| richardhutnik said: So, apparently there can be a snowball effect here...
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-poverty-iq-20130831,0,2261441.story Whether you're a New Jersey mall rat or a farmer in India, being poor can sap your smarts. In fact, the mental energy required to make do with scarce resources taxes the brain so much that it can perpetuate the cycle of poverty, new research shows. The findings, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, indicate that an urgent need — making rent, getting money for food — tugs at the attention so much that it can reduce the brainpower of anyone who experiences it, regardless of innate intelligence or personality. As a result, many social welfare programs set up to help the poor could backfire by adding more complexity to their lives. "I think it's a game changer," said Kathleen Vohs, a behavioral scientist at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, who wasn't involved with the study. There's a widespread tendency to assume that poor people don't have money because they are lazy, unmotivated or just not that sharp, said study coauthor Sendhil Mullainathan, a behavioral economist at Harvard University. "That's a broad narrative that's pretty common," Mullainathan said. "Our intuition was quite different: It's not that poor people are any different than rich people, but that being poor in itself has an effect." |
This reminded me of a Times article about the "Me" generation and an important portion from it about how back in the 80's and 90's they linked self-esteem to higher grades and testing scores. Turns out the take away that boosting self-esteem by giving awards, trophies or ribbons for simply being one's self and stroking our kids' egos didn't create better grades or more achievement but has come about in the form of greater rates of narcissism and selfishness. It was really ACTUAL achievement that boosted real self-esteem not the other way around.
I suspect that the same will be found here eventually after we have gone ahead and given away earned wealth and resources we will see a gradual decline in overall living standards and an even further decline in rates of intelligence.
We are already seeing it over the last several decades. We spend more on education, feeding the poor, giving away free health care etc. etc. than ever before and yet by nearly every metric we use to track the academic progress of our populace we are getting dumber and dumber.
