Persistent poverty is usually a byproduct of poor impulse control. That will quickly undo any compounding created by hard work.
No other factor comes close to being as predictive of whether or not someone in the US gets out of poverty as impulse control. I've seen it in every poor community I lived in.
There is no satisfactory way to address this reality. Impulse control is significantly innate. Attempts to improve it have limited success in the best cases. Someone with no impulse control will squander or lose resources given to them, whether through their own hard work or handouts. See also: lottery winners. It is a very deep local minima.
> Persistent poverty is usually a byproduct of poor impulse control.
Go visit a brick factory in Pakistan. The laborers are extremely poor and no amount of "work harder" effort on their individual part (they already work hard as fuck, six days a week) is going to lift them out of that life. Telling them they're poor because they have poor impulse control is one of the most ridiculous things I've read today.
In that case I would be very interested to see the parent commenter expand on why they have formed the opinion that persons living in poverty in the US (based on their first hand experiences) have poor impulse control but people in other locations do not.
Nobody can "impulse control" their way out of a situation where income is 100 and necessary expenses are 102. Sure there are things in their control but, thinking poor people are just wasting their money is a stereotype that need to die.
Assume everyone is as rational as you. How could you lift yourself from that upsidedown situation? Bootstraps?
Poor people absolutely are wasting money but it doesn’t matter. I did it, everyone does it. The “wasting money” argument is hyper-analytical and not a productive accounting of human behavior. Almost no one in the US is literally negative on resources from all sources versus necessary expenses.
Around 10-15% of US households are living at the edge of their income. That is per the US Federal Reserve and BLS. This doesn’t account for the widely available government subsidies[0] for people in these income brackets.
Even in the worst cases, there is significant economic slack. Almost the entire time I lived below the poverty line I was usually able to save significant money in that context. So could have almost all of the poor people I knew. The exceptions always seemed to be old people living off Social Security. But they have their own safety nets.
I want proper support for people in poverty. That requires an objective accounting of the nature of their poverty that far too many people are incurious about. Everyone wants to make this way more complicated than it needs to be.
[0] A variety of subpopulations legitimately fall through the cracks and are excluded from significant government support. I was in those cracks.
It is really obvious that many people worried about the poor in the US know nothing at all about the actual poor in the US.
I think the most reasonable answer is that first world countries provide access to many opportunities that do not exist elsewhere. People can and do lift themselves from poverty with these opportunities.
Valid hypothesis, but I suspect that cause and effect may be reversed.
When you don't have much, and opportunity is fleeting, you tend to grab and implement, quickly.
If you get a windfall, but don't have a bank account, you spend it quickly. Hanging onto it, could actually be very dangerous, or at least, increase the likelihood of having it taken away.
More than this, in a risky, unstable environment, taking what you can get when you can get it is the right evolutionary strategy. Genetics doesn't know what sort of world you are going to be born into so it has developed a limited number of plans. One of those plans is "control your impulses" and another is "get what you can and get out". They both work well in certain scenarios, and suffer in others.
> If something goes wrong in this process—the overwhelmingly most likely one is that the payer doesn’t have the funds to cover the check (NSF, or “insufficient funds”), but the check being fraudulent or unauthorized is also possible—that wrongness may not be discovered before money “moves” to your bank. And so that payment can be recalled from your bank to the bank the check is drawn on. This will likely result in the bank attempting to recall the money from your account.
> And so by presenting your check, which you think is substantially terminating a transaction, you are actually creating a new credit extension with your bank. They are extremely aware that you just asked them to advance you money, even if you are not aware that you did that. They already partially underwrote this extension of credit; that is why you were not shooed out of the building when you originally asked for a checking account.
The article is about depositing a check as an extension of credit; not spending via check. This creates a creditworthiness requirement that is in practice one of the most common reasons for someone to not have access to a bank account.
I'm open to this correlation. But I wonder about causality. Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential. Breaking the cycle of poverty is difficult, but I'm not an expert on where the best investments to solve this problem would be.
> But I wonder about causality. Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential.
There's fairly good statistics that a large portion of the people living in a cycle of poverty and drug addiction in Vancouver's downtown eastside suffer from a number of documented risk factors:
a) fetal alcohol syndrome
b) documented abuse by parents at an early age, or became wards of the state and entered foster care system, were not placed with any family members
c) drug/alcohol abuse by parents
d) molested by parents, relatives, "friends" of parents at an early age
If the parents have poor impulse control then the children often do as well. This is a selection effect; children growing up in poverty often inherit a significant contributor to their parents' persistent poverty.
People who are incidentally in poverty usually have children that aren't. I grew up in pretty abject poverty and saw this pattern over and over again too. My parents didn't have poor impulse control, it was circumstantial. All of my siblings were able to grind their way to a successful life despite having the deck stacked against them -- and none of them work in tech.
It is extremely frustrating. I have persistently poor friends who are unambiguously above average in both intelligence and work ethic, and with great personalities. Yet despite that, they constantly sabotage their future with poor impulse control. With good impulse control they'd be solidly middle class at a minimum.
I don't know how to fix the above situation. I've tried many times. They can't really explain why they make the stupid decisions they do, it just kind of happens.
I also wonder if its rational behaviour at the end of the day. If you don't have anything to your name, why delay gratification? Its not like you'll get benefits of delaying, and you may very well suffer a loss if you wait. I think you have to have a certain amount of wealth before the types of behaviours that actually make you wealthy make sense in the average case.
The original marshmallow test fails for this reason, but also it's true that poor impulse control makes it harder to break out of situations that do not reward delayed gratification.
> Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential.
But that’s just another correlation without a proof of causation.
There’s no clear definition of what causation is. You can invoke the tired “correlation doesn’t imply causation” any time you want, but the same quip disqualifies any alternative causation mechanism you propose, unless you serve up an actual criterion for distinguishing the two along with it. Asserting that one seems more plausible than the other isn’t enough.
How about growing up in a neighborhood and environment where there isn't negative influence and impulses around you to begin with?
For your example, people in poor environments have more liquor stores, convenience stores, etc. If you are rich you have more positive influence around you and less to impulse control against.
Want to test your argument? Try to live in a strip club and tell me if you can control your impulses as a male (or if you are a female, whatever is your temptation equivalent). Since you believe your control in that situation is 100% innnate and cannot be changed, then you have squandered all your resources. However you and I can see thats silly, why would anyone choose to live so close to temptation and negative influence? But isn't your argument saying you shouldn't bother to control that since you'd just fall to poverty anyway.
There's also been a number of studies done on what constitutes a "food desert" in the United States, where people don't have nearby access to a proper grocery store, just small convenience stores (and things like a strip mall with convenience store, liquor store, vape shop, etc). And as it correlates with obesity and health issues caused by an unhealthy diet.
Ah, hadn't realized it had been studied. Nice find.
Growing up with an immigrant family and parents who didn't have the opportunity I did to change environments and control the food around me (either by location, and proximity of nearby stores, and also whats physically in my home) I notice how much my "impulse" control simply changes based on whats around me.
When I am in their home space, the unhealthy diet and health issues abound.
You can have really stupid parents who ingrain suboptimal behavior patterns and interests to you. Things like poor eating, attitudes and beliefs about work and what’s possible, abuse, poor ways of coping with stress and conflict. Throw into that a hopeless environment with no immediate opportunities, bad peer group, and early pregnancies and you have a recipe for disaster
Usually? Dude, you're implying that most impoverished people deserve it without providing a shred of evidence. You saw it, huh? Sorry, idk what you saw, but your anecdotes are no basis for making such a sweeping and important claim about one of the most complex problems humanity faces.
No other factor comes close to being as predictive of whether or not someone in the US gets out of poverty as impulse control. I've seen it in every poor community I lived in.
There is no satisfactory way to address this reality. Impulse control is significantly innate. Attempts to improve it have limited success in the best cases. Someone with no impulse control will squander or lose resources given to them, whether through their own hard work or handouts. See also: lottery winners. It is a very deep local minima.