Re: Mental energy

Interesting stuff, but they really needed a study, complete with jargon, to 
figure that out?  


The working poor, by necessity, are far more obsessed with money than the rich 
and there is a direct inverse correlation between the level of relative wealth 
and that obsession.  Where I maintain the wrench gets thrown in is when you 
create a welfare state, where even maintaining yourself at a poverty level is no 
longer your responsibility.  Add the factor of multiple generations being 
dependent on handouts and all bets are off.

Anecdotal, but it should be studied, is the level of utilities used by those on 
govt. aid, (utilities, primarily heat, being paid directly or even indirectly by 
govt.), compared to the level used by those who aren't eligible for such aid due 
to their income being too high, (the working poor).  The homes I've gone into, 
(previous work related stuff), where utilities are paid by govt. are far warmer, 
to the point of being stifling, 


Medicaid is another example for this.  When you aren't paying for your health 
care you'll take your kid, or yourself, to the emergency room for a head cold.  
If you are paying your own heath care, and don't have insurance, you'll suffer 
excruciating pain, risk serious internal infections and contemplate wishing for 
death from a gall bladder attack, so as not to incur a medical bill you have no 
idea how you will pay. (like I said - anecdotal).  



Mike F.     





________________________________
From: Peter Chattaway <[email protected]>
To: Daniel Amos off-topic listserver <[email protected]>
Sent: Wed, June 8, 2011 12:03:43 AM
Subject: [DADL-OT] Mental energy

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/06/mental-energy.html

by Steve Sailer
Tuesday, June 7, 2011

From The New Republic:

    Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty?A radical new explanation from 
psychologists.

    Jamie Holmes June 6, 2011 | 12:00 am 

    Flannery O’Connor once described the contradictory desires that afflict all 
of us with characteristic simplicity. “Free will does not mean one will,” she 
wrote, “but many wills conflicting in one man.” The existence of appealing 
alternatives, after all, is what makes free will free: What would choice be 
without inner debate? We’re torn between staying faithful and that alluring man 
or woman across the room. We can’t resist the red velvet cake despite having 
sworn to keep our calories down. We buy a leather jacket on impulse, even though 
we know we’ll need the money for other things. Everyone is aware of such inner 
conflicts. But how, exactly, do we choose among them? As it turns out, science 
has recently shed light on the way our minds reconcile these conflicts, and the 
result has surprising implications for the way we think about one of society’s 
most intractable problems: poverty. 


By the way, can we try to avoid phrases like "science has recently shed light" 
-- unless you are Thomas Dolby on a nostalgia tour? The research cited was done 
by living, breathing researchers, whose hard work deserves at least the 
recognition that they are human beings, not "science." Moreover, remembering 
that human beings are making these arguments, not "science," has the salutary 
effect of keeping in mind that humans aren't infallible.

    In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” 
self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower 
was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in 
other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published 
some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, 
Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived 
subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; 
and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist 
the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. 
Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than 
twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers 
found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”

This sounds plausible, but the biochemical effect of chocolate versus radishes 
alone would have an effect on the "food-deprived." Chocolate contains caffeine, 
sugar, and fat, all of which help previously hungry people concentrate on 
puzzles. Radishes, not so much.

    Over the intervening 13 years, these results have been corroborated in more 
than 100 experiments. Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an 
initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more 
susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more 
likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of 
Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like 
resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.” 


    In addition, researchers have expanded the theory to cover tradeoff 
decisions, not just self-control decisions. That is, any decision that requires 
tradeoffs seems to deplete our ability to muster willpower for future decisions. 
Tradeoff decisions, like choosing between more money and more leisure time, 
require the same conflict resolution as self-control decisions (although our 
impulses appear to play a smaller role). In both cases, willpower can be 
understood as the capacity to resolve conflicts among choices as rationally as 
possible, and to make the best decision in light of one’s personal goals. And, 
in both cases, willpower seems to be a depletable resource.

In general, mental energy is limited, and it varies greatly among individuals.

    This theory of depletable willpower has its detractors, and, as in most 
academic topics studied across disciplinary fields, one finds plenty of disputes 
over the details. But this model of self-control is now one of the most 
prominent theories of willpower in social psychology, at the core of what E. 
Tory Higgins of Columbia University described in 2009 as “an explosion of 
scientific interest” in the topic over the last decade. Some skeptics correctly 
emphasize the vital role of motivation, and some emphasize instead that 
“attention” is limited. But the core of the breakthrough is that resolving 
conflicts among choices is expensive at a cognitive level and can be unpleasant. 
It causes mental fatigue. 


    Nowhere is this revelation more important than in our efforts to understand 
poverty. Taking this model of willpower into the real world, psychologists and 
economists have been exploring one particular source of stress on the mind: 
finances. The level at which the poor have to exert financial self-control, they 
have suggested, is far lower than the level at which the well-off have to do so. 
Purchasing decisions that the wealthy can base entirely on preference, like 
buying dinner, require rigorous tradeoff calculations for the poor. As Princeton 
psychologist EldarShafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, 
“almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It’s distracting, it’s 
depleting … and it leads to error.” The poor have to make financial tradeoff 
decisions, as Shafir put it, “on anything above a muffin.”

And poor people tend to be bad at doing financial tradeoff decisions: It's the 
Lucky Jim principle: nice things correlate with nice things, nasty things with 
nasty things.

    Last December, Princeton economist Dean Spears published a series of 
experiments that each revealed how “poverty appears to have made economic 
decision-making more consuming of cognitive control for poorer people than for 
richer people.” In one experiment, poor participants in India performed far less 
well on a self-control task after simply having to first decide whether to 
purchase body soap. As Spears found, “Choosing first was depleting only for the 
poorer participants.” Again, if you have enough money, deciding whether to buy 
the soap only requires considering whether you want it, not what you might have 
to give up to get it. Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make 
every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy 
medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a 
relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact 
a mental cost.

In general, this suggests why traditional morality is better for poor people 
than more modern a la carte morality.

Also, let me put in a word here for an old-fashioned class system. The idea was 
that there were respectable modes of behavior for whatever class you aspire to, 
so you don't have to make up your mind a la carte on every damn thing all day 
long. You just look at what the people in the class of which you wish to be 
considered a respectable member do, and imitate it.

Retailers often do well for themselves by offering to take over the brain work 
of choosing products for a particular class. For example, Sears started out as 
the respectable farmer's mail order catalog company. Then, in 1924, it hired the 
former Quartermaster General of the army in WWI, Robert E. Wood, who revamped 
the company to be the store of the home-owning, car-owning middle class 
suburbanite.

Today, it's interesting to compare the big box stores Target and Costco. Target 
might carry 100 different varieties of shampoo, while Costco carries about 
three. Thus, Target has lots of pretty girls shopping there, people to whom 
choosing the perfect shampoo is an important gambit in the mating game, worth 
expending scarce mental energy upon.

Costco, in contrast, has very few pretty girls among its customers. Most 
shoppers look like they have kids and are shopping for 3 to 5 people, and thus 
they aren't willing to finetune their purchases to meet individual 
idiosyncracies: just give us something cheap and respectable. Costco makes a big 
deal out of how they strike vast bulk deals with manufacturers and thus pass on 
(some) of the savings to the customer.

But a less obvious strategy of Costco is that they won't go terribly low in 
quality while pursuing bargains. Nor will they go to the gaudy extremes that 
poorer people like to splurge upon. Their implicit guarantee is that the 
products they sell will be, while rather dull, considered respectable by middle 
class to upper middle class family people.

Upper middle class styles in the U.S. have generally evolved away from the 
formal and fancy toward the casual and utilitarian. Wearing a $20 casual shirt 
from Costco to a Memorial Day barbecue is highly respectable for, say, a retired 
McKinsey consultant. (The truly rich tend to wear stuff that looks pretty 
similar, but costs much more.)

The opposite of the Costco shopping experience is car shopping. Dealers work 
very hard to make to make buying a car a stressful experience that preys upon 
your class insecurities. Their ultimate goal is to make you want to impress the 
salesman by overpaying for the car.

One of the better ways to buy a car these days is through Zag, which partners 
with companies whose customers are considered by car dealers to be less 
intimidatable, such as Consumer Reports subscribers and customers of USAA, the 
insurance company that specializes in selling to military officers. Zag lets you 
"build and buy" the exact car you want, then offers you "no-haggle" prices at 
some local dealers.

But that still doesn't get around the enormous mental energy expenditure of 
deciding what car and what features you want to build and buy. I think there is 
a real opportunity out there for some firm, such as Costco, to extend its 
strategy to car sales.

Say that Costco each year offered one SUV, one family sedan, and one compact 
car, each equipped with the optimal features for the price. Heck, they could 
offer just one color. They could negotiate a pretty low price from a 
manufacturer.

This would be particularly appealing to parents buying cars for their kids. For 
example, that McKinsey consultant is in the market for a car for his daughter 
graduating from college. He's interested in safety and reliability, and isn't 
all that interested in indulging her (no doubt strong) feelings about which car 
most self-actualizes her image of herself. If Costco told him that this year's 
Costco family sedan was a silver Ford Fusion with lots of airbags and other 
safety equipment like hands-free dialing for $18,999, he'd go for it in a flash.

But, there's practically no way to cut out car dealers. They have both contracts 
with manufacturers and state laws on their side protecting them from end arounds 
like this.


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