OK, Here Is How People Learn From Poverty:

[G_j]

from the Social Work Degree Center



This infographic comes from the Social Work Degree Center — where you can go if you're interested in doing social work.

[The Magistrate]

1. Cold Truth, Sir

"The winners are at war with the losers, and the fix is in. The prospects for peace are awful."

[daleanime]

2. K&R....

[WorseBeforeBetter]

3. K&R

[yallerdawg]

4. Very interesting how poverty...

is so mentally overwhelming.

Defines 'welfare' as more than an economic status, more than just some food, more than just some kind of shelter.

[SoCalDem]

5. Subsistence-living is not conducive to thought-processing

If you spend most of your time worrying about how to feed & house yourself, you don't have time to think about much else.. add kids to the mix, and it's overwhelming.

[ancianita]

6. This is a Big Deal. We must come to know this, its consequences in the realms of education, politics

and public discourse.

[marble falls]

7. Thanks. A lot of information put together in an understandable and very interesting form.

[antiquie]

8. I did not lose my cognitive abilities when I became poor.

Nor did any of the many others I know who were seriously recessionized.

Here is an abstracted response to the graphed study. Emphasis is mine.

Mani et al. (Research Articles, 30 August, p. 976) presented laboratory experiments that aimed to show that poverty-related worries impede cognitive functioning. A reanalysis without dichotomization of income fails to corroborate their findings and highlights spurious interactions between income and experimental manipulation due to ceiling effects caused by short and easy tests. This suggests that effects of financial worries are not limited to the poor.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6163/1169.4.abstract

[Tuesday Afternoon]

9. the reply to the comment =

Wicherts and Scholten (1) criticize our study (2) on three grounds: (i) the use of binary income variable rather than continuous income variable, (ii) potential ceiling effects in the cognitive control test, and (iii) retesting effects in the field study. We address each point below.

(i) Wicherts and Scholten argue that when using the continuous income variable, the interaction between income and condition (easy versus hard scenarios) is insignificant. Our income data, as is typically the case, and as Wicherts and Scholten recognize and we point out, are noisy. It is standard to create binary variables when dealing with noisy data (3–8). It is heartening, furthermore, that across all experiments, even with the continuous income variable (which they report), the effects are of the same sign. More important, we ran the same regression with data collapsed across the three core experiments (1, 3, and 4), and the interaction between income and condition is significant (P < 0.02), which they did not report. Results are shown in Table 1. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that in our field study a similar effect was observed in the absence of any income data.

at link:http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6163/1169.5.full

[KurtNYC]

10. "poverty related concerns consume mental resources" but aren't bill paying (on time),

finding a better job, etc poverty related concerns? The artists who made this mis-infographic seem to have take pieces of the study and put their own (wrong) conclusions on them. The authors of the study specifically pointed to bill paying and money savings as THE things that taxed mental bandwidth while the infographic says pretty much the opposite:

Poor people spend so much mental energy on the immediate problems of paying bills and cutting costs that they are left with less capacity to deal with other complex but important tasks, including education, training or managing their time, suggests research published on Thursday

The original 2013 study asked people in a shopping mall about car repair costs -- THAT is what they based the 13 point IQ thing on !?

She added that a limitation of the study was that the researchers had not studied how the financial questions in the shopping mall scenario had affected the emotional states of the participants. The $1,500 amount in the "hard" scenario may have failed to influence the cognitive processing of participants with higher incomes because it might have been too low to be meaningful to them, she said.

"The figure of $1,500 may have led to anxiety in low income participants, which could have influenced their performance. The study failed to look at affective state. How much anxiety did the imagined scenarios create and were their differences in how anxious high and low income participants felt, which could explain there differences in performance?"

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/29/poverty-mental-capacity-complex-tasks

[DamnYankeeInHouston]

11. Teachers are expected to somehow overcome this.

[niyad]

12. k and r

[Spitfire of ATJ]

13. Actual poverty is much higher if you count the low wage working poor.

[Doctor_J]

15. Yeah, their $22K for a family of 4 is pretty meager

Can you rent a place that holds 4 people for $500/month? Even if you can that's more than 1/4 of the family income. So even these depressing numbers are overly optimistic.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

16. These days the Right Wing claims the ARE NO POOR because over 90% of them own a refrigerator.

[DesertDiamond]

14. A Dutch painter once said, "The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time." And all

of your energy, and as this says, all of your mental capacity. Before I changed my financial karma I was always forgetting to pay bills on time, digging myself in deeper and deeper with the huge late fees every company used to charge, including the utility companies.

[ladyVet]

17. Being poor means being demoralized and tired all the time.

I know I spend a good bit of time ignoring all the things I'm supposed to buy, according to all the commercials. It hurts to know you can't buy the better foods at the grocery store, or the nicer clothes, that would actually last longer and be a better value. Or even get a new computer, or replace the broken air conditioning unit instead of using a window unit. And waiting until you almost pass out from the heat before you put the unit in the window, because it runs the electric bill up. Then in the winter, you keep the heat turned way down, because that runs up the electric, too.

You live in constant worry that something will go wrong with the car that a) you can't fix yourself, or that b) will be too expensive to fix. And as much as we'd like to say all the old, inefficient cars should be off the road, because it's better for the environment and helps keep us so dependent on oil, how do you buy one when you can barely keep the one you have running.

I get depressed when I think about going into my retirement years with nothing but Social Security to look forward to. I get very anxious when I see how easily Congress -- and even the President -- put cuts to SS and Medicare up for consideration.

I grew up poor, but my parents paid their bills unless there wasn't enough for food and bills. Then we bought food. Sometimes there wasn't enough for food or bills. Many years we didn't get new clothes for school, or maybe one outfit each and a pair of shoes. It was always the cheapest stuff. Never anything really nice.

But hey, I should stop now, because being poor is something people don't like to read about. Because it's all my fault and I should do that thing the Republicans talk about. Something about bootstraps and pulling. A lot of Democrats like that too.