Andrew Yang: How financial insecurity sinks American IQ scores | Big Think

These social scientists studied a group of farmers and gave them IQ tests throughout the year. Same farmers, same test. But what they found is that these farmers did much, much worse before they'd actually harvested crops. When everything was starting to go towards empty, they actually had lower IQ scores.

And then, when they tested them at a point when the harvest had come in, their IQs went up. And so then they were trying to figure out, how did the same person's IQ actually change throughout the year? And then they ran a similar test on Americans.

And what they did is they asked people a bunch of IQ related questions and got baseline scores. And then they said, "Hey, you now have a bill that you cannot pay. Just think about that." And then they gave them the same IQ test again. And lo and behold, the Americans who were presented with a bill that they could not pay, even though it was obviously a fictitious bill, actually had lower IQ scores.

And it turns out that not being able to pay your bills has the functional equivalent of decreasing your IQ by 13 points, or one standard deviation. And what they found is, there's a mindset of scarcity that's associated with when you don't have enough money, or you don't have enough time, or you don't have enough food, or if you don't have enough companionship.

And it actually decreases your functional bandwidth. It's different than stress. It actually makes you less reasonable, less rational, less generous, and more subject to bad ideas and bad impulses, including even things like racism and xenophobia. Now, the opposite of a mindset of scarcity is a mindset of abundance, which is what most entrepreneurs have.

A mindset of abundance is a sense of optimism that if you build it, it will improve. You will be able to get the resources, you will be able to get the customers, you will hire and find the right people. And, abundance and optimism ends up building unto itself and producing results if the environment is right.

And so, this scarcity mindset and abundance mindset are very much in opposition. And, we're programmed with a scarcity mindset in many ways because genetically, we're brought into an existence where things were scarce, where if you ate too much in a particular period, maybe you won't have enough to eat later.

And so, right now, this tension is something that humans and Americans struggle with all the time. Unfortunately, right now, the scarcity mindset is going up and up in the United States, because people can't pay their bills. 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. 57% can't afford an unexpected $500 bill.

And so if there's a sense that the United States is getting less reasonable, less rational, even more subject to bad ideas, and less open to other people, it's related to the fact that right now a mindset of scarcity has swept this country because of pervasive financial insecurity.

And that's one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about a Universal Basic Income, The Freedom Dividend, to help reverse this trend, get the boot off of people's throats, and replace the mindset of scarcity with a mindset of abundance.

With a mindset of abundance, we would see untold new -- hundreds and thousands of entrepreneurs, artists, creatives, founders, starting new things and organizations and projects and companies around the country. Because what we need for that to happen, more than anything else, is a mindset of abundance and people thinking that if they take the right moves into the future, they'll actually succeed.