Between a vacation and house selling, I've been in a bubble for a weeks and am just starting to emerge. Some of the following posts may not be the most timely. Oh, well. You know, it is really sad that information becomes stale after two weeks.
I know that David Brooks has been writing some good stuff this month, because my Facebook friends have been furiously linking to them. I'm finally getting around to reading his last month's columns.
Last week, Brooks wrote about a new theory of poverty coming out of Harvard using behavioral research.
There are two traditional understandings about why poor people are poor. The first theory is that poor people are poor, because they are lazy and they would rather collect welfare than find a job. The second theory is that people are poor, because they grow up in a culture of poverty. They grew up in isolated and stressed families, and the bad habits of the mom are passed on to the child.
Brooks describes the research of Eldar Shafir of Princeton and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard, which has created a whole new explanation for poverty. Shafir and Mullainathan believed that scarcity produces its own cognitive traits.
A quick question: What is the starting taxi fare in your city? If you are like most upper-middle-class people, you don’t know. If you are like many struggling people, you do know. Poorer people have to think hard about a million things that affluent people don’t. They have to make complicated trade-offs when buying a carton of milk: If I buy milk, I can’t afford orange juice. They have to decide which utility not to pay.
These questions impose enormous cognitive demands. The brain has limited capacities. If you increase demands on one sort of question, it performs less well on other sorts of questions.
So, people are poor, because they need to keep track of all sorts of stupid shit that you and I don't have to deal with. Because they must use up brain space remembering that beans are on sale, then they can't remember to do the bigger stuff that would actually help them get out of poverty.
I like this theory in some ways. Because I remember the dumb shit, like birthday presents and shopping lists, Steve doesn't have to keep track of that stuff. He has the brain capacity to figure out mortgage rates and refinancing and all sorts of stuff that actually leads to a bigger financial return. The dumb shit in life really does wear you down.
When you're poor, you're not only keeping track of dumb shit, like I do, but you're also making tough and depressing decisions. If you haven't paid your phone bill, then you're not much in the mood to study for GEDs.
On the other hand, I know some extremely poor grad students and writers who do actually produce books and dissertations, despite their poverty. Maybe they aren't poor enough to count.
Apt. 11d 
Maybe poor people are poor because 1 in 10 Americans are without jobs… and because for every single job posted, there are on average something like 300 applicants. Some one, or some 200, have to “loose”.
Maybe people are poor because they’re ill, don’t have sufficient health insurance or insurance options, or because they have kids with chronic illness, or are caring for disabled elders.
Maybe people are poor because people need to come up with stupid theories that blame the poor for poverty, rather than coming up with real social solutions to end it.
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I think the difference between poor graduate students (well, at least poor American ones) and poor people in general is family. I’ve never been poor (actually, maybe we were when my dad was a graduate student, but if so, I wasn’t aware of it), but I know that even if I didn’t have enough money, I always had solvent family that I could rely upon in a bind.
I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that the poor are, particularly, in a difficult place from which to improve their lot. But I’m suspicious of using words like “cognitive traits” to describe the phenomenon.
I haven’t read the original research, but I often find that I think that Brooks often skews his description of “behavioral research” (which is some kind of new term for social science/social psychology/psychology) to fit his own political leanings and social agenda (usually after hearing something at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is what I’m guessing happened here).
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Good comments.
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You know, none of those reasons are why I grew up poor. I grew up poor because the adults in charge of me were pleasure-focused self-centered jerks who were glad to take advantage of the do-gooders they perceived as stupid marks. I’m sure it satisfies some moral/ethical impulse to prove yourself a better person when you proclaim that poor people aren’t responsible for their situation. But some of them actually are.
And separately: “all that dumb shit” is elitist code for the necessary and important work of making a home for yourself and others. Having privilege because of income only means that you make your home differently. I don’t think devaluing that work is a good contribution to helping the worthy poor.
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I think there’s something to the idea. A connected issue is that (according to people like Daniel Willingham) it seems we have really little mental bandwidth to work with. Will power is finite–habit is what has to do the really heavy lifting. I think this principle has a lot to do with why I gained a lot of weight in graduate school and while my kids were toddlers. At the time, I was so committed to other projects that all the will power I had was going other places (writing papers and reading Wheels on the Bus) and I was grazing throughout the day, keeping myself awake and moving forward by brute caloric force. As my kids have gotten bigger and better at taking care of themselves and I am more rested, I don’t eat like that anymore. I’ve got enough mental energy to think–this is my second sweet of the day. I’m not going to have any more. I’m not losing weight, but I’m not gaining a steady 15 pounds a year the way I used to. It’s very similar with personal finance. When I was a sleepy mommy, I used to have a rather shocking GAP/Landsend/Amazon/Thai restaurant habit. Bills and bank letters would come in and I would let them pile up unopened for my husband. I had only the haziest idea of how our family income corresponded to what I was spending it on. I had this Micawberesque idea that someday we’d make more money, so we could think about tidying up credit card balances and retirement later. Likewise, we were supposed to be saving up for a house downpayment. However, I was (once again) a bit unclear on the whole “live on less than you make” concept, so we didn’t have any savings until just a few years ago. (A biographical oddity here is that previously, as a single Peace Corps Volunteer with a lot of free time, for much of a year I was saving 50% of my living allowance for a personal project. Upon getting paid, I immediately changed half my allowance into hundred dollar bills and socked it away. A few years later, I had somehow forgotten everything I knew about money management.)
I don’t think it’s just me, either. A lady I know has done a very good job with her diet and exercise (she’s got self-control there that puts me to shame), and she’s a middle-aged convert to financial responsibility. However, her home is frightening–a fridge full of rotting food, twenty year old cobwebs everywhere you look, and dead flies on all the windowsills. There are some hoarder tendencies there, of course, but I also think that it’s also a question of budgeting of will power. With limited mental resources, she has put all of her energies into moderate eating, frequent exercise and moderate spending–being a low-energy person, she really doesn’t have a lot of mental or physical surplus left over to deal with her home.
I know another couple that works round the clock, earning a large income and taking scrupulous care of a large home. However, this is one of those families where they work so hard that they feel like they ought to reward themselves, which means that they have to work even harder to afford their “rewards.” It’s a regular gerbil wheel of earning and consumption, and the faster you run, the faster it spins. But maybe because they are working so hard, they don’t have time to think about how bad their situation really is. (It’s really bad, but they think they can always just work more hours.)
What is the answer? In part, I think the answer is, thinking is HARD, especially when you’re tired and overwhelmed. It’s important to keep things as simple as possible. One example of a simple, effective personal finance system is Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps:
0. Get current on bills, if possible.
1. Save $1,000 emergency fund.
2. Pay off all debts from smallest to largest.
3. Save a 3-6 month emergency fund.
4. Start saving for retirement.
5. Start saving for kids’ college.
6. Pay off home mortgage.
7. Take the money that would normally go for mortgage payments and invest it.
Toward the end of the process, the steps start being concurrent (you do 4,5 and 6 at the same time, if possible), but early on, the steps are very small and sequential.
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From listening to Dave Ramsey’s callers, I get the feeling that one of the most pernicious thought patterns is the one that goes like this, “I work hard. I deserve XYZ.” In this context, XYZ is almost always a selfish or short-sighted idea.
Back to Daniel Willingham, we can really only ask our will power to do one thing at a time. Just as with a piece of machinery, pulleys and other mechanical devices can help you lift a lot more than you could by yourself, so too can a system or a habit help you to accomplish much more than you could with just will power alone.
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Not to monopolize the thread, but one of the virtues of the Dave Ramsey Baby Steps is that one of the side effects of following the plan is that your life will automatically get simpler and easier to carry around in your head. For instance, when my husband and I first became aggressive about debt repayment (in about 2006), we had somewhere between half a dozen and a dozen credit cards. Although an orthodox Ramseyite wouldn’t have any credit cards at all, even just cutting that down to two (one for personal, one for work expenses) has significantly reduced stress, incoming mail, risk of missed payment, etc.
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Kate, if this were Facebook, I would like your comment 100 times.
People are poor for a variety of reasons, sometimes it’s their fault, but sometimes it isn’t. We live in a flawed system- though I don’t know of any that aren’t.
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Absolute dictatorship of me won’t have flaws.
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I spend a lot of time with people living in poverty and so far, I have met more lazy, ignorant people in my country-club neighborhood than I have in my dealings with poverty.
To add on to Katie’s comment, sometimes people are poor because they are born when their mother is 15 and their grandmother is 30. Sometimes people are poor because they are Hmong and came to our country with literally nothing. And yes, sometimes people are poor because they are born to someone who would rather buy vodka than milk.
But I am intrigued by the research in the theory you write about. I know I would have a hard time walking in the shoes of my poor friends. Securing Section 8 housing, managing food stamps, and getting kids into free/reduced lunch programs is more work than one might think.
And the poverty I’m talking about is not grad-student poverty. I’ve lived grad-student poverty. This is “I have six kids and I honestly can’t feed them a meal today” poverty.
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Traditionally, the poorer zip codes contribute disproportionately to state lotteries.
“Illinois Lottery: The Poor Play More
Predominantly African American or Latino, low-income Chicago communities have generated the highest lottery sales in the state.”
“John Brown started buying lottery tickets the day he turned 18, the legal age for playing the Illinois Lottery.
“”On average, I’d say [I spend] about $25 a day,” said Brown, now 36, a laid-off laborer. “But I don’t mind because I know, sooner or later, I’m going to hit something.””
http://www.chicagoreporter.com/news/2007/09/illinois-lottery-poor-play-more
“A 2006 study commissioned by the state of Texas seemed to back that up. Players with a high school education or less spent an average of $20 a month on Texas scratch-off games, twice what college graduates spent. Those earning $12,000 or less spent an average of $16 on scratch-off tickets a month, 45 percent more than players who earned between $75,000 and $100,000.”
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5451633.html
$16 a month isn’t a lot–unless you’re making less than $12,000 a year.
One easy anti-poverty measure would be to can the lotteries.
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Yeah, Kate, I really like your comment, too. I think in this economy, no theory of poverty works. The unemployment rate is ridiculous. Whole industries have changed. People, who typically do everything right, are in poverty.
I do like the theory of the overtaxed brain, only because I feel like my brain gets over taxed dealing with the kids’ school shit and everything. It leaves very little space leftover for some bigger picture stuff.
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Geez Amy, people have little hope for the future. Judging them because they want to dream a little seems really harsh.
It seems there would be far more reasonable things to do than take away the day dreams of not living hand to mouth.
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Kristen, there is a really educational poverty simulation that United Way here puts on. You have to deal with tons of hurdles (reliable transportation and no child care being the first). At the end of my “family’s” month we only survived because we hawked a tv. What we would do the next month?
Very eye opening.
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“Geez Amy, people have little hope for the future. Judging them because they want to dream a little seems really harsh.”
But isn’t that part of the problem? The obvious issue with the lottery is that it takes poor people’s money. The less obvious issue is that it discourages poor people from thinking seriously and realistically about their futures, making plans, and following through.
While it can seem mean to question poor people’s money management, you can sometimes see very similar issues at play (just with more zeroes) with the more affluent. Here’s a New Jersey story with the names changed (it’s a little bit too good to be true and it could be totally fictitious, but it reminds me a lot of that NYT finance writer who took up with the high-living Argentinian):
“Mark, 63, and Melissa, 59, have learned that the hard way. They owe more than they own, and despite an annual income of about $200,000, they can’t seem to stay current with their bills.
“They’re behind on their mortgage and they owe back taxes to the IRS. And that’s just the beginning.
“”It’s a ceaseless struggle of paying off our debts,” says Mark.
“Mark says they’d like to get current and stay current with their two mortgages, pay off more than $335,000 in student loans they took for their three grown children and pay off their credit card obligations.
Despite the debt burden, the couple is still planning to spend more.
“”Repairs and improvements need to be made to our house over the next few years and, hopefully, the housing market will come back somewhat over that period,” Mark says. “We plan to sell, downsize and pay off as much debt as we can at that time. Retirement cannot come until we get to an affordable living situation.”
“Mark and Melissa, whose names have been changed, have $29,000 in a cash balance pension plan, $3,000 in a brokerage account and $3,000 in checking.
“Years ago, they cashed out Mark’s 401(k) plan when he had a salary reduction at work, and they never restarted the saving.”
http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2011/07/debt-ridden_couple_needs_to_cu.html
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The over-taxed brain does fit with my experience of not smoking. It was never hard to not smoke on vacation.
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This doesn’t fit with one big piece of data: immigrants often don’t show the same patterns, even at the same money income. And I have some very poor cousins who were raised very middle class; the behavior long preceded the outcome.
Not saying there’s nothing to this–I’m sure there is. But comprehensive “This is what causes poverty” theories are almost certain to fail; reality is complicated.
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None of these seem mutually exclusive. Even if willpower has some finite, cross-category limit in the human brain, people certainly have limits, otherwise we wouldn’t see so many people work furiously to lift themselves out of poverty and so many others appear not to try. So we’re still left to figure out what determines the limit.
Some people manage to raise kids and write a PhD thesis and stay in shape, simultaneously. Even under Brooks’s theory du jour, we have to figure out what makes them different from folks who can only do one at a time.
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“The over-taxed brain does fit with my experience of not smoking. It was never hard to not smoke on vacation.”
???
Doesn’t it fit? While you were at work, you needed to be calm and focused, and the nicotine gave you that. Then you went on vacation and there weren’t as many claims on your brain, so you didn’t need to medicate yourself.
(Personally, if I smoked, I would definitely smoke during vacation.)
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Amy, when you are making $12,000 a year- there is no kind of money management that will allow you to “realistically” plan for the future. I think blaming playing the lottery once in awhile is once again pointing fingers and saying “it’s their fault they’re poor.”
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“Even under Brooks’s theory du jour, we have to figure out what makes them different from folks who can only do one at a time.”
For one thing, I think different people have dramatically different energy levels. My example with the filthy house has a very low energy level, and so do I. And then there are people with very high energy levels. But then again, a high energy level is not an unmixed blessing–some people just use theirs to make bad decisions twice as fast and twice as destructively as everybody else.
MM’s immigrant example is interesting. I think it is actually compatible with the overtaxed brain theory. Successful immigrants often enter the US with 1) a supply of intellectual capital cheaply obtained abroad and 2) a script for success. I’ve noticed this with a number of Soviet Jewish immigrant families. The parents may be forced to resort to pretty menial work, but they’re educated people, the kids learn English within a year of arrival, and by college time, the kids are like upper-middle class American kids, if not better. So what does that have to do with the overtaxed brain theory? I’d argue that it has quite a lot to do with it. Having a simple, effective script to follow for child rearing frees up your brain.
The controversial but very original Steve Sailer quotes the following: “Eldar Shafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, “almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It’s distracting, it’s depleting … and it leads to error.” Sailer argues that “In general, this suggests why traditional morality is better for poor people than more modern a la carte morality.”
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/06/mental-energy.html
I was hoping to find an expanded version of Sailer’s argument, but I think that what he means is that given the cognitive burden on the poor of weighing trade-offs, it’s preferable to just have a simple list of taboos and dos and don’ts to follow, rather than to wallow in “critical thinking.” For instance, Lisa V thinks I’m being mean about lottery tickets, but when I was a kid growing up in an upwardly mobile lower-middle class (what you would call) fundamentalist extended family, my parents would no more have bought a lottery ticket than they would have bought cigarettes or alcohol. It just wasn’t done. It’s easy to make fun of these class shibboleths (low church Protestants can be very entertaining when arguing that Jesus didn’t drink wine), but in later years, I’ve come to see the utility of those taboos.
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I don’t think you’re being mean. I think you’re being judgmental. Something we’re all guilty of sometimes.
I also think that you (and lots of people) try to reassure yourselves that you’ll never be poor because a,b, or c. But sometimes people do follow a, b and c and still end up in poverty. In the last month I’ve had a doctor-seriously, a small business owner and a mechanical engineer all apply for financial assistance at my job.
There are also many people who know a,b and c but the circumstances of their lives are just not going to ever let them follow the steps.
Poverty can likely be prevented, but not always by better decisions on the part of the poor.
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I think that the reasons why people are poor will never be boiled down to one Grand Unified Theory of poverty, because different people are poor for different reasons. Also, what exactly makes someone “poor” is very difficult to define. It’s not only about income (i.e. the grad student example), but what else it should be about hasn’t exactly been settled. I think there are psychic factors to poverty that aren’t all encompassing but are also important. One difference I’ve heard of between grad students and other poor people is that grad students know their poverty is temporary and they can reasonably expect a better standard of living later in life. Even if they drop out of grad school, having at minimum a B.A. and being able to perform high level white collar work means that they have far more than a life of working at McDonalds to look forward too. If your options are 1) work really hard and have a terrible life trying to make ends meet or 2) not work really hard and have a terrible life trying to make ends meet, (or 3) don’t think about your options because they are too depressing and drink instead), there’s something rational about picking option 2 or 3.
Good books on this topic are “Promises I can Keep” which is about how outcomes for poor African American teen moms are actually better than for their childless peers, and “All Our Kin” which is a sociological study about the rationality of living in the moment in a large urban ghetto.
Also, my guess is another huge factor in this is sleep deprivation. I cannot imagine functioning for years on 4-5 hours of sleep, and I imagine having to negotiate the world in a state of perma-exhaustion makes everything really difficult. Also, being really poor and everything that goes along with it (shitty job(s) where people treat you poorly, terrible apartment in a bad neighborhood, constant worry about money, dealing with raising multiple children) is really stressful. Stress + exhaustion are a bad combination, and it’s not surprising people end up making what appear to be bad decisions, or choose to dull the stress with drugs/alchohol/drug foods (aka caffeine, sugar, fat, salt etc.)
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“Being Poor
“Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.
“Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.
“Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.
“Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away…”
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Amy P, upthread, “The parents may be forced to resort to pretty menial work…”
“There is no such thing as menial work, only menial pay.” – Andrew Young
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What about systemic factors? Many of the elements that keep people poor are the result of very deliberate choices by people with a lot more power and money who want to keep it that way.
Banks that redline neighborhoods, mining companies that put production far ahead of safety, payday loan companies that charge usurious interest, and on and on and on. It’s a very long list.
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Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV
That’s not just the poor. I’m sure it’s hard when you can’t afford toys, but kids ask for 600 things 500 times before breakfast. Nobody doesn’t get angry.
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OK, I’m going to defend the sociologists. Shocking, I know.
These sociologists aren’t really looking at why Joe Blow is poor and why Joe Shmo is rich. They are asking why one large group of people is poor and permanently poor. Why is one group of people always living in slums, without work, and poorly educated? These are questions that started in the 60s, went into disfavor, and have become a hot topic again thanks to William Julius Wilson at U of C.
These sociologists typically rule out structural factors, like low unemployment or real estate redlining, because of the immigrant example. Lots of immigrants show up with nothing in their pockets and within one generation, they become wealthy. They faced the same discrimination and obstacles as the long-time poor, yet they were able to bypass those obstacles. So, that’s why they are looking at other factors, like culture or behavior.
These questions are really important for policy makers. While one theory would not describe all people, it could explain what is going on with a large group of people. It can help tailor poverty policies. So, don’t dismiss them entirely.
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“One difference I’ve heard of between grad students and other poor people is that grad students know their poverty is temporary and they can reasonably expect a better standard of living later in life.”
Hee hee hee. Ok, sorry about that. Carry on.
I think the grad student is very similar to the immigrant. Like the immigrant, the grad student is a visitor from a different culture who is on their way to someplace else.
“”There is no such thing as menial work, only menial pay.””
Nope. I remember a Russian emigre friend (another Russian Jew–very cultured) who was so mortified by the fact that the only job her very smart (but marginally English-speaking) father could get was demonstrating various embarrassing medical supplies for elderly Russian ladies. He’d been a big construction engineer back in Russia. The only saving graces were that he no longer had the mob on his back and he no longer feared for his life, as he had in Russia, and the grandchild was on that successful trajectory that I described earlier.
“I think that the reasons why people are poor will never be boiled down to one Grand Unified Theory of poverty, because different people are poor for different reasons.”
Right.
“”Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.”
I don’t think that’s adequately filled out. You’d need to mention something about having bad credit, winding up with a 15% car loan (I’ve even heard of 19%), and winding up paying X for a car that’s worth Y because of all of the payments. Repeat with mattress, house, etc.
One thing that nobody has mentioned yet is a possibility for why the brain is overtaxed is that it may not be a very smart brain to begin with. That would not be universally true, but some people have more brains to begin with than others.
My relative who teaches community college remedial math says that with their level of math ability, his students are mostly easy marks for getting chiseled on cars, houses, etc. A lot of them have no number sense at all. When they hear numbers, all they can hear is something like the teacher voice from Charlie Brown (waah waa wa waah). I sympathize with that (I tend to turn the detail-oriented stuff over to my husband myself).
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Laura, I would argue that the selection and gifting of a memorable and on-time birthday present is not “dumb”, whereas the “figuring out of “bigger financial return” might be (no offense to your husband). They have calculators for that sort of thing (and it can be outsourced), but getting a child’s eyes to light up with excitement is the important work of quotidian happiness. Please don’t devalue your care work.
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Lots of immigrants show up with nothing in their pockets and within one generation, they become wealthy. They faced the same discrimination and obstacles as the long-time poor, yet they were able to bypass those obstacles.
So, the immigrants wouldn’t be as likely to be overtaxed in the brain because it sucked so much worse where they were from? That kind of makes sense. You aren’t stressed about whether you can buy milk or orange juice if getting either one is an improvement. You aren’t as likely to be stressed about the price of a cab if walking five miles is something you consider normal because you were raised somewhere without a road.
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“Sucked so much worse” is formal sociology lingo.
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Isn’t there some efficient working gurus who write about the problem of the urgent but trivial in work, how that work can suck up all your energy and prevent you from doing the important work in the long run? Isn’t this a version of that same problem?
I would like to know more about the “persistent poor” in the US. I hear a fair amount of mumbling in the popular literature who that segment is — in the US, I think a fair proportion are immigrants, who are not the persistent poor.
There’s no question in my mind that being poor is very hard, and that anyone who starts a sentence with “Why don’t they just . . . (buy in bulk, get educated, save money, grow tomatoes, . . . )” is saying “let them eat cake.” But, I also think that people respond to behavior incentives, that sprinters run faster when they have competition, that people obey cell phone laws when there’s enforcement, that children behave better when there are consequences. So, I’m also weary of theories that try to explain difficult circumstances as though they were an inevitable outcome. Some people meet challenges that others fail to meet, and incentivising the behavior that produces better outcomes will produce more of that kind of behavior (albeit with consequences for those who can’t face the challenges even with good incentives).
I have the same theory about education and child-raising.
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“Amy, when you are making $12,000 a year- there is no kind of money management that will allow you to “realistically” plan for the future.”
Even just a few hundred dollars cash is very helpful in a pinch. Imagine if you were a Katrina evacuee, and think how much better your first few days away from home would be if you had $300 or $400 cash, rather than pocket change. Even that small sum could mean the difference between staying in New Orleans and going, and it would help tremendously with your self-confidence. Katrina is an extreme example, but life is full of $200, $300 and $500 emergencies, and being just one step ahead cash-wise can make the difference between taking those emergencies in stride or winding up in a cascading financial disaster that leads to the door of the local payday loan establishment.
“I would like to know more about the “persistent poor” in the US. I hear a fair amount of mumbling in the popular literature who that segment is — in the US, I think a fair proportion are immigrants, who are not the persistent poor.”
I was thinking about this, and I think you need to make a distinction between poor and broke. Poor means very low income. Broke could be any income, all the way up to Nicolas Cage and Toni Braxton. For a lower-income example of broke, take my dad’s hairdresser. She is a bright, hard working immigrant Southeast Asian woman. She’s a good hairdresser, high energy and works every hour she can, so she’s got a decent income. Unfortunately, she’s also worked 20 some years and has absolutely nothing to show for it, beyond some trinkets and a $50k pickup truck parked in front of a $20k trailer. She’s not poor, she’s broke.
I don’t despair, though, because I’ve personally seen a number of late-in-life conversions to financial prudence. People really can and do change, although often at the last minute. I’ve personally changed a lot over the past 5 years, and nowadays, I don’t buy anything I can’t pay for 100% right now. I save for summer camps, medical expenses and home maintenance year round. Likewise, I’ve seen several people in their late 50s suddenly get religion and stop doing the dumb stuff they did for the previous 20 years.
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“Shafir and Mullainathan gave batteries of tests to Indian sugar farmers. After they sell their harvest, they live in relative prosperity. During this season, the farmers do well on the I.Q. and other tests. But before the harvest, they live amid scarcity and have to think hard about a thousand daily decisions. During these seasons, these same farmers do much worse on the tests. ”
Now, this, is fascinating, if true. It would suggest that being poor makes the same people temporarily and reversibly less smart. It’s the experiment I wondered about. I wish, though that Brooks cited his data. I’m annoyed if he’s citing an anecdote instead of data, because the rigor is in the details (is the sample matched, which IQ -and other- test, how much of an iq drop, statistical significance, . . . ). Also, as with much of this kind of research, you have to address whether the laboratory result (IQ scores) translates into real life decisions.
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Ok, have not read all the comments but to me, the grad student is not poor, the grad student is broke. I’ve been broke, and it was hard and did suck up a lot of time and worry, but not at all the same as being poor and feeling that your lot in life is what it is and will stay that way. It’s an interesting theory to add to the mix, but far too simplistic.
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“I wish, though that Brooks cited his data.”
Don’t forget to wish for a pony, too, while you’re doing this.
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In terms of having cash, Carol Stack discusses this in “All Our Kin.” Her point is that welfare benefits are rarely enough to live on, so people pool their money and create informal networks of support. This helps people live day to day, but it also creates a “guanxi” system (i.e. system of complicated debt relationships) of the type that when people do come into money–a $5,000 inheritance, a better paycheck, etc., they owe so many people favors that the money is effectively distributed across the group (say, a housing project). This system keeps people from begging on the streets and homelessness, but it also makes it hard to break out if they do get a bit of cash which to a middle class person looks like it could substantially help one get a foot out the door.
In “The Ethnic Myth” Stephen Steinberg addresses the issue historically of why certain immigrant groups were more successful than others, even if both groups came over penniless. The biggest determining factor for future success was not the amount of money an immigrant brought or their initial employment or circumstances, but their skills/economic position/educational level in the old country. People who were literate, had skilled jobs, and from urban environments were simply better able to translate those skills to a new environment, even if not directly useful (e.g. being able to read Hebrew isn’t an immediately useful crossover skill, but it does make learning to read in English comparatively easier.) Steinberg notes that sometimes there’s a generational delay, in that the immigrant parents take a permanent position cut, but generally the children bounce back. This can explain a bit of the model minority stereotype, in that the East Asians and Jews who immigrated to the US tended to be well-educated and often successful at home. So, Korean doctors who become grocers whose children then become doctors aren’t exactly comparable with Mexican indigenous peasants who then run a fruit stand and whose children become construction workers. If we ask, why do the children of professors/rabbis/engineers become more successful than the children of subsistance famers, the answer looks more obvious.
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“This can explain a bit of the model minority stereotype, in that the East Asians and Jews who immigrated to the US tended to be well-educated and often successful at home. So, Korean doctors who become grocers whose children then become doctors aren’t exactly comparable with Mexican indigenous peasants who then run a fruit stand and whose children become construction workers. If we ask, why do the children of professors/rabbis/engineers become more successful than the children of subsistance famers, the answer looks more obvious.”
Indeed.
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The descendant of 10 generations of Lithuanian rabbis turns out to be studious and to have a good memory–who could have seen that coming?
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“This system keeps people from begging on the streets and homelessness, but it also makes it hard to break out if they do get a bit of cash which to a middle class person looks like it could substantially help one get a foot out the door.”
I just realized that one of the branches of my family seems to operate on more or less those rules (I think it’s a more Arkansas branch than my side of the family). It’s a pretty low-functioning family system, with one chronically unemployed adult daughter at home and one chronically underemployed daughter, and the 80-something grandma/matriarch always bailing everybody out. On the other hand, knowing the genetic recipe of the family and certain recurring quirks, it’s tough to figure out if they are low-functioning because of the highly-intermeshed/no boundary family structure, or if they’ve embraced the structure because they are low-functioning and no other system would work for them.
All that failure has a tremendous gravitational pull on the more ambitious members of the family.
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Back in May, I volunteered at an event in my town called Project Homeless Connect, which puts this huge number of services together in one large building and invites homeless people (and those on the brink of homelessness) to come for assistance with what they need. As a volunteer, my job was to do a short intake questionnaire with each guest, and then offer to walk around with them to help them find the services they most needed.
It was a fascinating experience, actually. I worked with six different people. None were sleeping under a bridge: two were at a shelter, one was couch surfing, one was in drug rehab, and two actually lived in apartments, or at least they said they were living in apartments (one of them, I think he may have been lying to me and was actually sleeping rough, or possibly squatting illegally somewhere. It was not my job to interrogate him, so I checked “apartment” on the form and took him to the optical services area for the reading glasses he said were his most urgent need.)
Of the people I helped, I would say that all had made mistakes in the past. But, few of them had made mistakes that were significantly worse than mistakes made by many MANY middle class people I know. The biggest difference was, most of my middle class friends who’ve made mistakes have a family and friends with the ability to provide them with a safety net. They have the right connections — most made via family or at college.
Probably the guy who I felt benefited the most from the event arrived at the very end of the day. He had no criminal record or history of substance abuse — he had lost his job, been unable to find a new one, had lost his apartment, and had been couch-surfing on the sufferance of friends ever since. At some point (probably when he got evicted) he lost all his identification, and he’d assumed that this would keep him from getting food stamps or general assistance.
So, he needed ID, which meant he needed an out-of-state birth certificate: they had people on hand who were experts at wrangling the forms from all 50 states. He filled out a form, signed it, and was told he could pick up his birth certificate in two weeks at one of the downtown men’s shelters. He was given a voucher to get him a state ID, free. Then I took him to the county services area, where he filled out the forms to apply for food stamps, medical assistance, and general assistance — all of which, he absolutely qualified for. Then I took him to the area for job seekers.
All of these were things he could have done right away. But he didn’t know where to go, he didn’t have friends or family who knew where he needed to go, and he was focused on day-to-day survival. And these services are normally so scattered that just trying to get one thing could be a full day of wasted effort and money.
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“A quick question: What is the starting taxi fare in your city?”
40 some contents in, I can’t believe that nobody’s mocked Brooks for that line yet.
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“Yet in the middle of this golden age of behavioral research, there is a bill working through Congress that would eliminate the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This is exactly how budgets should not be balanced — by cutting cheap things that produce enormous future benefits.”
Mea Culpa, I hadn’t actually read the Brooks article, but reading it now, this makes me LOVE David Brooks right now. Congress is taking an axe to social science funding, cutting several million here and several million there. It’s doing nothing to really solve the budget deficit, but it’s destroying US social science research. In addition to cutting NSF funding for social sciences (as I am in the midst of applying for an NSF grant, thinking about this makes me nauseous), congress also cut Title VI funding by 40%, or about 6 million. That 6 million went mainly went to fund US education in critical foreign languages and research on foreign countries of critical importance to the US. That money was distributed through FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies grants) and Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation and post-doc grants to thousands of grad students and professors in modest stipends (about $20,000-$30,000 ea.) to study Chinese, Arabic, Pashto, etc. and do research abroad in non-Western countries. Likewise, an NSF grant would give me $20,000 to spend a year in China studying the the evolution of CCP discourse in the past 30 years, and what that might tell us about Communist ideology and the Chinese state. (My project). $20,000 (or even probably $6 million) isn’t even a rounding error in the federal budget, but to a grad student, it’s the difference between completing a dissertation or not. I’m not saying my project is uniquely amazing (or even averagely amazing), but I’d like to think it’s worth more than a square millimeter of a fighter jet.
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This question’s really got hold of my brain. Here’s another idea. Aside from culture-of-poverty or bad luck (severe illness, etc.), what if we put a particular individual’s personal qualities onto three axes (I’d note that all three have a fairly strong genetic component):
1. intelligence
2. energy level
3. executive ability (planning, focus, etc.)
If a person scores low in all three areas, I think they’re pretty much going to be poor. Any particular individual can probably do better with regard to any of the three axes with help, but there is a band of performance that is most natural to them. I personally have low energy, but I’m strong enough in executive ability that I can work around my sleepiness. Likewise, my husband is low energy and his executive ability is often so-so, but he’s smart enough that he can work around those deficiencies. An academic acquaintance of ours is very bright, very energetic, but is a fidgety ADHD type. His strategy is just to knock out projects quickly before his attention wanes. He is also quite successful.
I think Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is an interesting book to bring up in this context. You have the three sisters: rich, sleepy Lady Bertram (who married very well and had four children), energetic, management-minded Mrs. Norris (who married a clergyman and had no children but minds everybody’s business) and slow, poor, disorganized Mrs. Price (who married a sailor and had 9 kids). Austen explicitly says that Lady Bertram would have turned out like Mrs. Price given the same circumstances, and Mrs. Price would have turned out like Lady Bertram, given her circumstances, but that bustling, interfering, economizing Mrs. Norris would have managed much better in Mrs. Price’s shoes. There’s an excellent description of the Prices’ chaotic and uncomfortable home life in the section of Mansfield Park where Fanny is visiting her parents after many years’ absence. Her mother’s “days were spent in a kind of slow bustle; all was busy without getting on, always behindhand and lamenting it, without altering her ways; wishing to be an economist, without contrivance or regularity; dissatisfied with her servants, without skill to make them better, and whether helping, or reprimanding, or indulging them, without any power of engaging their respect.” Fanny understands that her mother is “a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children, whose house was the scene of mismanagement and discomfort from beginning to end…”
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Here’s a very interesting piece about support groups formed for poor families to encourage each other:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/out-of-poverty-family-style/#
“They started with 25 families in three cohorts — eight African American families, six Salvadoran refugee families and 11 Iu Mien families from Laos. The latter were all on welfare. FII asked them to write down their goals, gave each a computer and enlisted them to fill in a questionnaire each month that tracked changes in things like income, assets, debts, health, education, skills, social networks and civic engagement.
“They offered families $30 for every success they reported up to a maximum of $200 per month. (FII pays for reporting, not for specific actions, a different anti-poverty approach known as “conditional cash transfers” that we have reported on in Fixes.) Lim Miller reasoned that if he were to hire a consultant to collect this data, it would cost three or four times more. The families agreed to meet with an FII liaison every three months for an audit. Anything they reported — a pay increase, a doctor visit, an improvement in a child’s grades — had to be documented.
“Most important, families had to agree to meet as a group at least once a month in a confidential setting to discuss their goals and any issues they deemed important. FII didn’t guide the agenda and its liaisons did not act as facilitators.”
This reminds me a bit of Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University (a 13-week personal finance course), although this group tries to keep their course more open-ended. The similarities are 1) peer accountability groups 2) changing phenomena (wages, spending and debt) through keeping records.
“Of the initial 25 families, FII found that, after two years, household incomes had increased 27 percent (excluding the payments offered by FII). People got promotions, pay raises, worked extra hours, and built up informal side businesses. After FII’s payments stopped, incomes continued to increase. After another year, they were 40 percent higher than the baseline. “Nobody believed it,” Lim Miller recalled. “The stereotype is that they can’t do it. People said, ‘You have to be creaming [picking the easiest people to help].’ They can’t believe that this capacity exists and that it can be brought forth.”
“He extended the work to Hawaii and San Francisco. After two years, FII reported that incomes across all its sites had increased, on average, by 23 percent and savings were up 240 percent. In San Francisco, 30 percent of families established side businesses — everything from lawn maintenance to making pupusas to cutting people’s hair — to cope with the recession. A quarter of the families that had been receiving government income or housing subsidies — CalWorks or Section 8 — dropped them. Families reported improvements in health care, children’s grades, reductions in debt, enrollment in training programs and home ownership — all audited. Word rippled outward and within six months, 200 families applied to join FII. “Something viral had happened,” explained Mia Birdsong, FII’s vice president. “We still trying to track how it spread. We think it has to do with the trust factor.””
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We tend to focus on personal attributes and on culture for a variety of reasons, including cognitive bias. But the truth is that most poverty is structural, e.g., the same social relations that explain African-American inner city poverty in the US explain inner city white poverty in Manchester, UK: lack of indirect and direct ties to opportunities for socioecomomic advancement and the resources therefore.
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“But the truth is that most poverty is structural, e.g., the same social relations that explain African-American inner city poverty in the US explain inner city white poverty in Manchester, UK: lack of indirect and direct ties to opportunities for socioecomomic advancement and the resources therefore.”
The list of possible causes for poverty is as long as your arm, but once you try to reach out a helping hand and pull somebody out, the lead-a-horse-to-water proverb comes into play. Presented with “opportunities for socioeconomic advancement” people react profoundly differently, even within the same household or family.
And I emphasize, this is not a phenomenon confined to the poor. We’re all kind of stupid in our various ways–we do what we’ve been doing, and it’s very hard to budge us out of our ruts, whatever those ruts may be. For instance, I’ve tried fruitlessly to persuade an older relative that they’re overextended on real estate and that it would be a good idea to get while the getting’s good. They won’t listen, though. Real estate has gone up in their area for the past 30 years, and that’s been practically their only investment vehicle, and no matter how many markets have crashed already, it’s different where my relative lives. I can wring my hands and wait for the inevitable crash, but there’s nothing I can do if they won’t listen.
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If an overtaxed brain leads to persistent poverty, two adult brains would be better than one.
Presumably, each dependent child added to the mix would make things worse, by adding more details to keep track of. Sensible, trusted adult relatives would help.
The worst model for getting out of poverty would be a single mother, estranged from her family, with multiple children. The best would be a committed marriage, with a reliable network of kin.
I wonder how polygamy/polyandry would stack up?
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BI had this upthread:
“Her point is that welfare benefits are rarely enough to live on, so people pool their money and create informal networks of support. This helps people live day to day, but it also creates a “guanxi” system (i.e. system of complicated debt relationships) of the type that when people do come into money–a $5,000 inheritance, a better paycheck, etc., they owe so many people favors that the money is effectively distributed across the group (say, a housing project). This system keeps people from begging on the streets and homelessness, but it also makes it hard to break out if they do get a bit of cash which to a middle class person looks like it could substantially help one get a foot out the door.”
I was reading this and thinking of a bright, energetic, ambitious young woman that works for my family and is lifting herself up by her bootstraps. A warm heart and a regular paycheck (no matter how small) seem to bring all the moochers out of the woodwork, like ants trooping to a picnic. If you pressed these people who’ve been taking advantage of her slender means, they’d probably give some sort of story like in B.I.’s quote–that they’re down on their luck now, but they’ll return the favor by-and-by, no matter how unlikely their life circumstances and work ethic make that. I expect there are actually closed systems that work more or less as B.I. describes, but I think there are also counterfeit versions of that system that mimic the mutuality but are actually one-way. Of course, the worst case scenario is to be living with or married to your remora.
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