My article, “Lost Einsteins: Reducing poverty increases innovation” by Joe Hadfield explains Professor Stephanie Bair’s case in trying to reduce poverty. He writes about her argument that reducing poverty will fuel growth through potential innovators. It shows how poverty holds back the ability to be innovational in areas of finance, emotions, and time.

How it weakens creativity financially:

Poverty can have many negative effects which stems from the main problem, a lack of money. When there’s a lack of resources, the human mind will focus on the most important thing, which is survival. The thought most used thought process for people in poverty is to survive day by day. This makes it so that a valuable thought process “called ‘exploratory’ fades away” (Hadfield).

This relates to my novel, A Moveable Feast when we see Ernest Hemingway focus in on his job, and less on what he wants to write about. Hemingway was a rare case, where he able to keep his exploratory thought process by enjoying the Paris architecture on his walk home.

How it can affect your time for creativity:

As we saw before, impoverished people tend to focus more on surviving day by day, rather than putting time out of their day to do something that grows their brain. People will become so focused on their jobs and trying to gather resources for survival, that they have no time to stimulate and grow the brain. This effectively allows humans to “lose the ability to imagine and pursue the next big thing” (Hadfield).

This ties in to A Moveable Feast, as we see Hemingway focus on his day and a few sentences, instead of thinking about his grand project.

Emotionally:

Poverty’s most obvious downside is having no money for resources. However, that’s not all, a natural side effect of poverty is high amounts of stress. Stress is a terrible emotion that easily blocks out creative thinking. It causes the thinking process called “‘exploitative’, which helps day-to-day survival. You

We can see this in A Moveable Feast, when Ernest Hemingway needs to break away from everything, including writing, and just be alone. He walked in the park to clear his head from the stresses of his daily life.

Relation to the Novel:

Ernest Hemingway was blessed to be in such a rich environment, even though he was impoverished. And even though he was in a rich environment, he still struggled to be creative with poverty. If you are impoverished, it will never not bring you down, however the way in which you deal with it, can be beneficial. You’re made to be creative and express yourself, so try some new ways to do so and be grateful that you have that opportunity.