What Poverty Does to Your Brain | Hacker News Reader

What Poverty Does to Your Brain

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55 pointscdvonstinkpot77 comments

I lived this first hand. I grew up in extreme poverty (by the US standards anyways) where my electricity/water were cut off occasionally and occasionally would have to wonder if I was going to eat that night. Though this is still better than most of the world, it sucked. a lot. No christmas, no birthdays. The most interesting part is now im software engineer making really good money, I can still see the rest of my family with the same mindset that enabled that kind of poverty. While I live below my means, they regularly live above it. They lack the self control to regulate their spending, if they get money they spend it like it might go away if they don't. Its institutional in ways because their parents were poor. Although I broke the cycle, my brother didnt and shows a lot of the same patterns. This article hits the point head on. I wonder if there is a way to hack the cycle and reduce the institutional aspect of poverty.

I wonder if there is a way to hack the cycle and reduce the institutional aspect of poverty.

Check out what Harlem Children's Zone is doing: they seem to have at least the beginning of an answer.

Thats brilliant, seems well founded in research and well implemented. I really hope that it can continue to scale to more and more places. 445 communities is a smashing success already!

There was a really good article a while ago (this one, I think [1]), about why the poor make bad choices. Basically, the gist of it is that long-term, it doesn't matter - even if they made "good" choices, they would still remain poor. So they make "bad" choices (unprotected sex, pregnancy, smoking, impulse buying) that give them short-term pleasure, and hope they will get by somehow.

Do you think this would be possible for your family as well? For example, maybe your mindset is "save" because you earn a good salary and you know that if you save, in a few years you'll be well-off and will be able to afford exponentially more, whereas the rest of your family objectively has no way out of poverty, so they don't even try.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/21/linda-tirado-...

I think this is a pretty basic and important point. Even though money "doesn't by happiness" it can buy escape, even for short periods of time. That escape is as powerful as any drug when your day-to-day life is significantly depressed, with no foreseeable exit.

So for some people, there's not much difference in $100 and $100,000 without education and impulse control.

I agree that savings and restraint in spending are not the main issue. But on the other hand, if you:

1) Graduate high school,

2) Wait until age 21 to get married, and wait until marriage to have children; and

3) Have a full time job (any full time job),

then you have a 2% chance of living in poverty, and a 75% chance to be middle class. So in order to argue that bad choices don't matter, you need to make the case that one of these three steps is impossible for most people who are poor. I think your best bet is #3.

[1] http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/03/13-join-m...

It's not clear from the article if those percentages include all of the society or just those that started out poor. If it's the former, it might be just correlation, not causation.

I'm pretty sure it's the former. I don't find it plausible that these three things wouldn't have a causal effect on income, but it's a fair point that it would be more useful to see those percentages broken down by starting income level.

I think maybe its subconscious but they view getting rich as a singular event like winning the lottery, gambling or a lawsuit (I wish I was kidding on the second one) and not an long term compounding effect using money as your leverage. That article is really good and I think sums that mindset up really well: if getting rich was a singular event then I will spend everything I have until the event happens to me.

> I wonder if there is a way to hack the cycle and reduce the institutional aspect of poverty.

Countries with lower poverty rates have traditionally done this with welfare, free healthcare and social programs all funded by high tax rates. It works, but it doesn't fit well with the American ethos of every man to himself, where "redistribution of wealth" is seen as an encroachment on liberty rather than its biggest facilitator (as it's seen in other countries).

Mostly by people who receive a benefit of said redistribution.

http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2011/apr/22/rache...

I don't know why the poor just don't kill the rich, to be honest. I'm not poor, but if my child was suffering because of abject poverty and lack of healthcare while some asshole was buying a $50000 Birkin bag, I'd probably tear up the person with the bag. Why do the poor not just revolt?

Isn't that pretty much why we have welfare - to give the poor protection money to stop them attacking? Sure, you could spend more on police, but it's probably more cost effective to just give poor people money to keep them a bit more docile.

Bread and circuses. Basic income could work even better, by giving more certainty. There's probably a better version of circuses too - it was TV, now the mainstream internet, but at least there's more opportunity to use the net to move forward.

Because people have an innate sense of right and wrong. The concept that you should not kill someone else in order to take with they have has been shown to be almost universal across time and culture.

I don't think that's the whole story. I read a really eye-opening book a while back that was essentially an insider's guide to surviving in prison, and one of the things that stuck with me was the idea that people behave themselves (for the most part) in that environment because there's always somewhere "further down" in the system they can send you as punishment. It's the same on the outside. In the US, at least, you have to be really, really poor before being in prison for the rest of your life is a better option. Most poor people have lives, friends, family, a daily routine, freedoms, possessions, etc., that they'd be putting at risk if they decided to start murdering random rich people. Especially at scale.

That is not true. That standard has historically applied only to people who are "in your group". People throughout history have had no problem killing a neighboring tribe and taking over their stuff (including women and children).

I doubt any poor person sees a rich person as a part of their extended social group. The psychological barrier does not exist.

I really want a citation for that.

People who have the capacity to start a revolution have the capacity to start money-making organizations and usually are pretty well off. This is how revolutions do happen: when capable, rising groups are blocked from advancing further.

I'm more curious why the poor, and the rich aren't calling for more consequences for the politicians. The rich, and the poor alike understand that one of the main reasons for a government is to protect those who can't protect themselves (from circumstance, even).

The money is there. The food is there. The shelter is there. It's all there, yet you see individuals suffering left, right and center and even dying. Meanwhile, we can't even get the politicians to provide basic housing, food, healthcare and jobs for society's bottom rung.

Perhaps, the reason you question the use of violence as a solution to this problem is because you feel that there is no other recourse. We've been doing the "democracy" thing for a while, yet we can't get the basics right. Hell, we can't even up and call for a country-wide referendum on basic hotly-debated topics. It's all a circus, and the poor are barely getting enough bread to get by.

Who do you think own all the guns.

The government.

Probably same reasons that keep them poor like being too busy with the day to day effort to stay afloat.

Of course they do. When they do it individually, they quickly get arrested and thrown in jail. When they get organized, you get revolutions, which when successful end up by someone else becoming rich.

World GDP per capita (PPP) is about $13,000 / person [1]. So if the poor rose up, killed the rich, and distributed everything equally, then, assuming that the rich produce literally nothing and compensation has no effect on work effort, everyone in the world could make slightly less than the US minimum wage.

[1] http://www.indexmundi.com/world/gdp_per_capita_(ppp).html

Really this is an important point, expressed in the other answers.

There is a game and there are rules of that game, and almost everybody adhere to those rules and play the game, winners or losers. Killing somebody, notably the rich, is a game move, and there are rules about it, like go to jail, don't get the $20,000.

The question you're asking is why don't the poor just stop playing the game? Even rich people realize the game is no fun, and the losers of that game have a hard time, and I guess, some of them wouldn't mind stopping the game.

The thing is that the game is rigged to ensure that you don't realize it's there, and to ensure that you run and run all the time to catch up, without time to stop and think about the game.

Really, the majority in the middle can't take the time to think about it, and they still think they can win! Or if not them, their children. Only a few winners and losers could realize that. The losers, if they realize it, before they die, they can't do anything about it anyways, having to work hard to survive. The winners, they can't du much about it either, even with all their money, because everybody else wants to play the game.

You could hope to try to change it thru education, but now it's obvious that education is rigged to maintain people in ignorance and have them keep running for the game. http://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE/?_encod...

You could hope to try to change it thru the political system, but now it's obvious that it is rigged by the winners to maintain a winning game for them. http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/tv_turnout.pdf http://home.bi.no/fag89001/TV.pdf

As mentionned in another answer, a revolt only lead to the reproduction of the game, with another set of winner (or often just the same), and this arguably comes from the fact that the formal rules are written down by the same set of people designated by the winners, instead of by the people doing the revolt. I'm talking here of the constitutions. So one way would be to educate people to teach them constitution writing so that they could write their own consititution next time they revolt, and not have the same bunch of goonies write it for the ex-winners so they can be the new winners again. But see the problem with education above. On the other hand, here is a little light, with the Internet, people could educate themselves. Learn about true democracy at http://le-message.org/?lang=en and write constitution articles with your friends!

But more than just the consitution and formal rules (laws) aspect to the game, it also exists in an informal way in the mind of people, culturally.

The notions that you have to work to survive, the notion of money (and how it has been transformed in the recent centuries by the banksters), have to be changed. It's true that for a long time scarcity made it rather difficult to envision those changes. And the winners know it, since they are even today sending propaganda about a so called "Earth Overshoot Day" and other bullshit like overpopulation and climate "change", http://www.footprintnetwork.org/ to program deeply into your mind the notion of scarcity.

http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis-Cousin...

Instead, people we have to free ourselves from this mind set, learn about alternatives, and prepare for a real "revolution", where we will be able finally to get rid of the psychopaths "winners" of games, and of any "game" that pits man against man. https://www.thevenusproject.com/en/ http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/

In the meantime, and pushed very hard by robotization and automation of enterprises, the establishment of a universal income, basic revenue, whatever you name it, should ease the transition and perhaps let us avoid a bloody revolt.

There's also another dimension to take into account, that the poor are actually not in the same country or even the same continent as the rich. Some of those poor, pushed by war (resulting directly or indirectly from the USA and Europe action!), are migrating "refuge" into our countries; thus they are getting closer to the "rich", but most of the time they just start to run to play the game, happy of being already richer or more alive than their cousins they left home. Fighting fewer wars, killing fewer "dictators", and instead having some kind of international cooperation that would transform those countries into something less than us as we are now or were in the past couple of centuries, but instead more like what we'll be in a few centuries, could greatly help with this. Instead of killing a dictator, installing Internet in his country ought to be much more efficient. Instead of accepting the Internet filters of China, India or UK, promiting a free Internet everywhere could make it easier to resolve poverty everywhere.

My mother's mother's family had some kind of low level noble title that was sold when the family fell on hard times. She grew up in serious poverty because she grew up in Germany during WWII and its aftermath. My father grew up in the Great Depression and fought in two wars. Having known serious privation, they both placed a high value on making sure people got fed well.

When I was growing up, my father was often unemployed for months at a time. But they had put a very large down payment on the house we lived in, such that their house payment was about 40% of what the neighbors were paying for nearly identical houses. We had a garden and a good percentage of the meat we ate was game, often hunted by my father.

So we tended to have not much money and generally had less income than the neighbors, but we ate a helluva lot better than other folks around us. I lived almost like people did 100 or more years ago, before work was about earning money per se, when it was much more about literally putting food on the table.

I have a genetic disorder. It was diagnosed late in life, at age 35. I think it took me that long to get sick enough to get diagnosed in part because I was fed so well and I continued that tradition after I moved out.

I am currently homeless, somewhat by choice and somewhat not. This has been on my mind a lot here lately: I wonder how much it is a real choice and how much it is a lack of viable options. The short version is that the options available to me failed to support my goal of getting well.

And I am getting well. A very big part of how that is happening is based on eating right. Part of the upshot of getting well is that my brain works better.

For six months, I was homeless in La Jolla, one of the two most expensive zip codes in the US. I was surrounded by college students from very wealthy families who did things like flew home to another continent for Christmas and told humorous stories about casually lost expensive electronics. These kids were often envious of what I was eating. They made remarks that made it pretty clear they really did not know how to properly feed themselves.

I don't know the answer. But I don't think this is about money per se. We seem to think wealth is about having lots of stuff. As a society, I feel like we have lost our way in some important way.

I wonder a lot how to solve that problem.

Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington and Johannes Haushoffer wrote at length about the behavioral economics of poverty:

http://static.squarespace.com/static/52522308e4b0bcf2bc4dab4...

The whole PDF is in fact dedicated to outlining strategies for the reduction of poverty.

The study quoted in the article about scarcity and cognitive performance by Mani et al can be found here:

http://psych.princeton.edu/~psych/psychology/research/shafir...

I used it as the main document guiding my Msc. thesis research into poverty, cognitive function, and healthy meal choice.

This is your MSc. thesis that you are referring to? For anyone else interested:

http://thesis.eur.nl/pub/30170/MA-Thesis_Arik_Beremzon_41620...

>found that kids living in households just above the federal povertylevel had gray matter volumes that were 3 to 4 percentage points below the norm for their age group. The lower volume was concentrated in the brain's frontal and temporal lobes, regions that are implicated in behavioral and learning problems. Among kids living below the federal poverty line, gray matter volumes were 8 to 10 percent below the norm. On average, these kids performed 4 to 7 points worse on standardized tests.

A partial explanation could also be that they grew up in poverty because their parents were too genetically stupid to earn good cash / living within their means. I think this hypothesis is supported by adoption studies.

A partial explanation could also be that they grew up in poverty because their parents were too genetically stupid to earn good cash / living within their means. I think this hypothesis is supported by adoption studies.

And a partial explanation for why you believe this is that you've been indoctrinated and propagandized and peer-group socialized into believing this. See the studies that compare incomes between adopted and biological children and adoptive and biological parents. Environment is by far the determninant.

Genes are by far the most important factor. If you've bred animals, you'll understand this. Take a couple of poor animals and breed them. They'll have poor offspring. You can do all you like in their environment, but they'll still be poor. Select high quality parents, and you'll have high quality offspring. Selective breeding works extremely well to produce the best quality animals/plants.

I have no idea why we're in an age where it's so un-politically correct to say this about humans. Some people just seem to have their fingers in their ears when it comes to inconvenient facts that don't mesh with their "everyone is equal!" agenda.

edit: Downvote away. I'm sure that'll change the obvious biological facts.

Genes may play a factor, but they are certainly not the most important one, or even a significant one in this context. If you grow up in a poor family / poor neighborhood, you won't have access to the same education as those who grow up in middle-class areas. Education is far more important to what we consider "intelligence" in this context. Basic math, financial literacy, or even reading comprehension is far more a result of your education than it is of your genetic material.

It's easy, as a product of good education and a safe environment, to look at people in poverty and say "I guess they're not as smart as me." This hides a far more uncomfortable truth, which is that everyone who doesn't grow up in poverty has access to better education, better opportunities, and a better environment than those in poverty. Try as you might to claim that people in poverty are just "stupider", it's simply impossible to make this comparison given that people on opposite ends of the financial spectrum grow up in totally different environments. It's short-sighted to attribute this to genetics and nothing else.

I'm just going to hazard a guess that you didn't grow up in poverty, am I right? If you had, I'm sure you would have a very different idea about how difficult it is to grow up without all the advantages of a middle-class upbringing.

I don't think it's correct to say one way or the other what the critical driver is, as to my knowledge we don't have the necessary data to make such statements. Both genetics and environment likely play a role. We as a society have decided that it is unethical / not in our societal best interest to perform the experiments necessary to further investigate the mechanism, and so we should focus our efforts on alleviating environmental drivers of the problem. With that being said, to write off theoretical heritable causes of poverty or low intelligence just because they makes us uncomfortable would be bad science. We should be transparent about the limitations of our data and admit that as a society we are content with not knowing the answer to this question.

The other issue is that society has become so detached from nature that a lot of people are completely oblivious. If you breed animals, questions like this are pretty obvious and easy to answer.

I grew up in a reasonably poor household. We certainly weren't wealthy. I couldn't care less about poverty or not poverty, it's irrelevant. I was incredibly lucky to have good parents, with 'smart' genes.

Well obviously because this is how the pro-eugenics conversation begins. After all, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons have a place in society.

They seem to have accounted for that: > These differences weren’t present at birth, Wolfe says. “We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same, regardless of whether or not they were growing up in a poor family. But then as we traced them to age 4, we found areas that were developing more slowly among infants in low-income families.”

I don't think anyone discounts genetics completely. I just think for something like your mental capacity as a human will vary dramatically by your upbringing and teachings.

Take your 'high quality animal' and starve it occasionally. Wake it up with sirens. Beat it regularly and capriciously. Injure it. Compare that to one that is treated well but 'poor quality'. Also are we testing these animals in a maze or just size, speed, strength?

“We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same, regardless of whether or not they were growing up in a poor family."

What does that show? I'm sure if you checked the sperm and egg you could say "they're basically the same". All that means is the brain isn't fully developed before the age of 1. Big whoop.

> Environment is by far the determinant.

That's not my impression of the literature. It seems like income is highly heritable and shared environment explains very little. See for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3592970/ or https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/38881/HECER....

If you know of some papers that support your view, I'd be interested to see them.

Did you read these papers? I only skimmed them, but it seems that the first of them basically concludes that there's not enough data, and the second one only contrasts non-identical twins (so their conclusion is that shared environment doesn't influence lifetime income), where a better option would be comparing twins that were separated and grew up in poor/rich families.

As I said, I only skimmed the studies, have I missed anything essential?

I'm not aware of any studies on this topic that look at separated identical twins, but the sample sizes would have to be terribly small wouldn't they? Parents who adopt children are also not randomly selected, and almost never live in poverty, so I'm not sure whether you could trust the results even with a decent sample.

I don't quite understand your point about shared environment not being meaningful. The thesis of the original article is that the environment that a poor kid grows up in can cause physical changes in the brain, which cause them to be poor as an adult. One alternate explanation for the correlation between parent and child poverty is that some people are poor for genetic reasons, and those genetics are passed on to their children, who also end up poor. Distinguishing between the effect of shared environment and genetics on adult income is exactly what you need to decide between those two explanations.

Well, that's what I'm trying to say, proving this is really difficult, which is why I'm not inclined to believe it. It might be easier to do a study with kids of poor (genetic) parents that were adopted (immediately after birth) by rich parents.

> I don't quite understand your point about shared environment not being meaningful.

I'll have to think about this one more, I'm not sure it really matters.

This seems to be what you're looking for: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21409. But I can't find an ungated version.

Thanks! Well, according to the abstract, the findings of this paper suggest that environment is more important than genetics.

> Our findings suggest that wealth transmission is not primarily because children from wealthier families are inherently more talented or more able but that, even in relatively egalitarian Sweden, wealth begets wealth.

Try this: Is Financial Success a Product of Inherited Genes? [0]

[0] http://ineteconomics.org/ideas-papers/blog/is-financial-succ...

The studies cited in this article were observational, not mechanistic. What they found was that there was a correlation between being poor and having less grey matter development, not that being poor caused less grey matter development. They then speculated as to possible causes driving this correlation, but did not prove any of them in a controlled way. It would be incorrect based on the evidence they provided to say that there is definitive proof that environment is the determinant.

I would be willing to change my mind if you had a good argument.

After checking around a little I'll give you the reference "Genes and behaviour" in "Principles of neural science" by Eric R. Kandel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Neural_Science)

edited to be nicer.

They try to control for genetic factors by comparing children at lower ages first (We found that before age 1, infants’ brains were basically the same) but it is a very curious property of IQ that its heritability increases significantly with age.

A recent related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673796

Any discussion about poverty is worth including decision fatigue [1].

I've never been so poor as to lose water/electricity or to ever worry about if I was going to eat that night but there was a time as a child where we weren't _that_ far off (in retrospect).

So I don't presume to be able to speak from experience about true poverty but the after-effects of living even a relative (by Western standards) meager existence are interesting.

Others have mentioned about those who are poor tend to spend all their money in case it goes away. The NYT piece mentions this as well. It's also why there are big purchases of TVs and the like around the time poor families in the US receive their EITC refunds.

In my case I've had periods where I've been out of work and thankfully I could quickly adjust my expenses to my circumstances. The ability to live frugally is a useful one.

On the flipside, I am a software engineer. I make a good living. I sit in a Manhattan apartment that I own and still part of me is planning for what to do if it all goes away. I guess having contingencies isn't a bad thing but I wonder if that's really what it is. Or is it just a subconscious expectation of a meager existence? Is that a result of a fairly humble childhood or something else? Maybe that's the software engineer part of me working out worst case outcomes. Or maybe it's the expectation of worst case outcomes that is applied quite usefully to software engineering?

I really can't say.

I do however see people who barrel along with the unstated expectation that the good times will continue forever. I can't say why they are this way. It does seem like it's a better way to live though because even though things may take a turn for the worse what is the sense in worrying about it?

Fifty years the US had the "war on poverty" and despite the billions spent the poverty rate remains about the same. This does seem to suggest there are behavioural issues that either make someone more prone to being poor and making it harder to escape.

In many cases I'm sure the problem is simply not knowing any better. I do wonder if genetic traits/dispositions play a part, particularly in the areas of impulse control, which itself tends to lead to increased violence, unwanted pregnancy and other outcomes that are likely to result in the continuing poverty

Circumstances matter a lot. For example, I find the Freakonomics argument that legalized abortion led to reduce crime [2] to be compelling.

Still I imagine if you took someone born in poverty and put them an an environment where they had every advantage of the affluent, their outcomes would be a lot better.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-fro...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk6gOeggViw

Children from low-income households tend to have poorer academic performance and lower standardized test scores than kids from higher-income families

For me this part is totally wrong, Dummy comparison, I don't know Scientist who's father was billionaire or even millionaire. Some of the kids from high-income families are even spoiled a lot (thinking about Paris Hilton).

My academic performance was at top 1% at school, but I was almost at the bottom when sorted by family income.

Its not poverty changes brain, its your parents mindset change your brain.

> Its not poverty changes brain, its your parents mindset change your brain. This is my experience. I grew up in "poverty", but my parents spent a lot of time with me, and now I'm a sysadmin making a decent living.

Also, I never actually felt poor growing up. Sure it would have been nice to have a video game console or more movies, but I never felt like I was really deprived just because I didn't.

I don't remember ever fearing that I wouldn't have a roof over my head, or food on the table. I think the only times we might have been close to that, extended family took us in.

So, from personal experience, strong families are the best way to fix poverty.

Yep - causation != correlation - being poor in it of itself doesn't cause academic performance. It's the parental values, diet, distrations found in low income communities etc that cause poor performance, not just being poor.

Also, I think that the author meant middle class / upper middle class when he talked about "higher-income families" - certainly, in my university the majority of the kids are from upper middle class families.

> For me this part is totally wrong

The article discusses scientific findings. Your anecdotal experience does not change those findings.

when statistics done using very small fraction of population or even represents some tiny part of the world (say 200 kids from USA or 10000 kids from UK) then it doesn't work in other parts of the world, look at how many poor people live in India, China but their economy is growing, sometimes I offer very abstract or dummy comparison, some of them:

If poverty was the main reason for poor performance then China, India, Brazil should not grow in such pace

Look at this study [1], This means that employees who are intrinsically motivated are three times more engaged than employees who are extrinsically motivated (such as by money).

You may say this is not related to topic, but I guess they are related, overall what I want to say is high-income doesnt mean better performance, its your mindset and how your parents grow you affects your performance, numbers are wrong when conducted only in very small subset of population, they are just thoughts for other subset of population which are very similar in lifestyle and mindset.

[1] - https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv

"Higher-income" is not exclusively millionaires and billionaires, the article specifically states this: "Gray matter volume in kids from middle-income families did not statistically significantly differ from that of their richer peers, suggesting a poverty-specific effect."

As far as I can tell from skimming the article, there doesn't seem to be much causal inference going on: "It's not clear what, specifically, about poverty takes a toll on brain development." Seems like a great observational study to me--it doesn't jump to conclusions and opens a lot of questions that need to be answered.

"Its not poverty changes brain, its your parents mindset change your brain."

Which is not at all influenced by poverty, right?

This is a false dichotomy. The logical opposite of poor is not poor. It is not a sliding scale about the wealthier you are, the wiser you are. It is just that when you are constantly worrying about your next meal, you are less likely to have time or energy to plan ahead.

Your observation is probably correct but not all parents are conscientious or even care enough to protect their kids from their misfortune. Moreover, I hate it when people bring extraordinary examples and wasn't me to think that's the norm. Lincoln's parents were not wealthy and he became president! We are taking general terms and broad strokes.

"I have an anecdote, therefore this study's statistical findings must be completely wrong" is not exactly a great way to conduct yourself, y'know.

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