It’s not just climate
scientists and their global warming. Behavioral scientists have their own
biases. The August 30, 2013 issue of the premier journal, Science, has a research report claiming that poor people stay poor
because being poor “impairs their cognitive capacity.”[1] That is,
being poor is so challenging and stressful that poor people have exhausted their
mental capacity to regulate their impulses and make wise choices. The research
was deemed so impeccable by the editors that they also ran a companion news
story to publicize the findings to lay audiences.
The research yielded two
basic, independent findings:
- In one group of ordinary people sampled at a shopping mall, inducing negative thoughts about finances impaired function on two thinking tests in poor but not well-off participants. The median incomes per household varied from $20,000-$70,000 per year.
- Testing of farmers at two stages of the harvest cycle showed that thinking performance before the harvest, when they were relatively poor, was impaired relative to performance afterwards, when they were relatively rich.
The conclusion was that
people do not choose to be poor and that they become trapped in poverty because
being poor impairs their thinking and decision-making. Blame for people being
poor is put on their state of being poor. Nowhere, not in the research report nor
its news summary, did anybody consider an alternate explanation for poverty in
the U.S.:
Poverty of able-bodied, normal
people can be a choice.
In terms of social
policy, the implication of the politically correct is that you can help lift
people out of poverty if you make them less poor through gifts, exempting them
from taxation, and providing subsidies. Interestingly, the writers avoided this
obvious inference, no doubt because it would irritate people who believe in the
importance of personal responsibility. Rather, the writers focused on the need
of government to ease mental challenges of poor people to a level commensurate
with their impaired thinking capacity. For example, the authors suggested that
government should reduce “cognitive taxes” in addition to monetary taxes for
the poor. Specific policy suggestions included providing help in “filling out
forms, planning, and reminders” to help the poor access government services and
welfare.
Not mentioned is the
current U.S. policy of spending $67 million for “navigators” to help poor
people sign up for the Affordable Care Act. Who knows, that idea may well have
come from these authors, two of whom were high-status Ivy League professors.
But I have to ask, wouldn’t
these millions of dollars be better spent helping the poor get a work ethic and
make better life choices? Instead, our government gives welfare payments and
subsidies worth more than the poor can earn by working. And the poor don’t have
to work to get the welfare. At the same time, politicians and bureaucrats push
for an amnesty program for illegal aliens who are willing to do the work that
our poor citizens refuse to do. Tell me, how is a government policy of
promoting more dependency going to help anybody? If such government policy were
not so deliberate, it would be insane.
