I say yes, you say no, OR People are Strange

When Willie and Carol Fowler’s daughter cancelled her wedding, they decided to turn the reception into an event for 200 homeless individuals in Atlanta, Ga., on Sept. 15, 2013.

Alvin Evans

 

When Willie and Carol Fowler's only daughter cancelled her wedding 40 days before she was set to walk down the aisle, the parents were faced with a venue, food and entertainment that had all been paid for.

But instead of cancelling everything and losing their deposits, they decided to change the guest list -- to 200 homeless people.

"We went home that evening and my husband woke up the next morning and I was in the process of cancelling out the venue and he said, 'No, what we'll do is donate it to Hosea Feed the Hungry,'" Carol Fowler told ABCNews.com today.

"It was a vision," Fowler said of her husband's idea. "He said he had prayed on it during the night and God had directed him and that's what we were going to do."

The Fowlers called Hosea Feed the Hungry, an organization that their daughter had volunteered for when she was younger. It  is a nonprofit organization in Atlanta, Ga., that provides homeless individuals with services and resources.

"When they first called, the administration thought it was a prank call because it was too good to be true," Quisa Foster of Hosea Feed the Hungry said. "It's a very creme de la creme wedding venue, so to say that you're going to host 200 homeless individuals at Villa Christina -- it sounds like a prank call."

The Fowlers persisted and eventually had a meeting with the organization to prove their good intentions and plan the event.

On Sept. 15, buses transported 200 homeless women, children and families to Villa Christina for the event. It began at 2 p.m. with outdoor appetizers and space for the children to run and play.

The event then moved inside, where the approximately 50 children had a room to themselves with face-painting, juggling and crowns.

"The children had chicken fingers, French fries, fresh fruit and chocolate chip cookies," Carol Fowler said. "The adults had salmon and chicken."

"All the plates were empty and there wasn't any leftover food at all. It was an eye-opening experience," Foster said. "You go to weddings sometimes and you see a lot of people really waste food. We take so many things for granted. These clients or guests, as we call them, they don't."

The day's "inspiration program" included a motivational speaker for the adults.

"When you look at the faces of the women and children and actually participated in the event, they look like you and me," Foster said. "These are working families that for whatever reason -- the recession, economic turn -- have found themselves in a place where they're without a place to live and starting over."

"It was a wonderful event. It brought tears to my eyes," she said.

The Fowlers were very involved in the whole event and enjoyed greeting all of their guests. Their daughter was also on hand for a day that was "bittersweet but rewarding" for her, Willie Fowler said. The family declined to comment on why the wedding had been cancelled.

"There is no way to explain how it makes you feel, but it's wonderful," Willie Fowler said of seeing the joy at the event.

"It's just that wonderful, rewarding feeling," Carol Fowler said. "If we could just inspire one youth in that crowd to rise above the situation today and be a very responsible member of society tomorrow, that would be extremely rewarding."

The Fowlers are hoping to make the affair a yearly event that will be two days and incorporate educational elements for the participants.

They pointed out that events are cancelled all the time and encouraged others to think about donating

"If you have cancelled an event, do not walk away. Pick up the phone and call your favorite charity and offer it to them," Carol Fowler said. "We're regular, working people and anybody can do this. This is not star stuff."

U.S. Is Bigger Debtor Nation

The United States, already the world's largest debtor, sank an additional $154.2 billion into the red last year as foreign money poured in to plug the nation's balance-of-payments gap.

The value of foreign investments in the United States, ranging from stocks to factories, exceeded American investments abroad by $532.5 billion at the end of 1988, up from $378.3 billion a year earlier, the Commerce Department said last week.

As recently as 1984, the United States was a net creditor to the rest of the world by about $3.3 billion. (emphasis mine - let's see, who was president of the U.S. in 1984?  Who had been president for 4 years by that point?  ... hmmmmm)

In 1981, before the American budget and current-account deficits started to balloon, the net investment position was a positive $140.9 billion, the Commerce Department said.

The increasing debt is likely to mean that American living standards will rise a bit more slowly than they otherwise would, as interest and dividend payments to foreigners siphon off an increasing share of the United States' output of goods and services.

Foreign assets in the United States jumped by $238.2 billion, or 15.4 percent, to $1.78 trillion in 1988. Included in this total was a record $57.1 billion rise in direct investment, to $328.9 billion, the Government said.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/04/business/us-is-bigger-debtor-nation.html   (see for yourself)

Imagine that you are attending a late-afternoon meeting. Someone brings in a plate of cookies and places them on the other side of the conference table. Ten minutes later you realize you’ve processed only half of what has been said.       

Why? Only half of your mind was in the meeting. The other half was with the cookies: “Should I have one? I worked out yesterday. I deserve it. No, I should be good.”       

That cookie threatened to strain your waistline. It succeeded in straining your mind.       

This can happen even with no cookie in sight. Dieters conjure their own cookies: psychologists find that dieters have spontaneous self-generated cravings at a much higher rate than nondieters. And these cravings are not the dieters’ only distraction. Diets force trade-offs: If you eat the cookie, should you skip the appetizer at dinner? But that restaurant looked so good!       

Many diets also require constant calculations to determine calorie counts. All this clogs up the brain. Psychologists measure the impact of this clogging on various tasks: logical and spatial reasoning, self-control, problem solving, and absorption and retention of new information. Together these tasks measure “bandwidth,” the resource that underlies all higher-order mental activity. Inevitably, dieters do worse than nondieters on all these tasks; they have less bandwidth.       

One particularly clever study went further. It tested how dieters and nondieters reacted to eating a chocolate bar. Even though the bar provided calories, eating it widened the bandwidth gap between dieters and nondieters. Nondieters ate and moved on, but dieters started wondering how to make up for the calories they had just ingested or, even more fundamentally, pondered, “Why did I eat the bar?”       

In other words, diets do not just strain bandwidth because they leave us hungry. They have psychological, not just physiological, effects.       

The basic insight extends well beyond the experience of calorie counting. Something similar happens whenever we make do with less, as when we feel that we have too little time, or too little money. Just as the cookie tugs at the dieter, a looming deadline preoccupies a busy person, and the prospect of a painful rent payment shatters the peace of the poor. Just as dieters constantly track food, the hyper-busy track each minute and the poor track each dollar.       

As Prof. Eldar Shafir at Princeton University and I argue in our new book, “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much” (Times Books), a similar psychology of scarcity operates across these examples but with varying degrees of force. If a cookie can tax our mental resources, imagine how much more psychological impact other forms of scarcity can have.       

Take the case of poverty. In a paper published last month in Science, with Profs. Anandi Mani at the University of Warwick and Jiaying Zhao at the University of British Columbia, Professor Shafir and I waded into politically charged territory. Some people argue that the poor make terrible choices and do so because they are inherently less capable. But our analysis of scarcity suggests a different perspective: perhaps the poor are just as capable as everyone else. Perhaps the problem is not poor people but the mental strain that poverty imposes on anyone who must endure it.       

One of our studies focused on Indian sugar cane farmers, who typically feel themselves to be both poor and rich, depending on the season. They are paid once a year at harvest time. When the crop is sold, they are flush with cash. But the money runs out quickly, and by the time the next harvest arrives they are stretched thin: they are, for example, 20 times as likely to pawn an item before harvest as after it. Rather than compare poor and rich farmers, we compare each farmer to himself: when he is rich against when he is poor. This kind of comparison is important because it addresses valid concerns that differences in psychological tests merely reflect differences in culture or test familiarity.

We measured farmers’ mental function — on what psychologists call fluid intelligence and executive control — one month before and one month after harvest. And the effects were large: preharvest I.Q., for example, was lower by about nine to 10 points, which in a common descriptive classification is the distance between “average” and “superior” intelligence. To put that in perspective, a full night without sleep has a similar effect on I.Q.       

Bandwidth scarcity has far-reaching consequences, whether we are talking about poor farmers or affluent dieters. We all use bandwidth to make decisions at work, to resist the urge to yell at our children when they annoy us, or even to focus on a conversation during dinner or in a meeting. The diversity of these behaviors — combined with the size of the measurable effects — suggests a very different way to interpret the choices and behaviors of the poor. Just picture how distracting that cookie was, and multiply that experience by a factor of 10.       

For dieters, bandwidth scarcity has one particularly important consequence, illustrated in one study that gave people a choice between fruit salad and cake. Before choosing, half of the subjects had their bandwidth taxed: they were asked to remember a seven-digit number. The other half had a mentally less-demanding task: they were asked to remember a two-digit number. Those with less available bandwidth ate more cake: they were 50 percent more likely to choose cake than the others. There is a paradox here: diets create mental conditions that make it hard to diet.       

This may sound defeatist. But there are positive lessons for how to manage the different kinds of scarcity.       

THE United States government, laudably, offers financial aid for low-income students to attend college. Qualifying for it, though, requires completing a densely packed 10-page booklet, mentally taxing for anyone. A one-page version would not only be simpler but it would also recognize that the poor are short on bandwidth as well as cash.       

The same tactic — economizing on bandwidth — can be used in dieting. Take the Atkins diet, which effectively bans many foods, including bread and a lot of desserts. A ban is less complex than the trade-offs and calorie accounting required by many other diets. While all diets require self-control, Atkins requires less thinking. This might explain its popularity, and even its effectiveness: a recent study shows that people persist longer with diets that require less thought.       

The same study had another interesting finding: it was the perceived complexity of a diet — not its actual complexity — that determined persistence.       

So keep this in mind the next time you’re picking a diet to shed a few pounds. Try one that won’t also shed a few I.Q. points.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/business/the-mental-strain-of-making-do-with-less.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&smid=fb-nytimes