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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."
So if you want to claim that people are poor by choice you need to provide some evidence because all you have is an anecdote that doesn't match what I've ever seen.
Sure, and you can add to your list guys who had a romantic breakup that pushed them over the edge.
Look at the people who had major bills that wiped out all their money (along with a lot of the people who have addiction issues), that's where you find those people. Yeah, it sucks, but a lot of them decide in their minds that it was easier to be homeless than to keep fighting. So that's what they chose.
Also, don't think I'm looking down on them. I respect these people.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> working at a minimum wage job
I've noticed gas stations start new people at almost double minimum wage. I made minimum wage - for about two months. Then I got raise because I reliably showed up for my shift - I was stoned out of my mind, but I was there. If you're over 16 1/2 and making minimum wage, start showing up on time. Flipping burgers is like a training bra to get prepared for an actual job, it's not a career for raising a family.
> 1/8th of their income
Do you not see that 1/8th of your income on soda is an INCREDIBLY stupid idea? Yet, I just spoke to someone who makes those kinds of decisions regularly. She literally buys several fountain drinks per day and she's on welfare. My ex-wife will always be broke because those are the decisions she makes.