Utopian thinking: the easy way to eradicate poverty | Rutger Bregman

feminesque:

It all started when I accidently stumbled on a paper by a few American psychologists.
They had travelled 8,000 miles, to India, to carry out an experiment
with sugar cane farmers. These farmers collect about 60% of their annual
income all at once, right after the harvest. This means they are
relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other. The researchers
asked the farmers to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What
they discovered blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the tests
before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty, it turns out,
correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. That’s comparable to losing a
night’s sleep, or the effects of alcoholism.

Utopian thinking: the easy way to eradicate poverty | Rutger Bregman