It is a common assumption that those people stuck in the cycles of poverty, are personally responsible for their situation. This is a widespread belief by many who arbitrarily assign moral meanings to poverty. It is very easy for outside observers to see ways that the poor should better their situation. Those with money often say, “if they wanted it bad enough, they would find a way to improve.” Passing judgement on those impoverished is not the Canadian way.
As a country, we support many world-wide charities and are very empathetic to those in need. What about those people around you in your day-to-day life, those people who make up your “personal bubble”? Scarcity can be found everywhere, even in our own families. Border-line poverty affects your ability to make decisions and ultimately derails both the motivation and ambition of those who live in poverty. Poor people, especially single parents, and the elderly, have a lot of challenges and not having enough money for ordinary things that others take for granted causes many in poverty to make less rational decisions. When you are preoccupied with money worries you cannot help but feel challenged, in every way, every day.
There was a study done many years ago (Mullainathan, Shafir) that compared the IQ of those who had money and those that did not. The respondents were chosen because their IQ levels were the same at the beginning of the test. These were people from all walks of life, with all different education and ethnicities, from all over the country – the only requirement was that they had the same IQ score at the beginning of the study. All participants were given the same problems to solve and were told to relate the situations to their own lives. When faced with a financial challenge about their future, let’s say an expensive car repair, the ones that had the money to pay for the repair seemed to have a higher IQ with the balance of the testing. This was interesting. Why was this? Researchers theorized that the wealthier respondents did not have the “brain drain” of finding a solution to this problem because the answer to the question about how to meet the challenge of the car repair was relatively easy. They knew they could pay for the repair out of their savings or on credit, and their brains were free to move on to the next problem. This was not the same for the poorer respondents, who were stuck on the financial question since it was more difficult for them to know how to meet this personal challenge. The study showed that those with less monetary means seemed to lack the mental bandwidth available for the IQ test. It seemed the more questions poorer respondents had to solve when it came to monetary requirements the lower their IQ levels became.
You see being preoccupied by financial concerns makes everyone who has less, measurably unable to do the things that others can do because they have no worries about their future and the day-to-day monetary commitments. This is an ongoing problem in Canada especially now that inflation and interest rates are on the rise. Poverty does not discriminate by age – it effects the young to the very old. Canadians categorized as living in poverty, are those that have income below the 50% median income in the area in which they live. We must remember that it is harder for those impoverished to improve their situation than it is for those in our middle-class society, and we should never judge someone for what you believe is their lack of determination to improve their situation. There are many poor that have much more drive, determination and fortitude than those that have money. Many struggle with hardships that most upper-middle-class Canadians would never be able to endure.
Remember, financial scarcity is generally not a one-time event, it has long lasting consequences and for those that can overcome it, they have indeed climbed the mountain and triumphed.
Good Luck & Best Wishes,
ATML - Christine Ibbotson
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