Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (20 page)

It seems easy to be biased in our interpretation of the data about the poor. Given that we hold highly negative stereotypes about the poor, essentially defined by a failure (they are poor!), it is natural to attribute personal failure to them. Is it a surprise then that researchers “see” the disadvantaged failing? Unfortunately, when you look closer, the elephant cannot be taken out of the room so easily. Most of these data are genuine correlations, not just biased perceptions.

Nor can the data be dismissed as the result of researchers’ political bias. The data are often collected by researchers without an agenda, and when they have one, it is often contrary to what they find. Other times, the findings are incidental to their research, not something they were looking for. Agronomists and medical researchers collect large data sets where income is but one variable; they report this among many other correlations. They neither went looking for findings about the poor nor do they trumpet them. Moreover, when researchers finally do focus on poverty, they often come to the subject with a pro-poor bias. Scholars working on families or obesity or any number of other domains that focus on poverty tend to
have a natural affinity for their subjects, and they report discomfort with what they find. Perhaps most compelling is the sheer breadth and depth of this evidence. It comes not from an isolated study or polemic piece of research. Many efforts have accumulated quite a bit of data. And together they present quite a large elephant.

If we cannot dismiss the elephant, how can we make sense of it? One way is to assume that the causality runs from failure to poverty; that the poor are poor precisely because they are less capable. If your earnings depend on making good choices, then it follows naturally that those who fail end up poor. There are obvious complications to this view. Accidents of birth—such as what continent you are born on—have a large effect on your chance of being poor. Still, one prevailing view explains the strong correlation between poverty and failure by saying failure causes poverty.

Our data suggest causality runs at least as strongly in the other direction: that poverty—the scarcity mindset—causes failure.

One study on parenting focused on
air traffic controllers
. What made air traffic controllers interesting is that their jobs change daily and can be intense. Some days there are many planes in the air, weather conditions are bad, and there are congestion and delays. On those days the cognitive load—tunneling for long hours on landing all planes safely—is very high. Other days are more relaxed, with not many planes in the air or on the mind. What the researchers found was that the number of planes in the air on a particular day predicted the quality of parenting that night. More planes made for worse parents. Or, if you don’t mind a more vulgar framing, think of it this way. The same air traffic controller acted “middle class” after an easy day at work and acted “poor” after a hard day’s work.

Of course you know this yourself. You come home from work after a long, frustrating day. All you want is some peace and quiet,
but your kids are enthusiastically watching cartoons. The TV is not terribly loud but certainly enough to grate on your nerves. You implore your kids to turn the thing off, happy you managed not to be brusque. They respond that this is their television time, that you had explicitly promised that they could watch TV at this hour if they had finished their homework, which they have done. You hesitate for a second but the noise is too much. “Just turn the damn thing off!” you bark. Later you feel bad. It is not how you’d like to be with your wonderful children, but you couldn’t stop yourself.

And you would have good reason to be upset. While research on child rearing is murky, there are a few things that emerge as clearly good, and they are pretty intuitive. Consistency is near the top of the list. It is tough and anxiety-producing for children to learn things—discipline, rules of conduct, a sense of comfort—if parents are inconsistent in their statement and application. Yet this is easier said than done. Being a good parent, even when you know what to do, is hard. Consistency requires constant attention, effort, and steadfastness.

Good parenting generally requires bandwidth. It requires complex decisions and sacrifice. Children need to be motivated to do things they dislike, appointments have to be kept, activities planned, teachers met and their feedback processed, tutoring or extra help provided or procured and then monitored. This is hard for anyone, whatever his resources. It is doubly hard when your bandwidth is reduced. At that moment, you do not have the freedom of mind needed to exercise patience, to do the things you know to be right. A crowded airspace during the day leaves a crowded mind that night. A difficult day as an air traffic controller at work makes for a worse parent at home.

The poor have their own planes in the air. They are juggling rent, loans, late bills, and counting days till the next paycheck. Their bandwidth is used up in managing scarcity. Just as air traffic controllers might have their heads buzzing, so do the poor. An outside observer in their living room who didn’t know about all those planes in the air would indeed conclude that these parents lacked skills.

A
recent study showed some evidence of this. As we have seen, poor parents receive food stamps once a month, but by the end of each month they are running short. The end of the month is when their bandwidth is most taxed, the time when parenting is likely to be toughest. The economist Lisa Gennetian and her colleagues showed that these are also the times when children of parents who receive food stamps were
most likely to be acting out
and end up being disciplined in school.

Being a good parent requires many things. But most of all it requires freedom of mind. That is one luxury the poor do not have.

The poor are not just short on cash. They are also short on bandwidth. This is exactly what we saw in the mall studies and in the harvest studies. The same person when experiencing poverty—or primed to think about his monetary troubles—did significantly worse on several tests. He showed less flexible intelligence. He showed less executive control. With scarcity on his mind, he simply had less mind for everything else.

This is important because so many of our behaviors, not just parenting, rely on bandwidth. For example, an overtaxed bandwidth means a greater propensity to forget. Not so much the things you know (what psychologists call declarative memory), like the make of your first car, but things that fall under what psychologists call prospective memory—memory for things that you had planned to remember, like calling the doctor or paying a bill by the due date. These tasks must be maintained alive in your head, and they get neglected when your bandwidth is reduced. Is it any surprise then that the poor fail to take their medications? Some may find this hard to believe: how can you forget something so important? But memory doesn’t work that way. You don’t remember as a function of long-term value. Certainly no one forgets to take painkillers: the pain is a
constant reminder. Diseases such as diabetes, though, are “silent”; their consequences are not immediately felt. There is nothing to remind a person with an overburdened bandwidth to take those medications.

Another consequence is reduced productivity at work. Nearly every task—from processing drive-thru orders to arranging grocery shelves—requires working memory, the capacity to hold several pieces of information active in our minds, until we use them. By taxing working memory, poverty leads us to perform less well. It makes us less productive because our mental processor is occupied with other concerns. This creates a tragic situation where the poor, who most need the wages of their labor, also have their productivity most heavily taxed.

An overtaxed bandwidth means a reduced ability to process new information. How much of a lecture will you absorb if your mind constantly gets pulled away? Now think of a low-income college student whose mind keeps going back to making rent. How much will she absorb? Our data above suggest that much of the correlation between income and classroom performance may be explained by the bandwidth tax. And learning is impeded not only in the classroom. Many public health programs rely on the poor to absorb new information. Campaigns try to educate the public about the importance of eating healthier, smoking less, obtaining prenatal care, getting screened for HIV, and so on. In poor countries, extension workers reach out to farmers to educate them about the latest crops or the latest pests. It should not come as a surprise that these efforts are less successful with the poor, largely failing to get them to smoke less, eat healthier, or adopt the latest farm practices. Absorbing new information requires working memory.

The bandwidth tax also means that you have fewer mental resources to exert self-control. After a long day hard at work, are you likely to floss? Or will you say, “Never mind, I’ll do it tomorrow.” To make matters worse, we have seen how the constant struggle with poverty (and scarcity generally) further depletes self-control.
When you can afford so little, so many more things need to be resisted, and your self-control ends up being run down. Now picture yourself as a farmer preoccupied by thoughts of how you will make ends meet this week. You go to sleep preoccupied by how you’ll afford the dentist for your son who’s been complaining of toothache. You may need to forgo the night out with friends that you’ve been looking forward to. And you need to weed soon. You wake up, tired and still anxious. Like failing to floss, it is all too easy to imagine how you might decide, “I’ll just weed tomorrow.”

We see this in the data on smoking:
smokers with financial stress
are less likely to follow through on an attempt to quit. The poor will end up fatter too; eating well is a substantial self-control endeavor. One study found that when low-income women were moved to higher-income neighborhoods,
rates of extreme obesity and diabetes dropped
tremendously; other factors may have played a role, but a reduction in stress is almost certainly part of the story. Being a good parent requires self-control. Showing up at work even when you are sick requires self-control. Not snapping at your boss or at a customer requires self-control. Regularly attending a job-training program requires self-control. When you live in a rural village, ensuring that your kid gets to school every day requires self-control. So many of the “failures” surrounding poverty can be understood through the bandwidth tax.

Finally, think about the following. You have a big presentation tomorrow, for which you have prepared intensively. You know the value of rest, so you make sure to finish work by 5 p.m. You go home, have a good dinner with the family, and turn in early. But your mind is buzzing with thoughts of the presentation. So despite the need to sleep, you do not sleep well. Sleep research shows you are not alone. In one study,
thirty-eight good sleepers were instructed to go to sleep
as quickly as possible. Some of them were told that after the nap they would be giving a speech. Most people really do not like to give speeches. Indeed, this group had far more trouble falling asleep and slept less well when they did. Other data on
insomniacs show that they are
more likely to be worriers
. Put simply, it is hard to sleep well when you have things on your mind.

This is perhaps the most pernicious, long-term detrimental way in which scarcity may tax bandwidth: thoughts of scarcity erode sleep. Studies of the lonely show that
they sleep less well and get fewer hours
. These effects are quite strong for the poor: they too have
lower-quality sleep
. And not sleeping enough can be disastrous. The U.S. Army has shown how lack of sleep
can lead soldiers to fire on their own troops
.
The oil tanker
Exxon Valdez
crashed in Alaska in 1989 arguably in part because of the crew’s sleep deprivation and sleep debt. These effects cumulate. Studies show that sleeping four to six hours a night for two weeks leads to a decay in performance
comparable to going without sleep for two nights in a row
. Insufficient sleep further compromises bandwidth.

One of the things the poor lack most is bandwidth. The very struggle of making ends meet leaves them with less of this vital resource. This shortfall is not of the standard physiological variety, having to do with a lack of nutrition or stress from early childhood hindering brain development. Nor is bandwidth permanently compromised by poverty. It is the present-day cognitive load of making ends meet:
when income rises, so, too, does cognitive capacity
. The bandwidth of the farmers was restored as soon as crop payments were received. Poverty at its very core taxes bandwidth and diminishes capacity.

Bandwidth underpins nearly every aspect of our behavior. We use it to calculate our odds of winning in poker, to judge other people’s facial expressions, to control our emotions, to resist our impulses, to read a book, or to think creatively. Nearly every advanced cognitive function relies on bandwidth. Yet a tax on bandwidth is easy to overlook. Perhaps the best analogy is this: Think of talking to someone who is clearly doing something else, say surfing the web, while talking to you. If you did not know what they were doing, how would they seem to you? Daft? Confused? Uninterested? Not all there? A bandwidth tax can create the same perception.

So
if you want to understand the poor, imagine yourself with your mind elsewhere. You did not sleep much the night before. You find it hard to think clearly. Self-control feels like a challenge. You are distracted and easily perturbed. And this happens every day. On top of the other material challenges poverty brings, it also brings a mental one.

In this light, the elephant in the room no longer seems so puzzling. The failures of the poor are part and parcel of the misfortune of being poor in the first place. Under these conditions, we all would have (and have!) failed.

We began with a small sample of observations all pointing at the elephant in the room. In a great variety of circumstances, poverty appears to correlate with failure. We have given one explanation for these findings: the bandwidth tax. But how do we know that this, in fact, is the explanation? You might wonder, for example, whether the bandwidth tax is large enough to explain everything from failed adherence to forgotten weeding. We think it is. In the mall study from
chapter 2
, where the low-income group would not even qualify as truly poor, the bandwidth tax was sizable: roughly thirteen to fourteen IQ points, with an equally large effect on executive control. In the harvest study in India, we found an eight-to-nine-point effect on IQ and an even larger effect on executive control. These are, as we have pointed out, very large effects on cognitive function. In terms of the standard IQ classification, they can take you from “normal” to “superior” intelligence, or from “normal” to “dull,” or even “borderline deficient.” Not only is the bandwidth tax large, but the fact that we find it in two very different contexts is powerful confirmation. The poor in rural India are quite different from low-income shoppers at a New Jersey mall, yet they exhibit broadly similar bandwidth taxes. It is therefore not unreasonable to expect that the
bandwidth tax plays a similarly large role in the lives of the poor everywhere.