Psychology is largely at play here, since both the Fundamental attribution error (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error) and cognitive dissonance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance) have extremely strong effects. For the most part, the readership here often seems to be completely unaware of the daily realities of a very real underclass in western societies. Environment has a profound effect on our individual development.

I've lived a privileged life. I have many close friends who were not so fortunate. I could not possibly imagine my life circumstances today if I had to face what some of my friends did.

Maybe people don't think of responding to this, a large scale study, with personal anecdotes. There are plenty of amazing posts on HN in response to other stories.

Surely it's valuable to understand more about ourselves, what affects us, and how we can offer effective help, even if the process can seem a little clinical and heartless.

He is attempting to shut down debate by suggesting that anyone who hasn't actually experienced the phenomenon under discussion is incapable of reasoning about it and is probably irrational. One could make similar statements about any topic:

Anytime an article hits Hacker News such as this; that is, with explicit references to astronomy and outer space, I cringe as I read the comments[...]Psychology is largely at play here, [wikipedia articles about irrationality]. For the most part, the readership here often seems to be completely unaware of the realities in an extraterrestrial environment. [No facts provided.] I've lived a terrestrial live. I could not possibly imagine a low temperature, low pressure environment [and like me, no one else can reason about phenomena they have not personally experienced.]

Such statements serve only to stifle debate, most likely in an effort to induce people to support an emotionally pleasing policy choice.

When I make the same statement about an environment utterly alien to all human experience, it's obviously ridiculous. So why do we accept such a statement when it is made about nothing but a different sort of human experience?

In my experience, people who are born and raised upper middle class have absolutely no understanding of the different social classes, or what makes people belong to one and not the other. That makes for pretty irrational arguments. :-)

That said, I agree with you on the whole "shutting down debate", it's rather boring.

Your hyperbole doesn't quite work because we are dealing with human experience here. Poverty is not just a lack of money, it is most of all a very powerful internal human experience. There is no words to describe it. Kind of like there is not words to describe effectively what falling in love or dealing with a loved one's death is. Understanding that is not just a matter of reading an equation, you have to experience it yourself in order to more effectively talk about or try to fix it.

Does that stifle debate? Perhaps. I think the original poster was highlighting that it is important to keep in mind the personal experience before engaging in theoretical discussions about the subject.

> So why do we accept such a statement when it is made about nothing but a different sort of human experience?

The answer is in your question -- because _it is_ a human experience.

It seems to boil down to "how important is human experience?" Well, that's a topic for a new thread or a new philosophical debate...

In any case, I could make the same argument about different types of human experience, and you'd still reject it. Do you believe that only devout muslims can rationally opine on honor killings, or that only racists can discuss racism?

I would say that is even true for racism and honor killings. Someone who grew up in a muslem country or in the deep south in US will definetly understand better the underlying causes for rampant racism or why honor killings happen.

As for quantum physics, I would take someone's word if I believed they could experience it. I don't think any one can, so that's why anyone that can do the maths is just as good.

I sometimes still cry and question why I wasn't born normal like others. It doesn't matter what I know and understand. It doesn't matter what I tell myself. I still feel that stab. I couldn't have imagined what this felt like until I had to go through it, and herein lies the problem. The people who often try to erase social injustices are those who have lived a life of privilege and have absolutely no idea what it's like on the other side. A lot of them rely on second or third hand sources, but they often fail to get the gist of things. This isn't something wrong on it's own, but whenever people are frustrated they tend to grope for explanations and a lot of people fail to give this any thought whatsoever.

Even though this article seems to be well intentioned, but stuff like this hurts people in the longer run. Take a look at this;

>>>It is not simply a case of teenage girls from deprived backgrounds accidentally becoming pregnant. Evidence from many sources suggests that teen pregnancy rates are similar in poor and affluent communities. However, motherhood is a choice, as both Geronimus and Johns are keen to point out. Teenage girls from affluent backgrounds are more likely to have abortions than their less-privileged peers. In terms of reproduction, the more affluent girls are best off concentrating on their own career and development so that they can invest more in the children they have at a later stage. "It seems that girls are assessing their life chances on a number of fronts and making conscious decisions about reproduction," says Johns.<<<

The reason why they don't have pretty often is because they can't afford abortions. Even if there are clinics that perform this for an extremely low cost. Most people lack access and awareness in the ghetto, which is just another side effect of growing up there. Affluent children can think about their life choices because they have the luxury of doing so. Most children from the ghetto don't.

The very idea that such behavior is driven by genetic impulses is something that shows a flawed understanding of the entire concept at some stage by the writer. I am not an expert on it, but Richard Dawkins surely is and he takes the pains to point out that genes are like a coder who writes a complex AI program. After her/his job is finished the program is on its own. If you think about it everything comes down to genetic impulses and the environment plays a crucial role in determining those impulses, but in humans another paradigm also comes into the equation; the ability for us to make a conscious choice.

What I am trying to say is that the expert who wrote that paper is trying to get an extremely valuable point across, but the way it is used to explain everything is demeaning and flawed. There is no magic bullet for such problems, and you really need not resort to such things. Good ole' hard work with dedication and understanding ought to do.

[edit: I forgot to add "flawed understanding by the writer" the expert who has been quoted is spot on, but the general conclusions derived seem to be pretty shabby.]

The reason why they don't have pretty often is because they can't afford abortions.

A lot of the research in that article was done in the UK, where cost is not really a factor. Abortions are covered by the national heath service. Also, there are no parental notification rules or any similar barriers that make it so hard in the US.

Contraception is also free, and so I don't think it is completely unreasonable to speculate that many of these births are actually wanted and to examine the reasons for them, as the researchers are attempting in the OP. Whether their theory is actually correct, I don't know.

I am not saying that the births are not wanted either. What I am trying to say is that as a result of the environment such children are in they are taught that this is life and there is nothing more they can expect. This doesn't happen explicitly but implicitly through the actions of others.

I really can't explain this. I think that the OP is right and they are well intentioned, but they are making the same mistake over and over again. There is no magic bullet over here.

Of course, you should try to find ways to increase your ability to make change, but there really is not magic bullet.

I think you hit the nail on the head.

A lot of policy makers who make rules and laws about how to fix poverty always assume they deal with rational, clearly thinking, autonomous agents. They assume there is some logical planning taking place in teenagers' heads before they get pregnant: "...Having sex will lead to pregnancy which will lead to having a baby, who, even though I can't support, the state will take care of it, my boyfriends will be forced to pay child support therefore it makes perfect sense to have a baby." Something like that.

A 16 year old guy will think he can support all the babies in the world when having sex. The girl might think it will make the boyfriend love her more, they'll get married, find jobs, move out and have a happy your family and live happily every after. That is a very different thought process than what policy makers usually assume goes on.

Teenagers who are privileged end up making a lot of stupid decisions as well, but their parents, hover over them, guide them, fix their mistakes for them and wait for the kids to mature and start thinking rationally and maturely.

Many poor teenagers never have that. They don't get a second choice, a do over for small mistakes. Many are from a single parent family, or their parents are working 12 hour days to make ends meet, perhaps one or more parents are drunk or on drugs and there is just nobody to guide, to teach and to iron out the consequences of small and large mistakes. Consequently the teenagers grow up but mentally never mature. Then they become the next generation of parents. Then the cycle repeats.

Overall I think all the teenagers would end up procreating as soon as they can if they just grew up in the wild without any parental guidance. The ones that lead privileged lives have parents who teach, guide and iron out mistakes ("read : trip to the abortion clinic"), and this leads to a delay in procreation until some arbitrarily chosen "life event" usually : marriage + first job + new house.

I think taking this problem and turning it into some kind of evolutionary / genetic issue is pointless if not plain dangerous.

The article isn't saying that poverty is caused by genes, it's saying that the the behavior of having more children earlier when poor is caused by genes. Which is exactly the same sort of "coder" analogy that Richard Dawkins points out. It then says that this behavior then tends to "trap" individuals into this particular behavior, as any deviation from it results in fewer offspring surviving. In the game theory world, this is an evolutionarily stable strategy.

There are lots of instances where genes encode behaviors that are conditionally expressed by the environment, eg. the phenomenon where most mammals tend to have more girl babies then boys when times are bad, and vice versa when times are good.

Of course, you're right, but you forget that these are people capable of making a conscious choice. They are people who if given the right resources and understanding can choose otherwise. Perhaps we have a higher tendency of making such choices due to our genetic makeup, but that's what it exactly is a tendency. It is not an absolute, and my problem isn't the fact that this happens.

It is the fact that this does happen and that despite the fact those people can choose whenever someone meets them they will label them under something like this. We talk about them as mammals and subjects. This is a good thing when you're trying to get down to the facts, but we need to remember this; they are people, human beings with feelings, desires, dreams, aspirations, hopes and pain. If we want to help them we should respect them not label them.

[Edit: Made a few changes to make it more clear]

I think the key word here is "tends:" as far as I know, no evolutionary biologists or psychologists would argue a 1:1 correspondence between these kinds of situations and behavior. But, from both a game theory and evolutionary point of view, the kind of behavior described in the article makes sense. This isn't at all about being "extremely deterministic;" it's about analyzing how people might respond to certain forces and situations. They will have free will and can still exert their preferences in a wide variety of ways.

I think the author of the study and many others are trying to figure out how genes and environment interact -- which turns out to be a far more complex question than many simplifiers would have (and I'm not saying you're one of them).

For more on the topic of genes/environments in a less contentious / politically loaded setting, see "The Orchid Child" in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/the-scie... .

When I lived in such communities, access and cost weren't significant issues. Young girls wanted to have children. They got status and other social rewards for having children. (The sad ones said "a baby has to love me".)

They didn't see having children as a cost because, for them, it wasn't.

It has been postulated that American welfare assistantship programs are somewhat to blame. I think it has been discussed here (sorry to repeat it, and for not quoting -- I forgot who mentioned it).

Basically the programs to help "single mothers" was created to help widowed mothers support their family. Eventually some women realized that having a baby is not that bad as they can take advantage of the "single mother" status. There is sort of a logical reasoning behind it.

Now, not that every girl goes through that logical reasoning and decides on having a baby. Rather with time this choice of having a baby become "encoded" in the culture as something else "it is cool" or "it bring attention" or "status". Girls see other girls get attention and acquire status when they have children to they want to emulate.

Basically in this particular case, the welfare system completely backfired and instead of just helping, it started expanding the population segment that would take advantage of a particular feature.

Americans complain that "only stupid people are breeding" but we do almost nothing to make having kids easier for non-stupid, gainfully employed people. In contrast, places like Norway, Japan and Australia basically pay women of to have children, regardless of social status.

We really want to discourage single motherhood because it's pretty crappy for the kids.

Yes, there are other crappy things for kids, but that's not an argument for creating more.

I don't know how significant such aid was with the folks that I knew. I think that a bigger factor was the culture.

In most cases, they got their basics from family, so the assistance went for "luxuries". It's not enough for real luxuries, but it's enough to buy "stuff".

I don't think that the "stuff" was a big motivation, but its unclear why society should provide it.

The law was written more with the intent to help widows with small children. But it turned out that many young un-married girls could also just have a baby and take advantage of the same program. At some point having a baby became a good way to get decent welfare assistance.

>>>When I lived in such communities<<<

I am happy for you. I know you must have gone through a lot of pain, but it makes me happy that you survived and thrived.

Take care.

There are often multiple cultures in a single area.

It mentions the oft-cited statistic that 2000 calories of junk food is cheaper than 2000 calories of vegetables. The fact is true, but irrelevant; if you are overweight or obese (as most of the poor are), you can reduce your caloric intake and increase food quality for the same cost. A few of the poor may be working dangerous jobs, but the vast majority of the poor are simply not working.

When you subject individuals from affluent (or poor, but foreign) backgrounds to US poverty-like conditions, they rarely exhibit the same pathologies. Graduate students earn very little money, but don't become obese. Indian immigrants in Jersey City, which includes guys working at fast food places, don't turn to crime, teen pregnancy [1] or exhibit the poor health that Americans do. That isn't what you'd expect if environment, rather than personal choices, were the driving factor.

[1] They do reproduce fairly early, but this is caused by different pathologies (forcing girls into arranged marriages at an early age) and it occurs even among affluent Indians.

But a big part of your environment is your culture. The Indian immigrants in Jersey City, I suspect, still see themselves as Indian, probably grow up in stable families, and are given discipline, role models, encouragement, and expectations of achievement. Surely that makes a bigger difference than what goes on in one's neighborhood.

If you live near gangs, that's one thing. If your dad left and your brother is in a gang and the music all your peers listen to says "the goal of life is to be the baddest gangster," that's quite another.

Some components of personality are genetic (and not just heritable), as has been demonstrated by many twin studies. But we hardly need to invoke genetics to explain the heritability of behavior.

The article claims that 'this kind of "delinquent" behaviour is a sensible response to the circumstances of a life constrained by poverty', not that poor people are repeating the same bad choices as their parents. The article claims that "Once you are in a situation where the expected healthy lifetime is short whatever you do, then there is less incentive to look after yourself." That might be true, but it is irrelevant since your lifetime is longer if you make better choices. Being overweight or obese (a major pathology of the poor) is a much greater threat to your life than crime and car crashes (environmental killers cited by the article), but your weight and exercise levels are entirely under your control.

The point of the article is that what we perceive as bad choices is just a rational response to pathologies caused by environment (and they cite examples like the food we eat, the jobs we work, and the possibility of crime or car crashes), and that the choices are not the cause of the pathologies.

And even then, if our generous state education gave you the wisdom to see which way to go, would you be able to overcome the barriers between this optimum and the next?

That's my redux of the article: there's a local optimum sucking you back in. And at least locally, your behaviour would be sensible behaviour. Your other point, that this (globally) unwise behaviour only amplifies your problems, may well be correct. That will make the well you're stuck in only deeper.

Environment as it affects someone born into poverty without examples of persons who grow out of it, rather than a grad student(really a laughable argument that a grad student is 'poor' considering the value of their education.) or an immigrant to the nation, come to find opportunity...

But I definitely dispute the assertion that people living in poor regions lack examples of people who grew out of it. It's certainly not true in the poor neighborhoods I've lived in (and currently live in). There are plenty of people who stayed in school, kept their heads down and achieved a solidly middle class lifestyle. They often remain involved with the local community, typically the church and extended family.

[1] I find it very difficult to use the term "poverty" to describe the bottom 10% of Americans, seeing as all their material needs are met and they consume more leisure than any other group.

I don't have statistics for grad students (only personal observations), but I do have statistics showing that obesity goes up with poverty. For instance:

http://www.prb.org/articles/2010/usobesity.aspx

The modern "underclass" has probably only existed for at most, 100-200 years in various places. That's 3-10 generations with plenty of gene-movement in and out of the group in the meantime.

It seems a bit more plausible to me to argue that humans already have a variety of strategies for reproduction and different circumstances bring out different strategies.

My impression is that in peasant societies, teenage pregnancy is very common and families try to maximize the production of children. However, in hunter-gather societies, which pre-date peasant societies, my vague understanding that is teen-pregnancy is less common and there is less maximization of reproduction since population is often consciously consciously kept in the bounds of the land's productivity.

The article doesn't suggest that subgroups have evolved, rather that we have evolved to produce offspring sooner and faster in response to harsh conditions.

(So basically what you write in the rest of your post agrees with the article. I think!)

“My life sucks; studying hard and looking for a job will not make it suck less, because even if I get good grades, nobody will hire me; however, if I have a baby, then there will at least be something cute in my immediate environment that loves me” looks like a straightforward chain of logical reasoning to me.

But remember even cuteness is an evolutionary response. Nature selects for mothers who care for little things with wide eyes and big heads.

If you're interested in evolutionary psychology and the nature-nurture debate I highly recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.

There's very little way to get out of this cycle, besides either creating a lot of jobs, sufficient that men become useful, or simply increasing peoples' benefits such that strategies like having babies no longer get you a better outcome.

But there is value in accepting this theory, which I might add is reasonably well accepted as far as most other mammals. The value is that your chain of logic blames first the people themselves, and feeds back into the aticle's final justification, that is, while such things as increasing education are politically expedient, they don't actually change conditions. Getting this theory widely accepted can do a great deal for changing how governments fight the problems of poverty.

One could also understand the article the other way around: We have evolved to reproduce in response to natural conditions, and one result is women being able to get pregnant at about 15. Now, why should something like this happen if the natural 'optimum' would be rather 20 or 25?

Read this way, the fact that needs an explanation is women getting pregnant rather late.

Either way they're approaching it from the wrong angle with the somewhat patronising "underclass" suggestions. A significant proportion of girls having children fairly young is the norm in the developing world and has been the norm in the West for a long time. It's the deliberate decisions of "upper classes" to defer conception/birth until long after becoming sexually active in order to prioritise other goals that's the [unnatural] development. And it's the middle class people opting to have their first children late after achieving their career goals who are the outliers.

Personally, I think the solution is to provide a minimum guaranteed standard of living, no questions asked, no silly ragged patchwork quilt of programs, just a minimum standard of living. Not enough to remove the stigma of poverty -- we don't want people to be comfortable or satisfied on the dole -- just enough to make it worthwhile for people to invest in themselves and avoid anti-social behavior.

What we will then discover is whether an absolute level economic subsistence can transform behavior, or whether it is the stigma of relative poverty that causes people to behave antisocially.

Unfortunately, I know more than a couple in my family who despite having an iPhone and big screen TV, also have declared bankruptcy a few times, and will go on food stamps at times.

In my own case, I can thank our free university system for helping me drag myself from middle class to upper middle class, but then again I started with the middle class sentiment that education is always good. If you're working class, everyone in your environment will tell you that university is a huge waste of time, and I don't know how to address that. Throwing money at it won't do anything.

The article itself includes more than one example. E.g. the researchers hypothesized that, given some premises about evolution, poor women would have more kids earlier. This rules out them having fewer kids later.

Then they went and tested it.

Um, isn't this already well known? Did they not craft the hypothesis to fit their existing understanding?

> Then they went and tested it.

No comment.

No idea. The point is that it's a substantive claim that could be tested empirically.

> Did they not craft the hypothesis to fit their existing understanding?

I hope so. Using what you already know helps generate interesting hypotheses. They don't pop into existence asexually.

Another problem with your post is that you are conflating males and females sexual and reproductive interests. You speak of certain "families" having more children than other families, but a family is not a cohesive, unanimous group with common interests. It consists of two partners, a male and a female, who both have remarkably different sexual and reproductive interests. You are right in that males’ evolutionary goal-albeit they are often not conscious of it, or at least no more conscious than a frog is-is to propagate their genes which they do by inseminating as many females as possible. However, females do not benefit from such promiscuous behaviour, as they are the ones who have to bear the pregnancy for 9 months and then some. So the behaviour of each member of the family needs to be understood within the appropriate evolutionary context, and not just as a "family".

Now, onto to a theory which does take wealth into consideration when explaining human behaviour: A male is better able to monopolize being born into a wealthy family, that is, attract more mates and produce more offspring because females typically look for resources in a potential partner. Thus, we would expect parents to invest more time and resources in raising male children when they are living in good-i.e., wealthy- conditions, because males would be better able to translate those resources into mates, and, eventually, grandchildren. A female is limited in the number of offspring she can produce in her lifetime, something called reproductive value. But a male, given ample suxual opportunities, can produce pleny of offspring because he is not obligated to carry, give birth, and, in some cases, invest time.resources into raising children. Thus, the best way for wealthy parents to ensure they have plenty of grandchildren is to invest in their male children more than female. In fact, richer families beget more male children than poorer, who, in turn, beget more females. The explanation of this latter fidining is unknown, but several theories have been proposed.

In poorer conditions, however, we would expect the opposite to ring true. That is, parents would invest more time and resources in raising female children because they, of the two genders, are more likely to find a mate and produce grandchildren. A poor son is not a desirable mate, so he is less likely to attract a female with whom he can produce children. The saffer strategy for the parents in this situation is to invest more in their daughers.

So, contrary to what you mentioned above, evolutionary theories do offer predictions for the behaviour of the rich, not just the poor. You’ve just asked the wrong questions, and so have had difficulty finding the right answers.

If you're poor, British and female, having a baby is a good career move. As soon as that child is born, your income effectively doubles. The state pays you more cash benefits, your allowance for rent payments increases significantly and you become eligible for an array of other benefits, starting with a £500 ($770) payment before the birth. You become "in priority need of housing" and therefore gain the legal right to accommodation, jumping the queue for social housing.

Reproducing early may or may not be rational in Darwinian terms, but if you've just left school at sixteen with no qualifications and your community has 20% unemployment, it's certainly economically rational.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727692.100-die-young...

I strongly disagree with this statement. This view means that humans are taking the passenger seat when they can in fact take control of their lives. If you live by the motto of "well this is what life gave me" you will never go anywhere.

When you reward a behavior, people tend to do more of it.

Find several thousand wealthy couples.

Take away their wealth, reducing them to poverty.

Watch them make babies.

Evaluate empirical data.

Maybe we should look at former and current US mortgage brokers over the past decade?

Poor people are not stupid and if you think that I guess I would label you stupid. Before you jump on your horse and say I would work hard and study hard to get out of a shit life, what do you even mean by that? You would be an entirely different person raised in those circumstances.

Also some people make it out of the vicious cycle but I believe thats only luck based and they've just happened to meet some people who have said some useful things.

The article itself doesn't really mean anything and I wouldn't say teenage pregnancy is related to evolution. In third world countries having more children is probably the best solution if you lack an education and survive off labour.