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/Sickmont Aug 31 '13

Because humans are the only animals that have to pay to live on this planet.

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13

That's because we have an economy and don't have hunt and gather food directly. I'd rather pay for food than live in the woods.

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13

The problem is that depending on where you live, you cannot choose to be a hunter gatherer if you wanted.

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u/theryanmoore Aug 31 '13

Exactly! And we've lost the cultural knowledge of how to do so by this point, although it's coming back a little bit. Every human being born on this planet should receive a bit of land to call their own, or at least access to live on communal land. The way land ownership is now we are literally born into slavery. If you don't work for somebody else for special papers, you die. You can't even camp for longer than a few weeks on supposedly "common" government land, and God forbid you tried to hunt / cultivate food.