Stupidity Doesn’t Cause Poverty; Poverty Causes Stupidity

“. . . the infirmities that plague the poor, while appearing in the guise of disabilities we associate with innate stupidity, are far from being the product of deficient genetic endowment. They are a kind of learned or conditioned dullness that elicits irrational and counterproductive behaviors trapping the sufferer in a vicious cycle of want and poverty.” Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

By Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—10/7/2013—The poor are routinely characterized as being poor because of intellectual and moral infirmities.

Sometimes that is true. But more often it is not.

Or at least the infirmities that plague the poor, while appearing in the guise of disabilities we associate with innate stupidity, are far from being the product of deficient genetic endowment.

They are a kind of learned or conditioned dullness that elicits irrational and counterproductive behaviors trapping the sufferer in a vicious cycle of want and poverty.

A new wrinkle in the nurture-versus-nature debate is offered in a recent book by economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir. Succinctly entitled Scarcity, the volume presents the best case I’ve read for the “nurture” argument.

One of the ways of validating that argument is to test the intelligence of the same group of people under conditions of both want and abundance, holding constant, as far as possible, other variables.

The authors gave tests of fluid intelligence and executive function to a group of Indian sugar farmers before and after crop harvest.

Post-harvest, these farmers were rich, at least temporarily. Just as important, they felt rich.

Pre-harvest, they were poor and felt so.

The results indicate that, when they were and felt prosperous, these farmers had IQs of between 10 and 15 points higher than when their material circumstances worsened, albeit only seasonally.

Poverty so taxes the mind, conclude the authors, that it impairs the capacity to plan and execute remedial strategies.

In India, this impaired capacity sends farmers to the local money lender.

In the US, it sends the urban poor to payday lenders. These are ubiquitous, boasting some 23,000 national branches—a number greater than that of McDonalds and Starbucks combined.

No one with any brains or perceived choice would borrow from a payday lender and pay its usurious rates. But the poor can’t figure out how to avoid it, any more than they can structure their lives to avoid exorbitant charges for paying bills past their due date.

The pressure of the moment preoccupies the mind and perpetuates the cycle of dependence on emergency financial assistance.

Poverty appears to create a mental state very much akin to that of GAD (generalized anxiety disorder), and the GAD sufferer, as the literature attests, behaves as if his/her mind is frozen indissolubly.

The authors also dilate on other than material scarcity, most notably on the effects of the scarcity of time in the lives of the overcommitted, a theme that is unavoidably autobiographical.

But material scarcity is sui generis, they acknowledge. Some of their remedies, at least for the American poor, are innovative, including a fresh approach to job training that takes into account the harm already done by poverty to the individual’s executive function.

A “good read.” And it also “reads good.”

Note: For a sneak-peak within Scarcity, go to http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Having-Little-Means-Much/dp/0805092641.