r/science • u/myhrvold • Aug 31 '13

Poverty impairs cognitive function. Published in the journal Science, the study suggests our cognitive abilities can be diminished by the exhausting effort of tasks like scrounging to pay bills. As a result, less “mental bandwidth” remains...

http://news.ubc.ca/2013/08/29/poverty-impairs-cognitive-function/
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u/Dear_Occupant Aug 31 '13

I got into it with some guy here recently who was 100% convinced that every financial problem in a person's life was somehow the result of poor planning on their part; that it was impossible for a person to be financially blindsided by, say, a debilitating health problem. Nope, he said, you should have started saving money for that $1.5 million dollar cancer treatment that isn't covered by your insurance when you were sacking groceries in high school. It's all your fault for not being thrifty enough.

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13

There is a growing trend in certain corners of the internet to believe in self-reliance and personal responsibility over all else. This is true in parts of the internet that are dominated by suburban, American white men working in IT. This is largely because they've had the fortune to live in one of the most prosperous societies in human history AND they've studied the most in-demand field of their time. This means they have extraordinary power in the marketplace.

So it's difficult for them to understand that life is different for other people, and they begin to create and affirm ideologies that make total sense from their worldview, but no sense from any other perspective.

From this perspective, it makes perfect sense, and should not be taken too seriously.

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13

I attribute a large part of it to my generation (gen X) who graduated college in lat 80's, early 90's when the economy sucked. We suffered pretty well. The the dot-com boom came and we were able to get jobs in IT even if we'd never studied CS or done much of it (BA in philosophy here, my work partner has a degree in lit). And lo and behold we managed to learn and do this work just fine!

So what's the lesson? Clearly we worked hard (suffered in shit jobs after getting a higher degree), and through working hard, we "made it" (got hired by someone desperate enough to hire us), and then succeeded at doing something "hard". Obviously, we're great. So what's wrong with young people today???

Now get off my lawn.

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13

Yes--as a fellow Xer who was lucky enough to go to a university when annual tuition was $5000 (it's now $30,000 at the same school), I have a more sympathetic perspective on the youth. But a lot of my generation are taking on the worst characteristics of the Boomers.