Authored by economists Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, and Zhao.
"For people struggling to live paycheck-to-paycheck, daily life can sometimes seem like a gauntlet of impossible-to-answer questions....
"For many, those questions become so persistent it's hard to concentrate on anything else. And that's exactly the problem, says Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan.
"The accumulation of those money woes and day-to-day worries leaves many low-income individuals not only struggling financially, but cognitively, Mullainathan said. In a study published August 29 in Science, he showed that the "cognitive deficit" caused by poverty translates into as many as 10 IQ points....
"What we show is that the same person experiencing poverty suffers a cognitive deficit as opposed to when they're not experiencing poverty. It's also wrong to suggest that someone's cognitive capacity has gotten smaller because they're poor. In fact, what happens is that your effective capacity gets smaller, because you have all these other things on your mind, you have less mind to give to everything else....
"One of the major challenges for low-income individuals in the U.S. is having to juggle and find child care," he said. "That's a big cognitive load. Seamlessly solving the child-care problem would not just allow people to go to work, it would actually increase their IQ. Rather than simply looking at these challenges as a lack of money very broadly, if we could break it up and simply target the biggest concerns and deal with them, we might begin to solve other problems as well...."
http://phys.org/news/2013-08-poverty-cognitive-ten-iq.html
Mani, et al. (2013). "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function." Science, Abstract.
Infographics: http://ow.ly/osLk6
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