A new paper by Anandi Mani et al in the August issue of Science has a stunning finding – that the cognitive impact of being poor may be equivalent to as much as 13 IQ points. The authors study shoppers in a New Jersey mall and sugarcane farmers in Tamil Nadu using an experimental design and are able to show that the poor perform consistently worse on standard non-verbal tests of intelligence when “stressed” than the rich. Very interestingly, in the case of the sugarcane farmers, the comparison is not between rich farmers and poor farmers but the same farmer pre-harvest and post-harvest. Before harvest, the farmer is a poorer version of himself (compared to after harvest) because of the liquidity crunch associated with the time before harvest. Think of it as the equivalent of the last few days of the month for the salaried class.
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