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."

Comments

FTFY

[ThePhilips]

It's a common trope in USA that most poor people are poor because they're lazy or just inherently bad with money.

FTFY.

Otherwise, I have seen plenty of rich people who were also pretty bad with money.

Re:FTFY

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:FTFY

[ShanghaiBill]

I have seen plenty of rich people who were also pretty bad with money.

Rich people that inherit their money often manage it poorly. There is an old saying: The first generation earns a fortune, the second generation sits on it, the third generations squanders it. But rich people that got there on their own are pretty much by definition good with money.

My experience with poor people is that they don't see the connection between large and small amounts of money. They see the money they spend on a soda, and the money they need to send their kid to college as completely unrelated. They are unable to comprehend that by drinking water instead of three sodas a day, and putting the savings into a tax deferred education savings account, they can easily afford in-state tuition at a good university.

Re:FTFY

[MightyMartian]

In some cases, they're singular talent is knowing which family to be born to.

Re:FTFY

[Barsteward]

when you are living on the bread line, you tend to have a more short term attitude to things. So if they get a bit more money than usual, they will enjoy it quickly as a treat against all the other times where they are having a hard time

Re:FTFY

[AlphaWolf_HK]

My experience with poor people is so varied, because I've seen them all. I live around poor people all the time. I don't rag on them for being poor, but I know why they are and I know that they are also undeserving of handouts. I've seen those who are very stingy with money, and I've seen those whose pockets have a bigger hole than an opening.

They all seem to have a few things in common though: They have little incentive to pull in an income, and/or they really don't understand the concept of investment.

One thing is clear though: Handing money to poor people isn't the answer. It never will be. If what I'm saying weren't true, then lottery winners would stay rich after getting all of that money. They don't though, that money eventually runs out, and usually within only a few years.

Re:FTFY

[girlintraining]

They are unable to comprehend that by drinking water instead of three sodas a day, and putting the savings into a tax deferred education savings account, they can easily afford in-state tuition at a good university.

Or perhaps they comprehend it just fine, but they make a choice you disagree with: Like after working a 10 hour shift for $7.25 an hour, they would like to have at least a small creature comfort, so they buy a six pack of beer (or soda), instead of going home and enjoying tasteless and bland tap-water. The thing about being poor that everyone forgets is that everything that might relieve the boredom and stress of long hours for little reward costs something. It's easy to say "I'll save a few dollars a day" when you've got a fat paycheck -- but when you have nothing and you're looking to those couple of dollars leftover in your wallet, it's hard to say "You don't exist, go away". But psychology aside, there's still the troubling issue of your really, really bad math skills.

Let's analyze your example of "three sodas a day". For the 2012-2013 year, tuition costs for state residents at a community college averaged $8,655 across the country. We're going to ignore cost of living adjustments, peripheral expenses like books, lost wages, and everything else. We're going to take just that tuition number and that will be the cost of "easily afford" at a "good university".

The cost of a 'soda', which to give you the best case scenario, will be for one of the plastic 16 oz variety, which averages about $1.50 right now. So we're going to go with $4.50 per day being blown on soda. In 1,923 days -- about 5.25 years worth of not drinking soda per year of tuition.

Now, given the rate of inflation combined with the rate that tuition has been rising, it's safe to say that number will be higher. And when you consider that tuition is only perhaps 2/3rds of the fees you'll be paying... that number goes up even more.

Bottom line here is that your assertion that saving the equivalent of three sodas a day ($4.50) can buy someone a college education is possible, but absurd. You would spend half your working life waiting. In reality, you're going to have to save more to make it happen. Working a minimum wage job, you're only going to be pulling in about $36 a day (at best). Odds are good you'll be clearing even less.

You're asking someone for whom three sodas a day accounts for about 1/8th of their total personal income to save even more to make this do-able. You'd have to at least double, and probably triple, the savings rate, to get into college within a reasonable timeframe.

Frankly, when you take rent, utilities, and everything else into consideration... a minimum wage job simply cannot sustain that level of investment. Not unless you want to starve, rack up debt elsewhere (like late fees, bank overdraft fees, etc.) -- which will happen anyway when you're living paycheck by paycheck.

The bottom line here is that what these scientists is saying has nothing to do with the conclusions you and many others are reaching: Which is that you can "think" your way out of poverty, or that the problem can be resolved by simple mathematical ability. It is much bigger than that. All this study does is show that when financial resources become severely constrained, people are poor judges of how to best utilize those limited resources.

It provides no guidance on a viable strategy for emerging from that environment, and your flippant advice about simply not drinking soda is symptomatic of another, perhaps larger problem, that poor people face: Prejudice.

Re:FTFY

[BonThomme]

Not really, if you've met both people who've inherited wealth and made it themselves, the difference is striking.

Re:FTFY

[RabidReindeer]

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.

Re:FTFY

[interkin3tic]

I think it's rare that someone is driven to the streets due to a single fault as well. People often assume that homeless people are lazy and that's how they ended up on the street, and if they would just care enough to get off the street and get a job, they would be off in no time.

I think it's comforting to people to tell themselves that were they in that situation, they could EASILY identify the problem and fix it in a snap. That way, they don't have to feel sorry for said people, and don't have to worry themselves about what they would do if they ever end up in such a situation. "Oh, I'd just not be lazy, and bam, I'm off the street."

In reality, I doubt that many people are homeless because of one single problem like laziness. Addiction often seems to be involved. I've heard from people who know more about it than I do that most people actually on the street are there because homeless shelters refuse to allow drunk or high people in. Such people also typically must have reasons they don't stay with friends or family, either they don't have them or they burned through them already. Few places want to hire people with no home, a record, no car, no recent job. And obviously there are a lot of homeless people who need psychiatric help, but after Regan, they're never going to get it.

Re:FTFY

[girlintraining]

I don't rag on them for being poor, but I know why they are and I know that they are also undeserving of handouts.

So you just don't tell them you hate them to their face. How noble of you.

They all seem to have a few things in common though: They have little incentive to pull in an income, and/or they really don't understand the concept of investment.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but public education was an idea that came from the working class. It was fought by the elite class for decades, despite popular support. Labor unions repeatedly shutting down factories and killing profits was what eventually created the federal mandate that public education be available in all states. After that, it was a fight to get blacks and minorities into schools, necessitating the national guard coming out to forcibly open the doors of schools in the South and allow them in. And now, higher education is being rapidly priced into extinction, and it is disproportionately affecting the working class.

So when you say "they don't really understand", consider the possibility that it's not because they can't understand, but lack access to resources that would allow them to.

One thing is clear though: Handing money to poor people isn't the answer. It never will be.

But handing money to CEOs "too big to fail" and banks so corrupt they put the entire economy in the drink for over a decade is? Why do you feel that it is more likely that hundreds of millions of Americans are lazy than that a few thousand of them are greedy?

Re:FTFY

[girlintraining]

ey are not making a choice. A thought pops into their head and

... and then what? If you asked them "Did you want to buy that soda?" will they say no? This is a choice. It may not be a good choice. It may not be a rational choice. But it is a choice. The article doesn't say they have no choice; I'm going to have to insist on a direct quote.

The 3 sodas a day example was not meant to be a tuition fund on its own - it is illustrating the lack of connection people make

I think you illustrated the lack of connection almost everyone has to statistics and probability. These are common cognitive distortions. Everybody has them. We value our own personal experience over direct observation. We are more afraid of what we don't know than what we do know. We are absolute and utter shit at estimating risk. This is the human condition, and I don't mean to single you out here; But being aware of these cognitive blindspots is the first step to managing them. I didn't say eliminate; I said manage. Everyone makes mistakes.

That said, you wrote what you wrote, and I'm holding you to it. You can apologize and say that wasn't what you meant, and that's fine -- but I'm not letting you change the goal posts here. You made an argument. It was a shit argument, and it died in place. Abandon it like a man and come up with a new one.

There is absolutely no basis for your conclusion. People can't think their way out...

Okay, I'm gonna stop you right here. You're moving the goal posts again. I said poor people deal with prejudice. That's it. That's all. And it may be an even bigger problem than the one under discussion. If you want to reply, reply to that statement directly. Provide factual and supporting evidence that poor people don't deal with prejudice, or at least that prejudice is less of a threat to them than this cognitive haze the researchers are asserting exists.

Consider that, and consider than soda is not the only extra people can do without if they really want to be financially better off. Consider the role of grants and scholarships, and do your math again. I'm sure you will realize it's not so flippant of a comment.

It remains a flippant comment. It may not be what you meant, but there it is, two lines up, staring you in the face and saying "I was a total dick back there, and someone called me on it." Man up to it. You can very probably come up with a better argument, possibly even one that is defensible, and supports your implicit belief that we shouldn't help poor people, with the followup being they need to help themselves first. I won't argue that belief. It's yours. Keep it. Honest. But I will argue with your faulty logic, cognitive mistakes, and apparent lack of empathy towards others whom you seem to implicitly feel are beneath you and morally inferior in some fashion.

Re:FTFY

[mc6809e]

And obviously there are a lot of homeless people who need psychiatric help, but after Regan, they're never going to get it.

This is one of those myths that just won't die.

Defunding of psychiatric hospitals generally occurred AFTER those hospitals lost patients that were allowed to leave after the Psychiatric_survivors_movementsuccessfully fought for deinstitutionalization.

Mental hospitals lost about 80% of their residents when those patients were given the choice to discharge themselves.

Re:FTFY

[Teun]

This is a bit off-topic but your calculation shows us the issues surrounding a fair minimum wage.
Fair means to me your days labour pays for a day's life, not a day of suffering.
That day's life should include savings for later, including savings for the future of your kids.

If your income cannot support this your job is not only useless for you but to society as a whole, your boss/employer might seem to make money over your back but at the end of the day/week/month/year/life we as a society are stuck with a family that needs support to survive, forget about advancing the pool of society.

A fair and sufficient minimum wage might initially look like a burden for the company or employer but in the long term it helps us all.
A day's work that cannot pay for a workers life and future is by definition inefficient and in the longer term will cost us all.

Re:FTFY

[nbauman]

I think it's rare that someone is driven to the streets due to a single fault as well. People often assume that homeless people are lazy and that's how they ended up on the street, and if they would just care enough to get off the street and get a job, they would be off in no time.

There have been lots of studies of the homeless. The one thing they found in common was that homeless people had no social networks. When people have family or friends to help them, they don't wind up on the streets. The people who wind up on the streets are those who have no one to help them.

I remember seeing some studies that found that half the homeless were mentally disturbed, and the other half were alcoholics or drug addicts.

One of the surprising things they found out in New York City was that they could simply give people housing, without social services, without counseling, and most of them did OK. Whatever the underlying pathology, it improves things to give them normal housing. Homeless people resist living in shelters that are run in some ways like prisons, but they usually are willing to live in normal housing.

I think it's comforting to people to tell themselves that were they in that situation, they could EASILY identify the problem and fix it in a snap. That way, they don't have to feel sorry for said people, and don't have to worry themselves about what they would do if they ever end up in such a situation. "Oh, I'd just not be lazy, and bam, I'm off the street."
 

That's known as the fallacy of the just universe: "The world is just, therefore, if somebody is having problems, he must have done something to deserve it."

Corollary: "Therefore, I shouldn't have to pay taxes to help them."

And the explanation the psychologists give for that fallacy is pretty much as you describe.

Re:FTFY

[girlintraining]

I think it's rare that someone is driven to the streets due to a single fault as well. People often assume that homeless people are lazy and that's how they ended up on the street, and if they would just care enough to get off the street and get a job, they would be off in no time.

Numerous studies have been done and the overwelming majority are mentally ill or veterans. For some reason, watching people get blown apart by cluster bombs repeatedly has an effect on people's mental stability. It's the same thing with the prisons -- something like 86% of people in prison are suffering from severe mental illness.

But the Just World Hypothesis is what causes most people to reach a different conclusion than "We should help these people," -- and it's because if they admitted to themselves that they're very similar to these people and could experience the same misfortune, then it would also mean they are not, due to some intrinsic value in themselves, more deserving of success than the other guy is. It is, at its core, nothing more than a form of ego-protection. One that, unfortunately, has the side effect of condemning millions to destitute poverty, suicide, and illness.

Re:FTFY

[nbauman]

In New York State it was pretty clear what happened.

The institutionalized mental hospitals really were snake pits. They were badly run by incompetent, underpaid aides, and made their residents worse.

Psychiatrists found that the best way to help most of that population was to move them into supportive housing that was as close to normal living conditions as possible. It also made a big difference if they were living among friends and family, in a city for example, rather than off in an isolated prison-like hospital. A lot of these patients never should have been institutionalized. They were capable of holding jobs and functioning pretty well.

And there were new psychiatric drugs that helped with a lot of the worst symptoms of mental illnesses like schizophrenia.

Deinstitutionalization was very popular among liberal and conservative politicians, because it was cheaper than traditional mental hospitals. Their argument was, they would close down the institutions, and use the money to create community residences and mental health services.

But then, after they closed the hospitals, they didn't use the money for community residences and mental health services. They set up for example community mental health centers. But it was a lot cheaper for them to treat women with housewife blues than to treat schizophrenics.

So then these former residents wound up on the streets. Fortunately, the Partnership for the Homeless sued New York City, and then other cities around the country, to force them to provide housing for the homeless, as they were usually required under the "provide for the public welfare" provisions of most city and state constitutions.

There were a very few people who really did need to be institutionalized, because they were a danger to themselves or others. But we still don't have anyplace to put them. According to a recent New York Times series, those residences are still hellholes. Attendants were raping patients and kept on the job.

Re:FTFY

[nbauman]

Well, I am not sure where there study group came from, but there is a tremendous amount of real-world examples to show that just giving money to people does NOT fix poverty. Don't believe me, take a good hard look at every big city in America for the last 40 years. The amount of money given to people in poor environments is staggering, and there is no real numbers to show that we have made a dent on poverty (by dent, I mean helped an appreciable percentage of people out of poverty).

The study comes from Science magazine. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976.abstract and if you click on the author affiliations you'll see that they came from Harvard, Princeton, U British Columbia, and U Warwick. The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs is not a left-wing think tank.

They provided good evidence to support their conclusion that when people are poor, they're under stress, and they're less able to make good decisions.

Other things being equal, giving money to people does fix poverty. The most successful poverty program in the country, in terms of bipartisan approval, was the Earned Income Tax Credit, and it did move a lot of people into significantly less poverty. So did the food stamp program.

Over a time scale of about 50 or 60 years, black people started out in the south in terrible poverty. The federal poverty program by Kennedy and Johnson gave them more income. We don't have the same poverty in the south now that we did in 1950. One dramatic chart is of the reading and math level of black students, which climbed dramatically from 1970 to the latest data, according to the NAEP. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/

I know people who worked in Africa with families who were living on the subsistence level. One of the successful things they did was give them cash. They'd give the families $10 or $20 and the first thing they'd do was pay their debts. Next month, they'd buy necessities, like furniture. Next month, they'd start a little business, like selling things on the side of the road.

Re:FTFY

[cas2000]

> So, they go down to occupy wall street bitching at a very
> arbitrary set of people (the top 1%, or the top 3.14159%, or
> whatever) about why their life sucks and somebody else
> needs to pay.

the fallacy of envy is complete bullshit. it's nonsensical propaganda pushed by those who don't want to think about how the world actually works, and by those who don't want anyone else to think about it. it's part of the same ideological blinker set that says there are no systemic problems, it's all just the fault of "a few bad apples" or "individuals making the wrong choices".

people aren't pissed off at the 1% merely because they own 99+% of the world's wealth and make 99+% of the worl'd income. we're pissed off because of *how* they do it, not just the fact of it.

we're pissed off because they're fucking thieves and parasites and when they steal trillions they then get a government handout of trillions more (all the while deriding welfare and social safety nets).

they are large-scale thieves in $10,000 suits - and far more damaging to everyone in the world than the small-time thieves in $5 kmart tracksuits.

Re:Strategy

[Proudrooster]

Statistically, there are two pieces of data that determine success in public education:
* Socioeconomic Status of the Parents
* Highest Education Level Achieved by Parents

The researcher Andrew Maslow in 1943 basically drew the same conclusion in his research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

His conclusion was is that if you aren't safe, fed, loved, and have self esteem that aren't going to be a problem solver.
Everything old is new again. I guess the new buzz words are "cognitive load" vs. "problem solver."

Re:If you're poor

[Desler]

I have worked with homeless people. Next to none of them were poor by choice. Many of them were poor and homeless due to being a couple of major causes:

1) Mental issues such as schizophrenia and kicked out of the institution they were receiving treatment from.
2) Addiction issues.
3) Some major bill came along that wiped out their money.

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.

Re:If you're poor

[Desler]

And to add to my previous post:

For persons in families, the three most commonly cited causes, according to a 2008 U.S. Conference of Mayors study (pdf) are:
Lack of affordable housing
Poverty
Unemployment

For singles, the three most commonly cited causes of homelessness are:
Substance abuse
Lack of affordable housing
Mental illness

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/526/homeless-facts.html

Funny how none of the major causes are "chose to be poor".

"Poverty makes you crazy"

[BenEnglishAtHome]

30 years ago I worked with a former social worker of long experience who had just changed jobs seeking a steadier paycheck. She said that poverty produced a constant stress over not feeling safe that basic needs would be met. Her view was that that constant stress often resulted in serious mental disfunction.

"Poverty makes you crazy...or at least stupid" was her standard rejoinder whenever we ran across someone who did something stupid with what little money they had.

From the Hierarchy of Needs, to my co-worker, to this new study - has anything changed? Not really. But it seems the relevant points need to be made over and over again because they just aren't getting through.

Re:"Poverty makes you crazy"

[CastrTroy]

I've heard of other stuff related to this. Children who grow up in an abusive or unstable home are basically in "fight or flight" mode all day long. They never get a chance to relax. A lot of these kids end up with symptoms similar to PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), which is what soldiers or other people living in warzones usually get.

Re:"Poverty makes you crazy"

[fermion]

First, I read this paper yesterday and for a piece of social science I was rather impressed with the methodology. I think they took care to cover the variables and carefully limit their conclusions to what could be inferred fro the experiment.

That said, the media reports, as normal, tend to focus on the headline value rather than the research. Although the paper does talk about poverty, it is in the context of having to live in poverty, not being poor. From the conclusion
The findings, in other words, are not about poor people, but about any people who find themselves poor.
The paper specifically talks about providing scaffolding to those who find themselves with funds, instead of just expecting them to act like an average person with enough money. The authors call the normal methods of intervention as incurring 'cognitive taxes' and say that things such as "Filling out long forms, preparing for a lengthy interview, deciphering new rules," should be minimized on the basis of this research. T

So I think that just saying poor people make poor financial decisions, or variations of that, is not really what is being concluded. We all make poor decisions, even if we are well off. I buy pints on Hagan Das for $4 that I really do not need with money I really do not have. Other people lease a BMW or go out and spend huge amounts on wine. Even if one has money today, it is hard to justify these extravagances for a purely rational point of view. A person spending every penny the make is certainly to some degree irrational no matter how much they make.

Rather, I think that the research can tell us what happens to people when they become fiscally stressed. People who are pepertually in this state are certain a prime concern, and we must take any effect on cognitive behavior into account, but anyone in financial straights are going to be effected as well. In the paper they use farmers as an example, and attempt to show that better decisions are made after a good harvest rather than later when thing are less abundant.

Here is how I would think about it using an example from the housing bubble. At first, when times were good, people bought hoses to live in or rented as they could. They paid their mortgages or rent and all was well. At time went on, and their friends were living better, and they felt poor, these people bought homes or bigger homes, often with adjustable rate, interest only, or buble mortgages. At some point they actually did become financially stressed, as property taxes went up, or repairs had to be made, or interests rate rose, and they begin to make truly poor decisions, such as borrowing equity from their homes to pay for vacations, or beer, or fancy dinners, or a new BMW.

Now clearly these people did not make these poor choices on their own. They were helped, even prodded. Which is, IMHO, the point. Perhaps we should not have policy that tend to push people into worse situations. It may not really the homeowners fault that they lost their house if cognitive function decreases with financial stress. It may not be students fault that they have big students loans if the school took advantage of, and ever promoted, the financial stress on the student or parents.

Same Story, New Data.

[lionchild]

This isn't actually really new news for some folks in the US. Public Educators have know this sort of thing in the form of other studies for many years.

For example, studies have shown that people who are low-income, tend to favor larger quantities of food. Middle-class/income favor higher quality foods, and when it comes to upper-income/class, they are more interested in the quality of the presentation of food.

We have long since known that low-income families have higher risks for needing additional aid in learning, because they do carry a much heavier mental/emotional burden than other families. They're constantly worried about if they'll have enough money to put food on the table, to keep the lights on, or even pay the rent. If low-income families first pay rent, food, utilities and transportation, they are in a completely different mental/emotional position than if they're worrying about one of those basic areas not being covered.

Re:5 years and compound interest = college

[girlintraining]

My dad grew up dirt poor, as in the floor of his parents. By making decisions like the soda decision, he ended up flying us on private jets when he was 40.

Unlikely. Anyone who's made it big in finances will, if they're being honest with themselves, say that it came down to hard work, smart decisions, and luck. Your dad may have all of those qualities you admire, but that's not why he's rich. He's rich because he had those qualities and was in the right place at the right time when an opportunity presented. Some people win this lottery early. Some win it late in life. Very many though never get a winning ticket, and so for them, it doesn't matter.

The cognitive distortion you have just used is what is called the Just World Hypothesis.

Re:5 years and compound interest = college

[sumdumass]

This is the kind of idiocy that keeps poor people poor. Wise decisions with money can move someone out of the poor house just as easily as they can keep them in.

In the soda example, at 3 soda's a day per $1.50 a piece or $4.50 a day, if you were to open an account stating with $4.50 then add a equivalent of $4.50 per day for the duration of a month (about $135 a month)- every month, earning just 3% interest would give you about $38,457.00 in 18 years. That certainly is not a small number. But how many other choices are made that could equate to similar savings? Suppose that you could save the same amount per month by packing a lunch instead of eating at fast food joints and skipping a movie from time to time (135+135). This new savings gives you a total of about $76,907.00 in those same 18 years.

So while you will not be driving around in a Bently due to this savings, thanks to compounding interest, you certainly could be sending your first born to college or perhaps placing a down payment on a retirement home or any number of things that would make life much more enjoyable than a soda and BigMac might.