Why are rich people rich and poor people poor?

Just because the rich work harder and longer? Is it because they are more willing to take risks and make sacrifices, and the poor will sleep asleep after 10 am and spend money on online games? Or more specifically, is it because the rich pay attention to education and opportunities, and the poor come from generation to generation?

According to the BBC, in the United States, the income gap has grown for nearly three decades. This gap reached a record-breaking proportion in 2019, with the top 1% of Americans earning 19.3% of all household income. For some decision makers and members of the public, this is a serious problem – and it is impossible to solve this problem without looking for the reasons for the rich and the poor to be poorer from both personal and institutional perspectives. of.

A behavioral economist at Harvard University and a cognitive psychologist at Princeton University have a new study that may help solve this long-standing problem. In their recently published book, "Scarcity: Why Very Little Owners Means A Lot", Sidehill Muraidandan and Elda Shafir believe that it is not because the Moonlight family is not good at financial management. They are often in a state of no money, but because they are in a state of no money, so they are not good at financial management. This is a subtle but significant conceptual shift.

Based on data collected from a large number of tests and experiments, the two authors believe that it is necessary to continuously discuss which credit card should be used first or which can be put into the shopping cart according to the sales volume, which will cause mental damage. Doing a person's cognitive resources will also weaken the importance of planning tomorrow, because today's demand is too big. In other words, when you are struggling to step on the water, the ability to calculate which shoreline has recently become a luxury.

Shafir said: "Let your computer run 16 programs at the same time, then all the speed will slow down. Because it is too much at one time."

The analogy is enough. Let's take a look at the experimental evidence.

In one experiment, the authors asked participants to imagine that they would need to pay $300 for repairing their car, they could pay immediately, they could pay with the loan, or they could completely ignore it. The two authors then asked participants to answer a series of computer-generated questions designed to measure their logical thinking, cognitive function, and problem-solving skills. All participants, both rich and poor, showed similar levels of intelligence.

However, when the two authors raised the maintenance fee to $3,000 and repeated the experiment, the intellectual level of the poor lags far behind the rich, and even some people's iq drops to 13 or the value of sleeping at night.

On a field trip, Shafir and Mura Nadana allowed Indian sugarcane farmers to do psychological tests before and immediately after harvesting. The results were unsurprising: after the harvest, the farmers performed much better in the test.

According to their research, the existence of scarcity seems to establish a narrow vision in the human brain. While helping people focus on urgent issues, it also simplifies dating, errands, and aspirations that are currently in a secondary position. In this way, poor life often continues the state of poverty.

Shafeier said: "We use intelligence bandwidth to concentrate, make decisions and resist temptations - psychologists call it 'active memory.' We always know that when working memory increases, it hurts. Active memory. For example, when you have to remember a seven-digit number, you can't remember so many other things you need to do. Increasing the intelligence bandwidth and the load of working memory will make you often go wrong when doing things.

The research of the two writers is not limited to the poor and their lack of money. In The Scarcity, Shafir and Mura Nadan believe that this reduced mentality can appear in anyone for a variety of reasons, whether it is lack of time, food or friendship. No one can be spared.

Shafir said: "We are very cautious to point out that this is not about the poor - but people living in a poor environment. Think about the feeling of hunger. If you feel hungry, that is what you thought at the time. You don't have to It takes a long time - you will have this idea when you feel hungry."

Some critics insist that the two writers completely confuse causality - poor people are poor because they lack intelligence and perseverance, not vice versa - Shafir feels that things will not be so simple.

Shafier said: "In a sense, the most exciting part of our research is that whatever you think is the cause of poverty, all the factors we consider are clearly related to the poor environment. Not with people themselves. In the same environment, the poor and the rich perform as well. When exposed to a scarce environment, the performance of the poor suddenly becomes worse, even though they are still the same group."

But the environment and pressure described by the two writers are different—a certain amount of stress is actually good for us to accomplish the task—all of which are obvious to people living in chronic poverty or those who have experienced economic difficulties for some time. It is very difficult to be penniless. Lack of money will not only limit what you can do, but it will also make your survival compromise and entangle in the most basic goods and services. Going back to the analogy of bandwidth, it's like going to the Internet when you download files from a computer, never ending. When you don't know how to pay the arrears of water and electricity, you can't stop yourself from thinking about it.

But judging from the political pattern of polarization in the United States, common sense for some people is not equal to everyone. In this regard, Shafir said that he hopes that this information can set up an "empathy bridge" between the opposing camps, and perhaps also allows some Washington decision makers to understand the plight of the poor. The authors provided some practical solutions, such as automatically depositing wages into accounts and vials. Basically anything that helps liberate bandwidth can be done.

On the occasion of the documentary "Inequality for All", former US Secretary of Labor Robert Leahy said: "In all developed countries, the income distribution of the United States is the most unequal, and this inequality is rapidly expanding." For some, it means going to prosperity, but for the rest, it means destruction. Although Shafir and Mulaine Nadan's research does not cover all aspects of the widening gap, it confronts this complex issue – why it is so difficult for the poor to get rid of poverty on their own.