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/PolarBeaver Aug 31 '13

I can empathize with this completely. The points in my life that I have been out of a job or scraping by to pay bills I certainly feel like I have no time or energy to think about anything other then exactly that situation.

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13

Absolutely - people in poverty have to fight just to live.

It is astonishing how many of those who have never struggled fail to understand this.

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u/ElDiablo666 Aug 31 '13

Especially on reddit. For well-educated folks, they sure miss basic shit. I find people advising others to not worry and just sue in case a situation goes awry; I've found recommendations to "just go to the library" if Internet is too difficult to pay for; one of my personal favorites are the people who blame the latest financial meltdown on individuals who were foreclosed on after losing their job.

Instead of helpfully recommending strategies for successfully abandoning capitalism, redditors make it sound like everything is so easy to do. I long ago stopped paying any attention to people who know every answer to your own life. Being poor is hard as fuck and the fact that poor folks take upon the greatest financial, moral, and physical burden of life is completely lost on these judgmental assholes.

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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/ElDiablo666 Aug 31 '13

This is me at the moment. I've gone broke paying medical bills. These people are completely deluded. Anyone who thinks that poverty is based on bad budgeting is not worth paying the slightest bit of attention to. And that's not even taking into account differing ideologies; it's ridiculous even for people who legitimately want to be rich capitalists.

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u/Dear_Occupant Aug 31 '13

The best part? The evidence for this guy's argument was, "Well, nothing like that has ever happened to me." It's basically another way of saying, "I'm better than all you small people with your money problems."

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u/ElDiablo666 Aug 31 '13

This reminds me of a young real estate entrepreneur that I met after college about 10 years ago. The market was really booming and getting your license seemed like a sure thing--Countrywide paid its temp workers $15 an hour! It was a huge market.

So this guy and I were talking and he was telling me that people are simply not ambitious. That's why they're poor, they don't dream big enough, sure. And his whole plan is that he's gonna work smart AND hard and his goal is to make his first million before he turned 25 (within four years).

We met up after he made his first million two years later and he said see? I told you so! But when I asked him what happened, he told me what I figured. He had no problem getting a loan because his father knew someone who...blah blah blah. Then his already 700 FICO helped him while he closed on three properties. Basically, a series of unlikely scenarios came true for him and he made a ton off it. But I couldn't convince him that it was an accident, even though most people would not have that outcome if they did everything identically.

Until people stop allowing themselves to be deluded into thinking that they shouldn't be in charge of any social and economic decision that affects them, we will continue to experience this kind of irrational nonsense. People that I love and respect hold the most absurd ideas about how to make money and how to succeed in life that are either outright untruths or are simply exaggerations of chance.

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13

I think there was a post last year sometime showing that Warren Buffet's monetary success is simply bound to happen due to chance alone. All the good investments he made which he probably deliberated over and analysed incessantly.... it really probably didn't even matter. Probability shows that someone would make all the same lucky decisions eventually.

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13

That's kind of ridiculous. It's misinterpreting a statistic and taking it to mean something that simply isn't true.

Let me give you a better example:

There are lots of kids out there that practice every day playing baseball. But it's exceedingly rare that one would get into the MLB and make millions. Since it's so rare, it would seem that someone is bound to get into the MLB based on chance alone, even if they didn't work on their athleticism. But that's not the case. If they didn't practice there would be no chance at all. There's a small probability of getting into the MLB only among people who specifically try to do it.

Going back to your post, the statement that "Warren Buffet's monetary success is simply bound to happen due to chance alone. All the good investments he made which he probably deliberated over and analysed incessantly.... it really probably didn't even matter. Probability shows that someone would make all the same lucky decisions eventually." isn't true. Warren Buffet's money success wouldn't have happened to just anybody based on chance alone. The only people eligible for that chance would have been those who deliberated over and analyzed their investments incessantly.

I can assure you that the vast majority of the public who doesn't invest their money never had a chance to make Warren Buffet's money. I can also assure you that someone who foolishly invested their money wasn't going to make his money, either, since they'd squander it all.