The article “Too little money, too
much borrowing” explains why so-called “poor” people might make decisions based
on short-term needs more than long-term ones. There was a study where “poor”
people were put against “rich” ones, and they had to play a game where there
was very scarce time. “Poor” people did worse in this game. In the next game,
people were allowed to borrow time, but they would have less time later on. The
“poor” people’s scores decreased this time, while the “rich” people’s scores
stayed the same. This suggests that scarcity focuses the mind on immediate
concerns and discourages taking a broader perspective. The “poor” people did
worse in these games because they were focusing mostly on the immediate effects
of their choices, rather than the long-term ones.
This
article can change many things in the modern world. With this knowledge, the
so-called poor people can realize that their scarcity makes them less likely to
make decisions that take long-term results into account. Then the “poor” can
learn to make more long-term decisions, and that will be very beneficial to
many people.
There
were a few things that I thought the article did not do very well. One of these
is that nowhere in the article did the author of the article state who did this
study. There were also a few grammatical errors that I noticed while reading
the article. A third thing that I did not like about the article was it did not
bother to say what criteria they had for someone being “poor” or “rich”.
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