg2 6y ago
  I think anything that crushes one's spirit leads to lower productivity.
• adolph 6y ago
  The researchers find that the workers who were paid upfront were significantly more productive, making 6.2% more plates per hour. The biggest effect was seen with the poorest workers. Great, they made 6.2% more plates; what a win for capitalism! Shuffle around the payroll, no change in $$, and boom increased productivity. Here's the study: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28338 https://www.nber.org/papers/w28338
• imnotlost 6y ago
  Also: being rich and attractive solves all your problems. Being human is messy.
• karmakaze 6y ago
  > Their main experiment was pretty simple: they randomly gave a group of workers a large portion of their compensation earlier in their work period rather than at the very end. > The authors conclude that giving workers cash upfront helped alleviate the mental burden of their financial problems and freed them to be more productive. Hmm. I'd be interested in how a third group who are simply given a single amount equal to the upfront payment would fare. They wouldn't be told it's related to their employment or work. How much of their improvement is merely from having current debts paid vs the concept of getting paid first then being trusted to deliver?