| Description: | "House of Fun"Bernie Wrightson, . another of the studys authors "Picture yourself after an all-nighter Being poor is like that every day"Mullainathan said previous research often has assumed that poor people are poor because they are somehow less capable than others whether inherently or because of past trauma or other environmental factors in their lives But he said what the latest study suggests is that the strain of poverty can tax the cognitive abilities of anyone experiencing it and that those abilities return when the burden of poverty disappears "While the poor may be experiencing a scarcity of money at some level what they may really be experiencing is a scarcity of bandwidth of cognitive capacity" he said "Its the situation thats creating the stress"Zhao and Mullainathan said that their findings if accurate could have profound implications for public policy For starters policymakers "should beware of imposing cognitive taxes on the poor just as they avoid monetary taxes on th |