Poverty and the all-consuming fretting that comes with it require so much mental energy that the poor have little brain power left to devote to other areas of life, according to the findings of an international study published on Thursday.
The mental strain could be costing poor people up to 13 IQ (intelligence quotient) points and means they are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that amplify and perpetuate their financial woes, researchers found.
“Our results suggest that when you are poor, money is not the only thing in short supply. Cognitive capacity is also stretched thin,” said Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, part of an international team that conducted the study.
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Understanding Society: Poverty and economics
The neoclassical free market purists stand at the other end of the garden. The economists of the Chicago School put primary emphasis on the beneficent effects of untrammeled market behavior, and they give little attention to the “market imperfections” that poverty and deprivation represent. (The word “poverty” does not occur in the index of John Van Overtveldt’s good intellectual history of the Chicago School, The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who Revolutionized Economics and Business.) Poverty seems to be viewed as a normal and fair result of the workings of market institutions: some people make large contributions and earn high income, and others make small or zero contributions and earn low income.
The closing chapter of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom is entitled “The Alleviation of Poverty.” Here Friedman admits that poverty is a problem, but conceives of only two solutions: private charity (which he agrees will not work in a large complex society) and direct transfers from tax revenues to payments to the poor (which is limited by the willingness of citizens to provide taxes for this purpose). The mechanism he prefers is a negative income tax: persons with incomes below a given threshold would receive payments determined by their income levels. “In this way, it would be possible to set a floor below which no man’s net income (defined now to include the subsidy) could fall” (192).
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What parts of the global income distribution registered the largest gains between 1988 and 2008? As figure below shows, it is indeed among the very top of the income distribution and among the emerging global middle class, which includes more than a third of the world’s population, that we find most significant increases in per … Continue reading »
In addition to the tax increases and broad federal spending cuts (known as “sequestration”) scheduled to take effect at the end of this year, the emergency unemployment benefits system is also expected to come to an end. It doesn’t get as much attention as the defense cuts or the tax increases, but the end of … Continue reading »
Reblogged from GDNet Blog: Combating poverty and inequality is on the top of priorities for many development organizations. This is why the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA), the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank came together to launch their joint initiative “Network on Inequality and Poverty”. The objective of the initiative is … Continue reading »
Officially, the U.S. poverty rate in 2011 was 15 percent exactly, a 0.1 point reduction from 2010. But as I pointed out when that number was released in September, that figure doesn’t mean a whole lot. The official poverty threshold is the amount of money a family of three would have to make to spend … Continue reading »
A study shows how that anti-poverty programs are much more popular when socially well-connected citizens are the first to know about them Continue reading »
Four out of five US adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives Continue reading »
A newly published study indicates that today, more than 40 percent of