Study Finds Poverty Reduces Brain Power?

“Poverty and the all-consuming fretting that comes with it require so much mental energy that the poor have little brain power left to devote to other areas of life, according to the findings of an international study published on Thursday.  The mental strain could be costing poor people up to 13 IQ (intelligence quotient) points and means they are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that amplify and perpetuate their financial woes, researchers found.  "Our results suggest that when you are poor, money is not the only thing in short supply. Cognitive capacity is also stretched thin," said Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, part of an international team that conducted the study.”- Reuters

People loooove studies. We are all about that. Studies show that women are more emotional than men. Studies show that poor people are likely to have substance abuse problems.  Studies show that people living below the poverty line are more likely to steal. Studies show. Studies show.

We are all too willing to believe what we can conclude from a set of statistical data. Never mind that so many women are tougher than so many men. Never mind that plenty of rich kids and celebrities do have substance abuse problems. Never mind that the greediest thieves of this century have never been poor. (Maybe except Napoles. You can totally tell she’s new money).

At some point, these findings fuel a battle of the sexes or of the classes. Why can’t we just say that some people are more emotional than others? Nothing wrong with that. Some people have substance abuse problems. Some people steal if they can. It is the 21^st century.  Instead of rejecting generalizations that lead to a simplistic understanding of the people around us, we crave for all kinds of statistical data as if these would explain — and help manage— the parts of ourselves that we don’t understand.

Today, a news article claiming that poverty reduces cognitive capacity was posted. To be fair, the study was not meant to discriminate on the poor as a class but simply to show the correlation of IQ and availability of financial resources. But there is something strange about the premise in the first place. 

It assumes two things that the poor tend to make bad decisions that worsen their condition and that the logic and cognitive tests used here are the appropriate measure of intelligence. The study concludes that brain power goes down. It does not conclude that mental focus shifts to other more pressing matters.  It does not say that the mental process changes in a way. It concludes that cognitive power is diminished based solely on the drops in test scores.

"We are arguing that the lack of financial resources itself can lead to impaired cognitive function," she said.

So the study explains why the financially constrained make bad choices, and we should all be relieved that this is not a permanent condition. They weren’t born that way, and they wouldn’t stay that way.

“In India, the researchers found that farmers had diminished cognitive performance before getting paid for their harvest compared to afterwards, when their coffers have been replenished.”

Well yes, but in the Philippines, there are so many who live under impoverished conditions all their lives and perhaps because of this financial strain, we cannot expect them to perform exceptionally well in a classroom or score high in an IQ test in the same way that hungry children cannot study well. However, this set of observations could be a result of not being able to concentrate at the test at hand or not being able to appreciate a task that yields no immediate reward.

To conclude automatically that the IQ actually dropped 13 points seems to display a bias against the kind of skills that the poor may acquire precisely because they are poor. For example, under financial stress, a poor person may not score well in a test but might instead develop essential life skills that will allow him to survive his current predicament.

We do not wish to say this out loud but we all secretly subscribe to the belief that being fluent in spoken English makes some people more intelligent than others who are good at something like carpentry. We think that a degree in agriculture automatically puts us in position to teach farmers, not learn from their years of experience in the field. And we think that an MBA makes us more business savvy than those who make a living selling fish and vegetables in wet markets just because we can perfectly define fancy words and phrases like "depreciation," "law of supply and demand," and so on.

The study explains in an objective, scientific, and almost reassuring manner why the poor are “less.” But are the non-poor necessily better in the first place?

A life characterized by daily struggle for survival can be like a hard stone that sharpens a knife. If you fish for a living, you are likely to acquire skills and knowledge that those who spend their time at desks cannot hope to match. Is that not intelligence too? If you drive a jeepney and maintain it yourself, is that not a little bit of engineering, which you had to learn because you can’t afford to pay someone to do it for you?

Many of those living in poverty are instinctively proficient at business, at innovation and human interaction precisely because these skills are essential for survival. But we tend to judge a person the way he articulates his thoughts rather than looking closely at the options before him and giving significant thought to the question: "Under the circumstances, is this the best he could do? Was he able to find unique solutions to alleviate his circumstance?"

Imagine the conditions that those with fewer opportunities live under. If they were so inept, they’d all be dead.

What’s scary about such a study is that it supports, without meaning to, the popular belief that the lower class are less able to understand the world, all the lofty and new concepts that emerge from it, and contribute to its growth in the same way that the non-poor can. It also uses non-poor standards to measure the intelligence of the poor. (Look, if we can’t cross the street without getting hit by a bus, the poor will snicker at us dumb pedestrians too. They just don’t do "studies.")

In this country, we attribute a whole lot of traits to the poor. For example, the rich, the middle-class, and the educated are pretty irresponsible voters too because of misinformation, social affiliation, and even personal or business interests. It is a sweeping generalization and a gross misdiagnosis to say that scum gets elected into office because the poor, who  fall for Erap-para-sa-mahirap-campaigns and make bad decisions, outnumber the middle-class and the rich, who make better decisions. In this country, this is said all the time. The poor may sell their votes, but it is the rich who offer financial support to political entities that support their business interest.

I’m going to start my own study to determine statistically whether the rich, the privileged, and the sheltered have little common sense and are less likely to be innovative. Isn’t that offensive, simplistic, and false? Well, it’s the same type of study.

The sari sari store, the jeepney, and the tricycle are brilliant innovations which emerged not in spite of but because of impoverished conditions so it is not just an issue of this study being biased, offensive, and self-glorifying, it quite simply draws erroneous conclusions from a set of numbers altogether ignoring the growth in human potential among those hard-pressed to rise to the challenges of life.

(I, by the way, dedicate this post to my mother, 4^th among 8 children, poor all her life and exceptionally intelligent all this time.  :)  Happy Birthday.)