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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the poverty-sucks dept.

The poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty. We hypothesize that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis. First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants. Second, we examined the cognitive function of farmers over the planting cycle. We found that the same farmer shows diminished cognitive performance before harvest, when poor, as compared with after harvest, when rich. This cannot be explained by differences in time available, nutrition, or work effort. Nor can it be explained with stress: Although farmers do show more stress before harvest, that does not account for diminished cognitive performance. Instead, it appears that poverty itself reduces cognitive capacity. We suggest that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks. These data provide a previously unexamined perspective and help explain a spectrum of behaviors among the poor. We discuss some implications for poverty policy.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Tuesday November 06 2018, @09:50AM (2 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday November 06 2018, @09:50AM (#758433) Journal

    This is something that's annoyed me for a long time. I typically buy almost all non-perishable staples at a big discount when they're on offer and I can do this because I have some disposable income and storage space. I end up paying around half as much as someone who doesn't have this.

    Terry Pratchett wrote about this as the Sam Vimes theory of social economics in the Discworld books: Vimes observed that a rich person would buy an expensive pair of boots that would last 10 years. A poor person would buy one that cost a tenth the amount and lasted six months, because they couldn't afford the expensive pair. The poor person would spend twice as much and would still have wet feet because the cheap boots would start to leak before they were replaced.

    You may well call me cynical, but I don't think this particular confluence of circumstances is in any way accidental. It seems to me it is one of several easily visible mechanisms for keeping the poor, poor.

    This is where I disagree. It's obviously in the interests of the shops to shift large quantities of their products at a time. They have a bunch of fixed overheads that mean that a large sale at a lower price is better for them than a load of smaller sales over a longer period. That also makes it harder to fix. If this were some orchestrated policy to keep the poor in their place, then that's something that could be addressed fairly easily. When it's a natural consequence of a particular economic model (especially one that is also shared by pretty much any other plausible replacement) then it's much harder.

    It's a small scale example of the same problem as renting vs buying a house. You can't buy a house unless you have a big chunk of spare capital for the deposit, but if you can't buy a house then you're going to be paying more in rent than your landlord is paying on a mortgage for the same property, so people with less capital end up with higher living costs. That's a fundamental problem with any economic system that rewards owning capital more than performing labour. Unfortunately, every alternative that people have tried has worked out even less well.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @11:29AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @11:29AM (#758455)

    I've experienced this...anybody who shops at harbor freight has. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do, but its not difficult to get out of.

    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:12PM

      by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:12PM (#758516)

      > but its not difficult to get out of.

      That depends entirely on your available income stream. Before you can start getting out of the hole, you need to accumulate enough savings to start being able to buy the better-investment products. And when you're already doing most of your durable goods shopping at second-hand stores, and still having trouble keeping enough beans and rice on the table, that's not so easy to do.