Comments on: 99 problems but the rich ‘aint one

By: Solemndragon

Solemndragon — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:07:22 +0000

http://www.africametrics.org/documents/conference07/Day%201/Session%202/Aye%20effect%20of%20poverty.pdf
http://140.247.94.230/soc/faculty/sampson/articles/1994_CD_Laub.pdf
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/290/15/2023
It would appear that this is an extension of the basic study of why the poor buy lottery tickets, and why the poor are substantially more likely to divert into patterns of delinquency. Simply put, the world that poorer people live in is different. Roy F. Baumeister also looked at this a bit, I think, in looking at why short-term rewards were more influential for people in poverty, who seldom get to experience the longer-term rewards.
I think this field of study does exist, but that this is the point where we are arriving at a consensus on the fact that poverty itself changes people, and until we also address those factors, poverty will remain. It’s the realisation that people are not just waiting for opportunity to rise- they are also doing the best they can with what they’ve got, and that isn’t equipping them for the different realm of choices and social norms that enable long-term responsibility.

By: hat_eater

hat_eater — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:41:57 +0000

One does not need to be poor to experience this effect. When various annoying tasks happen to pile up, I’m much less likely to do anything about any of them, as reason would demand, and more likely to watch a movie or read a book instead of working on solving problems, and hit the sheets earlier, perhaps a bottle too.
I know this is not an universal behavior, but it’s far from rare.

By: John Andrews

John Andrews — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:44:13 +0000

Sendhil Mullainathan at Harvard and co-authors have some interesting work in behavioral economics related to how deprivation affects decision-making. There are quite a lot of experimental observations.
Maybe unlike Karelis, the larger point is that everyone has the tendency to make poor decisions under scarcity. Sendhil’s good at pointing out how time scarcity, etc. lead to poor decisions in daily life.
There’s an entertaining bloggingheads with Glenn Loury (http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/26877), academic work on development and psychology here (http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/mullainathan/files/lens%20of%20psychology.pdf), and various TED talks, etc.