by Rodger Malcolm Mitchell, www.nofica.com
What is the single, most serious problem facing the U.S. economy?
If you’re a regular reader, you know the answer, because I’ve been beating the same drum for years. The answer is the too-wide-and-widening income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest.
Here are excerpts from an article that appeared in Harvard Magazine; it describes the self-perpetuating nature of poverty (The word “poverty” is a synonym for a too-wide Gap.)
Toward the end of WWII, the University of Minnesota enlisted 36 men to do a study of starvation.
The Science of Scarcity
by Cara Feinberg, May-June 2015
The physical toll on these men was alarming. But researchers also observed disturbing mental effects they hadn’t expected: obsessions about cookbooks and recipes developed; men with no previous interest in food thought-and talked-about nothing else.
Overwhelming, uncontrollable thoughts had taken over, and as one participant later recalled, “Food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life.” There was no room left for anything else.
Research like the Minnesota study raised important questions: What happens to our minds-and our decisions-when we feel we have too little of something?
Why, in the face of scarcity, do people so often make seemingly irrational, even counter-productive decisions?
And if this is true in large populations, why do so few policies and programs take it into account?
Scarcity steals mental capacity wherever it occurs-from the hungry, to the lonely, to the time-strapped, to the poor.
That’s a phenomenon well-documented by psychologists: If the mind is focused on one thing, other abilities and skills-attention, self-control, and long-term planning-often suffer.
There, briefly, is the self-perpetuating aspect of poverty. Scarcity steals mental capacity.
As a group (and of course, there are individual exceptions) the poor focus on what they lack, losing attention to “less important” needs like, for instance, the education that would help them escape poverty.
