The untold burden of poverty “When you are poor, your intestine eats itself and you will start burping even your own soul.” That was my best remembrance of the line in the film, "Ang Babae sa Septic Tank." It was a profoundly stirring expression of the fact that the trappings of extreme poverty could cause your own moral fiber to fray. But as if that were not insidious enough, poverty could be consummate in its havoc. It could do something else. Poverty could drain our mental batteries. The mental powers required to cope and overcome scarcity seem to make our brains less agile in thinking about other things in life. This is what the latest research based in Princeton entitled Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function” that appeared in the journal Science last Aug 30, 2013 has shown. Last year, these same authors conducted an earlier research to find out what happens to people who face even just hypothetical situations of scarcity. The test involved subjects being given a specific number of shots and guesses to two groups in a version of “Wheel of Fortune” and in another game similar to Angry Birds. One group was given much less chances to guess or shoot and thus was called the “poor” group”. They found out that the “poor” group begin to be very short-sighted and score lower than the “rich” group. The researchers then imagined that it would be difficult to test for this in the real world. But this year, they were able to do it. IQs and the scarcity problem The researchers wanted to extend the scarcity problem to real-life situations to find out if there is a difference in the IQ of the rich and poor given the same set of problems. Their study has confirmed that indeed there is but it is not because of common perceptions that the poor are lazy or they have imbibed a culture of poverty. First, they tested 400 shoppers in a mall in New Jersey and they divided them into two groups according to their self-reported income. Then they were told that they had to pretend that they had to pay for a car repair worth $150 which did not seem too expensive for either group. Then they were asked to do an unrelated spatial intelligence test. There was no significant difference in the way they performed in the spatial test. But when they were asked to think about how to pay a $1500 car repair expense, the “poor” group performed worse than the “rich” group. Then they tested the abstract reasoning and problem-solving abilities of 464 sugar cane farmers in India twice: one before harvest time and one after harvest. Sixty percent of the income of these farmers depended on their harvest for their annual income. Before harvest time, cash was low, and at post harvest, cash was on hand. The result: the farmers did worse on tests given at the pre- harvest period than on post-harvest, reflecting a 13-point drop in IQ. What is it exactly about poverty that cripples our smarts? Is it our diet, our environment, our attitude when we are poor that causes us to get trapped in our own poverty cycle? The researchers pointed out that it is the feeling of “scarcity” – when you don’t have enough – that whittles you to a narrow range of mental activity, prioritizing the imminent and the basics like food, rental expense for the house or medical expenses. Note that the perception of scarcity (theoretical car expense) is enough to impoverish the minds of the subjects. It seems that our attention, when pushed by the feeling of scarcity is held hostage by the emergencies of surviving the call of hunger and rent, leaving little room to explore the possibilities of getting out of the rut of poverty altogether. Thinking about possibilities We regularly have surveys on how much of our population think they are poor. If a significant percentage of our people think they are poor, this study says that there may be a significant drop in the IQ of those people which would further bind them to poverty. Knowing this, we need to tailor our poverty alleviating mechanisms so that they would be relatively easy to understand and participate in, with the bureaucratic hurdles less mentally taxing since we know that the poor’s mental capacities are eclipsed by the urgent demands of survival. Once we can make them focus on more than the threat of crippling scarcity, then they can think about possibilities. “Possibilities” here include thinking about education. This is why we should take our hats off to those who have survived the trap of poverty by being persistent in education. For some of those I personally know, it was their mothers who bore everything so that their children will not be preoccupied with only thoughts of being poor. Am not sure their mothers realized the trade-off because they were the ones who constantly worried about their children’s survival and education. The fight against poverty has never been just about having the basic stuff. It has always been about fighting to keep your birthright – to have a choice of your own future, independent of the circumstances you were born to. That, and yes, never ever having to burp your own spirit just because you are poor.
Posted on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 12:26:12 +0000
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