I'd like to start with a simple question,why do the poor make so many poor decisions.I know it's a harsh(adj.严厉的) question，but take a look at the data.The poor borrow more,save less,smoke more,excercise less,drink more and eat less healthyfully.Why?
Well,the standard explanation was once sumed up by British Prime Minister A.She called poverty "a personality defect"
a lack of character basically.
I am sure not so many of you would be so blunt.But the idea that there are something wrong with the poor themselves is not restricted to A.
some of you make believe that the poor should be responsible for their own mistake;and others may argue that we should help them to make better decisions.But the underlying assumption is the same.There are something wrong with them.If we could just change them.If we could just teach them how to live their lives,If they would only listen.And to be honest.This was what I thought for a long time.It was only a few years ago that I discovered that everything I thought ,I knew about poverty was wrong.It all started when I accidently stumbled from a paper by a few American pyschologists.They traveled 8000 miles all away to India,for a fascinating study.And it was an experiment with sugurcane framers.You should know these famers collect about 60% of annual income all at once right after the harvest,This means they relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other.
2018年1月6日
And the reserchers asked them to do an IQ test before and after the harvest,what they subsquently discovered completely blew my mind.The farmers scored much worse on the test before the harvest.The effects of living in poverty ,it turns out, correspond to losing 14 point of IQ.To give you an idea,that comparable to losing a night's sleep or the effects of alcoholism.
A few months later,I heart that B,a profeesor at C and one of the authors of this study,was coming over to Holland,whre I live.So we met up in D to talk about his revolutionary new theory of poverty.and I can summ it up just in two words:scarcity mentality.It turns out that people behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce.and what the thing is does not much matter.whtheter it is not enough time ,money or food.
2018年1月14日
you all konw this feeling when you've got too much to do or when you've put off breaking for lunch and your blood sugar takes a dive.This narrows your focus to your immediate lack--to the sandwich you 've got to have now ,the meeting that's starting in fave minutes or the bills that have to be paid tomorrow.So the long term perspective goes out the window.You could compare it to a new computer that is running ten heavy programms at once.It gets slower and slower ,making errors ,eventually frezzes.Not beacause it is a bad computer but because it has so much to do at once.And the poor have the same problem.They're not making dumb decisions because they are dumb.but because They're living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions
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