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Comment by tuyguntn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

"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.

> 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.

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.

"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.

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.

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

Which is not at all influenced by poverty, right?

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