Causes of Poverty in the USA

[freeztar]

Inf, why are you butting in? You have already proved to me you aren't interested in thinking about a subject, why don't you just let Freez and I talk about it. Instead of reading thousands of articles, maybe he could read three or four. Do you think that is posssible?

 

Inf was merely pointing out the inconsistent manner in your reply.

I'm still here, we can talk. :)

 

I'm still uncertain why it is you think it is necessary for me to read up on brain hemispheres? :)

I understand the concept well. I first learned of the theory in high school. I was given a test and it placed me at 4.6 (on a scale of 1-10, 1 being utmost left-brained). In college, I took several psychology classes that touched on this theory as well.

 

My problem with your conjecture is that you are taking something broad and making it fit specific definitions of behavioural/mental characteristics, with no support whatsoever.

 

I've done my reading, and in doing so have never encountered ideas as radical as yours. So for you to convince me of your theory, I need some convincing evidence. Why not offer a link? :shrug:

[questor]

I did not do the research on hemisphere tendencies. The authors of the articles did. I did not say I have proof of my theory, I said I have observed and concluded certain facts. For instance, I think you and Infy think alike, your conclusions are similar. My conclusion for that is that you are both liberal, will vote for the Democratic candidate next year, would like to keep the welfare program the way it is, are non-religious, are politically correct, and think you should be making more money than you are now. You have trouble understanding cause and effect, and have trouble ''putting two and two together''. You don't want to read the research, you want someone else to prove it to you. You are not alone, about 40% of Americans think just as you do. If you don't already, go to the website Daily Kos. Here you will find many right brainers. Left brainers hang out at Redstate.com. As I have said, there is crossover, most people will have mixed traits, so more brain research will eventually prove me right or wrong. Do not think that everything under the sun has been written about, if that were true we would have no more inventions or technical advancements.

[Zythryn]

I did not say I have proof of my theory,...

They weren't asking for proof, just for supporting evidence.

For instance, I think you and Infy think alike

I have noted similarities as well. They are both asking for you to show some support for your claim. A typically rational and logical thought process.

My conclusion for that is that you are both liberal, will vote for the Democratic candidate next year, would like to keep the welfare program the way it is, are non-religious, are politically correct, and think you should be making more money than you are now. You have trouble understanding cause and effect, and have trouble ''putting two and two together''.

This is an amazing leap of unsupported conjecture. All this because they asked you which one of 135,000 search results to read up on?:)

 

Q, I don't believe you understand what right-brain thinkers and left-brain thinkers really means. You have made up an explanation for what you want to believe and refuse to actually do any research of your own to support your biased claims.

[Turtle]

Some additional major contributing causes of poverty not yet cited include unemployment by virtue of lack of employers, sickness, and old age. Not unique conditions in the US by any means. Maybe we can employ a few good people from these groups to make Soilent Green out of the rest of them. :)

[questor]

Z, what type or research would you suggest I do to test my theory? Do you think my suggestion to Freez to read the first 3-5 articles on the subject would suffice? Please tell me what biased claims I am making?

[Zythryn]

Q, just to make sure I understand you.

You made some observations. Created a hypothesis. You have not read any research papers, scientific journal articles, nor even statistics that support your hypothesis?

The article you recently posted, which I read, was a human interest story that didn't talk at all about poverty. It also gave no statistics nor links to research.

 

This is the first time you have narrowed down the list of articles on right-brain vs left-brain behaviors. So are you saying that the first 3-5 articles in the google search will support your claims?

[Zythryn]

Please tell me what biased claims I am making?

I probably should have said biased and unsupported:shrug:

How is this one for starts:

My conclusion for that is that you are both liberal, will vote for the Democratic candidate next year, would like to keep the welfare program the way it is, are non-religious, are politically correct, and think you should be making more money than you are now.

 

Again, all we are looking for is for any data, research papers or even statistical trends that support your supposition.

[Racoon]

Some additional major contributing causes of poverty not yet cited include unemployment by virtue of lack of employers, sickness, and old age. Not unique conditions in the US by any means. Maybe we can employ a few good people from these groups to make Soilent Green out of the rest of them.

 

 

True enough, indeed.

I might add as well, lack of virtue by some employers. :evil:

I felt bad for the Enron and WorldCom employees who had their pensions, 401k's, and other resources swindled from them...

 

Medical Bills are certainly the fastest way to go from "doing sufficiently well" to the "poor house".. :eek:

 

Many elderly are poor, not from a lack of hard work, or dutiful payment into an antiquated social benefit system; but they simply are living longer than ever before or have lost a bread-winning spouse.

 

Excellent points Turtle

[Zythryn]

Medical Bills are certainly the fastest way to go from "doing sufficiently well" to the "poor house"..

 

All good points. This is one of the most heartbreaking in my mind. I am curious how often it really is the primary cause.

 

My insulin vials have gone from $13 a number of years ago (10? 25?) to over $90 a vial. And that is cheap by comparison to many other drugs.

[questor]

An informative article on right brain left brain thinking:

 

'Right Brain' or 'Left Brain' -

Myth Or Reality?

By John McCrone

The New Scientist rbiproduction

© New Scientist, RBI Limited 2000

From Skye Turell <[email protected]>

7-21-00

 

 

 

Turn to the small advertisements in many a Sunday magazine, says John McCrone, and you'll find something rather like this: "Are you good at logic, great at analysis and working out maths problems? Then you're probably a left-brainer . . . Want to get in touch with your intuitive, creative right brain and find a whole other you . . . "

 

 

Many a myth has grown up around the brain's asymmetry. The left cerebral hemisphere is supposed to be the coldly logical, verbal and dominant half of the brain, while the right developed a reputation as the imaginative side, emotional, spatially aware but suppressed. Two personalities in one head, Yin and Yang, hero and villain.

 

To most neuroscientists, of course, these notions are seen as simplistic at best and nonsense at worst. So there was general satisfaction when, a couple of years ago, a simple brain scanner test appeared to reveal the true story about one of neurology's greatest puzzles: exactly what is the difference between the two sides of the human brain? Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you like your theories, the big picture revealed by that work is proving far less romantic than the logical-creative split, intriguingly complex and tough to prove.

 

The people behind the scanner test, clinical neurologists Gereon Fink of the University of Düsseldorf in Germany and John Marshall from the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, had been pursuing the idea that the difference between the two hemispheres lay in their style of working. The left brain, they reckoned, focused on detail. This would make it the natural home for all those mental skills that need us to act in a series of discrete steps or fix on a particular fragment of what we perceive--skills such as recognising a friend's face in a crowd or "lining up" words to make a sentence.

 

By contrast, the right brain concentrated on the broad, background picture. The researchers believed it had a panoramic focus that made it good at seeing general connections; this hemisphere was best able to represent the relative position of objects in space and to handle the emotional and metaphorical aspects of speech. So, in a neat and complementary division of labour, one side of the brain thought and saw in wide-angle while the other zoomed in on the detail.

 

Good response

 

To test this idea, the pair teamed up with the imaging laboratory at London's Institute of Neurology and scanned the brains of people who were looking at a series of images called letter navons. These are pictures in which a single large letter such as an S is made up of many smaller letters--perhaps a series of Fs (see Diagram, p 29). The researchers asked their subjects to report whether they saw the global image (the big S) or the local elements (the Fs) while a radioactive chemical injected into their bloodstream revealed which side of the brain worked hardest to make each report.

 

The results seemed beautifully clear. When the subjects concentrated on the small letters, areas on the left side of the brain fired; when they mentally stepped back to take in the overall shape, the right side fired. So wham, bam, and a few months later in August 1996, Fink, Marshall and their colleagues published a neat, tidy paper in Nature (vol 382, p 626). "The study was in the textbooks within a year," says Marshall with a smile. "The only other work that I've done that's got into the textbooks took about twenty years to get there."

 

Other work appeared to be converging on the same conclusion, which no doubt helped the speedy acceptance of the paper's findings. The popular myth about the hemispheres grew largely from "split-brain" research in the 1960s, such as that which later won Roger Sperry of Caltech a Nobel prize. In a drastic treatment for epilepsy, surgeons had operated on a number of patients by cutting the corpus callosum--the thick bundle of nerve fibres that forms the main connection between the cerebral hemispheres. The surgery revealed what Sperry described as "two spheres of consciousness" locked in the one head, the left-hand side having speech and a rational, intellectual style, while the right was inarticulate, but blessed with special spatial abilities.

[questor]

Z, I do not know if this description is correct or not. If it is not correct, let me know. You said:

 

''I probably should have said biased and unsupported

How is this one for starts:''

 

Quote: (from Questor) ''My conclusion for that is that you are both liberal, will vote for the Democratic candidate next year, would like to keep the welfare program the way it is, are non-religious, are politically correct, and think you should be making more money than you are now. ''

 

How would you describe yourself? This is response to post #24

If you don't want to answer it's OK.

[freeztar]

Did you even read the whole article you posted from, Q? The last paragraph firmly denies your "theory".

Such brain-aching complexities mean that this new line in hemispheric research is still in its early days. But at least there seems no prospect of a return to the old left-right caricatures that inspired so many self-help books exhorting people to liberate their right brains and avoid too much sterile left-brain thinking. As Fink says, whatever the story about lateralisation, simple dichotomies are out. It is how the two sides of the brain complement and combine that counts.

*Bold emphasis mine.

‘Right Brain’ or ‘Left Brain’ Myth Or Reality? « Health Information

[questor]

Here are the last TWO paragraphs in the article:

 

''Even if attention does shape how the brain chooses to process a signal, it does not mean that the neural wiring theory is necessarily dead, argues Fink. There could still be a wiring bias, formed as the brain develops, that does some coarse initial sorting of the information coming into the brain. Attention would then exaggerate the effect when the call came to focus in a particular way.

 

Such brain-aching complexities mean that this new line in hemispheric research is still in its rly days. But at least there seems no prospect of a return to the old left-right caricatures that inspired so many self-help books exhorting people to liberate their right brains and avoid too much sterile left-brain thinking. As Fink says, whatever the story about lateralisation, simple dichotomies are out. It is how the two sides of the brain complement and combine that counts.''

 

It looks to me that more research is yet to be done. I don't see anything here that totally discounts my theory. I repeat what I said earlier, whether or not it is a simple right brain-left brain phenomenon, there is a definite difference in how large groups of people perceive or interpret the same event. What is the reason?

[freeztar]

there is a definite difference in how large groups of people perceive or interpret the same event. What is the reason?

 

I believe there are lots of reasons, with experience probably being the largest contributor.

For example, in the case of this thread, one person/group might think that poor people are not given enough opportunities to help themselves and another person/group might think the opposite. Potential factors based on experience that may factor into the opinion formed might include: having been poor/rich for one's entire life, rural/urban upbringing, learned political bias, etc...

[questor]

My original premise or question was stated in the thread on Brain ''Wiring'',

''I would like to start a discussion on what may be a biochemical difference in human beings. My question is this: why are approximately 40% of Americans liberal and 40 % conservative with the rest somewhere in between? How can two people view the same event and have totally different perceptions of what occurred and the sequelae thereof ?''

An example of this difference can be viewed in this article:

Poverty Poll

''Democrats and Republicans express substantially different opinions about poverty. The survey reveals deep political divisions in the country on the subject of poverty. In question after question — especially those having to do with attitudes about poverty or welfare — the public was split about 50-50. But when the responses were separated by political party, 55%-65% of Democrats were on one side, and 55%-65% of Republicans were on the other side. Nevertheless, there is strong support even among Republicans for programs that help people who are trying to help themselves (though support is not as strong as it is among Democrats). However, when it comes to paying for the programs, Republicans are much less likely to want to raise taxes. Forty-three percent of Republicans say they would be willing to raise taxes, while 53% say they would not; 67% of Democrats are willing to raise taxes, and only 31% are not.''

You can see a large split among the groups. There are rich, poor, white, black, among each group, I would assume, so there must be some underlying reason for differing thought processes. I attribute it to different ''wiring'' and

in looking at the right brain left brain findings with the descriptions of the attributes to each, I think I can ascribe certain traits to people on each side.

Do I have research and proof? Of course not, the research has yet to be done. I will say from experience, each group will usually think alike on each subject, such as education, poverty, political correctness, war, the military, morality, etc.

[Zythryn]

I would be happy to describe myself. In what way, political party, view on this topic, etc?

 

This 'wiring' you speak of. I think you have it backwards.

You seem to be saying that people that agree on this topic are 'wired' to think that way.

The 'wiring' isn't what makes them think in a certain way. The fact that they do agree seems to be why you think they are wired.

There are only so many positions when you have a bill in congress. Either vote for it, or vote against it.

However, there are lots of possible positions.

One could think:

The poor deserve it because they are lazy.

The poor are only poor due to bad luck.

The poor deserve help to get back on their feet.

The poor deserve to be supported by the rich.

Society should support all of the poor as best they can.

etc

[InfiniteNow]

There are rich, poor, white, black, among each group, I would assume, so there must be some underlying reason for differing thought processes. I attribute it to different ''wiring'' and in looking at the right brain left brain findings with the descriptions of the attributes to each, I think I can ascribe certain traits to people on each side.

Do I have research and proof? Of course not, the research has yet to be done. I will say from experience, each group will usually think alike on each subject, such as education, poverty, political correctness, war, the military, morality, etc.

 

If this were the case, it would be extraordinarily easy to prove or demonstrate, yet all of the evidence that we've encountered indicates that it doesn't work. We're not attacking you, questor, so stop acting like it. We're attacking your faulty conclusion, and showing that (despite how hard you want it to be so) hemispherical dominance is not an adequate way to describe the different pigeon holes into which you're trying to fit the entire US populace.