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Actually, the headline on this column probably should be, “How Much Brain Damage Does Debt Cause?”
The Atlantic magazine recently ran a story called How Income Affects the Brain. In it, reporter Olga Khazan compares a new study to one conducted in 2013, and she concludes…
This line of research suggests that being poor (or at least not rich) might be at least in part a self-perpetuating cycle. The people who are less wealthy struggle to cover their expenses. They get stressed, remember worse, and thus perform worse at the very same cognitive tasks that tend to increase wealth in today’s information economy.
I’m a CPA, not a scientist, but I’m not at all surprised by these results. For two decades, I’ve counseled Americans who have fallen deeply into debt. I’ve seen how debt has altered their thinking, and not simply from the stress of worrying how they’ll make ends meet.
I’ve also made observations not cited in either of the two research projects Khazan mentions. Namely…
