Princeton researchers have discovered that the poor are poor and make bad decisions not because of some inborn defect in their mental equipment nor God Forbid!, IQ. Simply, the poor are distracted and cannot focus on their real problems.
Obviously, if they only could concentrate or made to focus, poverty would disappear from the face of the Earth.
The researchers asked shoppers at a New Jersey mall to handle the following decision: Have your faulty car repaired for either $150 or $1,500. While the participants were considering how to decide, they were given simple cognitive tasks like solving puzzles. It was expected that the stress from contemplating the $1,500 expense would hurt performance. They were right. But participants with above-average incomes succeeded in their tasks under both scenarios, while those with average or low incomes did worse as repair costs climbed. Even the prospect of spending any money at all damaged the ability of low-income earners to think rationally.
May be less TV could help them (we have no TV at home). But I'm not convinced. This distraction thing - while true - is just another mental trick to avoid saying: the poor (in general) lack the equipment to get rich. The required equipment is a functioning brain, which we come with from the merging of our parent's ovum + sperm.
19 comments:
Something very strange connected.
I noticed in my social circles that if you calculate people have very little wealth accumulated - money in bank, properties whatever. And yet looking at their clothes, cars etc you would miss this fact.
The capacity not to throw valuable limited resources on anything that glitters is missing from the largest majority. Somehow they just don't understand that if you deduce debts the majority are extremly poor. And having a good income is not necessarily certain until you die, and a lot can happen.
I was talking about the professional class, programmers auditors etc where IQ is definitely not small.
I'd sugest is not only a problem of IQ, but also of the ability to control impulses.
It's the monkey inside us trying to come out in the light.
I mentioned this as an add to what you wrote. Those with higher income are not necessarily too far from those with low income. How about those who managed to accumulate some wealth during their professional activity?
Not just earning a relatively high income and just wasting it on changing the car, phone, tv, seazon clothes etc. As in earning and keeping at least a part of it.
PS. This behaviour annoys me a lot. I'd like to hear your opinion about it. I have to live with them and is unpleasant to look like the poor relative. And yet working a lot just to throw everything on glittering toys in order to keep up is even worse. It makes absolutely no sense.
Well, when I felt like a poor relative, I was a poor relative. Nowaday I am past the age that I care what people thinks. And believe me, there is nothing they have that I want.
I think it ia peculiarity of J family that we look like unshaved beggars. Who cares?
Quite clear. I didn't explain the problem.
Children are the problem. Me I am impermeable. But what if you have to keep up irrationally for the kids?
Now it's OK , mine are small. But tomorrow?
What if my daughter cares? Hmmmmmmmmmm
That is the problem.
That is why I started to notice the problem and to get annoyed.
teo
I have the solution to your worry.
Make money.
Enough money so your children will have enough to feel they have nothing to envy.
You appear to have a very good mind, so making money will not be a problem for you.
You just have to put your mind on it and maintain focus for a few years.
Effective education should teach people how to concentrate.
ram
This is exactly backwards. The camp survivors all left the KZ lagers with absolutely nothing and within a few years many were millionaires. Same with the oligarchs in Russia. Being poor does not make you stupid but being stupid makes you poor. Only a leftist could be so willfully blind that he can't see which way the causation runs.
K
K
There is a desperatge ongoing search for rationales for poverty that dont mention IQ.
This is one example. Poverty is simply distraction...
If they only would concentrate...
But it appears that they cant. The equipment is not there. We always come back tothe same thing: IQ.
"There is a desperatge ongoing search for rationales for poverty that dont mention IQ."
Well desperate as in lots of people are payed to search for justifications. Nothing more I believe.
The alternative is to tell the majority that the system in it's present form is clearly rigged in their disfavour. It brings unjustified social costs - loss of legitimacy, hatred towards the upper classes etc
Nobody has better solutions so why create additional problems. Make the best with what you have.
As in saying:
Some minor problems we are solving right now , mistakes were made but anyway you and your kids are not relegated to inferior status for perpetuity. Some mistakes were made but we are working on them. Now go back to digging.
It can go on and on for eternity. Functional illiterates will not usually read and put things in perspective.
(Problems appear only when society goes through a crisis or large demographic increase. Then a lot of smart people are relegated to digging. And they tend to organise and lead the masses in order to chop to pieces the ones who have a better position. It's not the case now.)
In the US, such issues are tied up with race and so cannot be discussed honestly. Charles Murray (co-author of the infamous Bell Curve book) recently wrote another book in which he purposely confines his analysis only to white people, so he cannot be accused of "racism" the minute he mentions IQ. His thesis is that our society is increasingly fragmented into classes that do not interact with each other - they live in different neighborhoods, go to different schools, eat different food, engage in different entertainments, etc.
The college admissions system in America is largely based on the SAT test, which is basically an IQ test. Colleges also function as giant matchmaking services. This has had a completely unintentional eugenic effect - people of similar IQ are marrying each other and producing children with similar IQs, so that we have an increasingly hereditary intellectual class and a lower class that is only getting dumber (poor whites are increasingly living (black) "ghetto" lifestyles - having children out of wedlock, not working, taking drugs, etc.)
K
Prof. J., K.,
Liberal control of discourse, including its permeation with liberal assumptions, is the main reason that realists lose. I just had a conversation with a friend who's much smarter than me -- Ph. D. track in math at a top 10 American university -- where he admitted that the Ashkenazi/white Gentile IQ split showed that the white Gentile/black American IQ split need not be attributable to bad schools or racism. This modest conclusion, however, would be a hatethought were it to be published in a national newspaper.
Indeed, most Americans, including the majority of conservatives, would be outraged to see reported in print the uncontroversial and well-established fact of racial IQ discrepancies.
-s.n.
There' an article in today's NY Times about blacks at the elite NY public schools - these are special schools where admission is strictly by test. They are increasing Asian dominated (up to 75%) and blacks are enrolled in vanishingly small #'s (somehow these schools have escaped the affirmative action nonsense).
What's interesting is that to the extent that there are blacks, they tend to be recent immigrant offspring (this is true of "geniuses" in general - I once attended a meeting of parents of children (like my daughter) who had score above 700 on the SAT before the age of 13. Most of the parents barely spoke English.) One would think that Jamaican and other Caribbean blacks have a similar genetic (and therefore IQ) profile but their culture is not as degraaded as American black culture (Barbados income level approaches Israel).
K
Barbados is run by the Jews.
Above was meant sarcastically.
It's true that running an empire is expensive. It's also true that NOT running an empire is even more expensive in the long run. It's tough work but someone has to take up the white man's burden (as Kipling says) or the world will fall into chaos - it will be Somalia all over the place. When the Roman empire broke down, a 1000 year dark age followed. Imagine what the world would be like today if we were 1000 years down the road in technological progress, if the Renaissance had begun in 400 AD and not 1400.
K
It's oversimplified to say that the fall of Rome led to a "Dark Age." It definitely caused a collapse in trade and increased lawlessness. Yet the Roman Empire had already lost a great deal of its economic sophistication during the Crisis of the Third Century, when barter re-established itself, and the Roman system of slave-farming was legal violence of a kind not necessarily preferable to open plunder by warlords. At least some studies show that villeins' nutrition generally improved above Roman standards during the "Dark Ages." Not so dark for them, at any rate.
The fall of Rome lead to technological regression in some areas, particularly having to do with luxury goods, public works, and high culture. But again, the glass is half full; by the High Middle Ages, the technological level and productive capacity of the Western European man greatly exceeded that of Rome. The guild-masters knew secrets of machine-building and weaving that far eclipsed those of the labor-heavy Romans. Likewise, medieval farming was more efficient and less cruel. Medieval Paris and London were dirtier and smellier than Rome, but on the other hand, they were free cities.
-s.n.
All progress did not stop, but in some areas - civil engineering (roads, water supply), architecture (domes, stadiums, use of concrete), etc. Roman levels were not achieved again until the 19th century.
K
K,
I agree, and said as much. But you said "Somalia" and "1000 year dark age." Neither describes medieval Europe. The collapse of an empire need not lead to Somalia.
-s.n.
In the hills above Florence lies Fiesole. The Romans had a magnificent complex there with temples, a theatre, baths, etc. When they excavated in the 20th century, they found the later barbarians had buried their dead randomly throughout the grounds - they had no use or respect for all of the Roman's technology. It was just junk to them. I get the feeling that this is not unlike Somalia (or G-d forbid) what our Western cities will once again look like someday if things go poorly.
K
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