Why are poor people dumber and less immoral than the rich? (VIDEO)

Rutger Breggman, historian

* This text is translated from the video distributed below.

Why do poor people make so many bad decisions?

The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more, and eat less. The prevailing assumption is there's something wrong with them.

“Poverty is a personality defect.”

And to be honest, that's what I've been thinking for a long time. Just a few years ago, I discovered that everything I thought I knew about poverty was wrong.

It all started when I accidentally read a study by some American psychologists. And it was an experiment with sugar-barried farmers. You should know that these farmers collect about 60 percent of their annual income immediately after harvest.

This means that they remain relatively poor part of the year and relatively rich in the rest.

Researchers had asked them to run IQ tests before and after the harvest. It turns out that the same farmers achieved much worse results before the harvest.

This proves that the cause of living in poverty corresponded to the loss of 14 points in the IQ. Turns out people behave differently when they see something doesn't come out enough. And what that thing is doesn't really matter whether there's enough time, money or food.

Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of money.

The most important question that needs to be asked is, of course: What can be done?

This is an incredible simple idea: guaranteeing basic income. It's a monthly grant, enough to pay for your basic needs: food, housing, education.

It has to be completely unattended, so no one can tell you what you could do for him.

Ensuring basic income is not a favor but a right.

And its proponentians have spread the spectrum from left to right, from civil rights activist Martin Luther King, economist Milton Friedman.

I heard that in one country this thing had become that poverty had been eradicated.

This story starts at Dauphin, Canada. In 1974, everyone in this town had been given basic income guarantee, making sure that no one went down the line of poverty. People in that town not only grew richer but also became wiser and healthier.

Children's school performance rose dramatically. The level of people's hospitals decreased by 8.5 percent. Domestic violence had also dropped, as had complaints about mental health. And people didn't leave their jobs.

Similar results have been found in countless experiments across the globe, from the United States to India.

But let's talk about the elephant in the room [the phrase used for what is visible but usually silent].

How could we ever cope with the guarantee of basic income for all? What they did in Dauphin was fund it with a negative income tax. This means that your income would grow once you fall under the poverty line.

And with this scenario, according to the best estimates of our economists, for a cost of $175 billion, which is a quarter of US military spending, one percent of GDP could be financed by all poor Americans under the poverty line.

Basic income is much more than just another policy.

That also means a complete reevaluation of what work really is. And in that sense, not only would it grant freedom to the poor, but also to the others.

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