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The Cognitive Cost of Poverty
An anonymous reader writes "It's a common trope that most poor people are poor because they're lazy or just inherently bad with money. But a new study (abstract) makes a fascinating find: being poor actually reduces your cognitive capabilities when thinking about money. 'In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night's sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that's been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.' This makes the difficulty in climbing out of poverty much easier to understand. The researchers also demonstrated causality by showing that thinking about a very small expense led to no impairment, while thinking about a very large expense did. They confirmed this by looking at a group of farmers in India who tend to receive most of their income at one time — immediately following their harvest. Shortly before that payment, when the farmers had very little money, their scores dropped as well."
But they must be good at something...if only at stealing.
Homeless people are good at things too, a lot of them. If you go out and talk to them, you'll find a lot of them have very good skills. I knew one guy who was good at construction (and management too, just not managing his own life). The guy could easily pull down $2000 a week, and yet half the time he was out on the streets. Why? Because he spent it all as fast as he got it. On booze, or horse races or in one particularly bad situation, on a woman. The money just burned a hole in his pocket.
If you talk to homeless people, you'll find that almost all of them have horrific money management skills, even though often it's because of psychological problems etc.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And then it's only a common trope amongst the right-wing ultra wealthy crowd. Many of which were born into money.
Sorry, no. It's also a common trope amongst the right-wing wealthy-wannabe crowd. Including the ones who are pretty damned poor themselves and will only be rich, or even well-off in their dreams.
Been "rich". Been poor. Poor makes you feel like you're jammed inside a tin can with limited options. Even if you're poor with money in the bank, but unsure when you're going to become rich again.
Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy your way out of a lot of everyday problems. It can also offer a buffer in case the way out turned out to be a bust and you have to try something else. When you have money you can afford to make mistakes.
In short, I already knew this firsthand.