This Is Your Brain on Poverty: What Science Tells Us About Poverty

[xchrom]

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/21967-this-is-your-brain-on-poverty-what-science-tells-us-about-poverty



Talking about poverty and inequality is all the rage these days. President Obama wants to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who delivered the official response to the State of the Union address, said that the problem isn't "income inequality, but the real gap we face today is one of opportunity inequality." Rand Paul has offered that we need to stop giving money to unwed mothers, and David Brooks has recently written two columns about inequality, the first saying that poverty and inequality have nothing to do with each other and will you please stop talking, please; the second brushed Brooks' solutions with the thin veneer of science - mentioning "prefrontal cortexes" and "cortisol levels" - and offered a litany of solutions to treat the symptoms of child poverty ("students can't control their impulses, can't form attachments, don't possess resilience and lack social and emotional skills&quot without ever quite understanding that instead of treating the symptoms, it might be easier to just cure the disease.

Research has only recently been able to identify poverty as a causal factor (rather than merely correlational) in debilitating medical conditions that leave people sick, unable to work and unable to think - all factors that then perpetuate poverty, leaving the poor trapped in a vicious biological cycle.

So what can actual science (not Brooks' buzzword-laden version of it) tell us about poverty? What are its effects and how is it perpetuated? And if we did decide to end poverty, what would it look like, and what are the potential gains for our society?

If you're a child born into a poor household, you're more likely to exhibit psychological symptoms than if you were born to a non-poor household - symptoms that are a direct result of being born poor. (That's the impulse control, attachment and resilience that Brooks was talking about.) How do we know this? In 1993, a group of researchers started an eight-year longitudinal study of children in the Great Smoky Mountains, a range of peaks along the North Carolina-Tennessee border. One thousand four hundred twenty children were recruited - 25 percent Native American, 7.5 percent black and the rest white - and given psychiatric exams annually. Unsurprisingly, the children from poor families were found to have problems, about 60 percent more than their middle-class counterparts.

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[jsr]

2. Recommend

[brer cat]

3. K&R

Excellent read, xchrom.

[handmade34]

4. ...

...having first hand knowledge of this, I can heartily attest to the veracity of this article...

"...The notion that the poor can make “free and rational choices” and thus can be held responsible for their situation is incorrect. There is accumulating evidence that poverty literally “messes with your mind” in a way that obstructs responsible choices.

In fact, the “free market” contributes to an environment that makes the poor decidedly unfree: confused, preoccupied, and feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. In other words, being poor makes you cognitively dysfunctional..."

[Coyotl]

5. K&R

[barnabas63]

6. How did they pick $10 as a decent minimum wage?

I can't see how $10 is much better than $7.50, or whatever most people are making these days. Sad.

[indepat]

9. Maybe TPTB wanted to raise our minimum wage to at least nearly 2/3 of Australia's,

but Senator Pryor, D-AR (home of Walmart) must feel $10.10 is too much too fast. i.e., Walmart would be in a tizzie? What a simpering putz.

[El_Johns]

10. 25% of workers make < $10/hr.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/07/24/573671/one-in-four-private-sector-workers-earn-less-than-10-an-hour/

[riderinthestorm]

7. Really insightful article. Big K&R nt

[marble falls]

8. Great post. Thanks. Poverty kills in a spiralling slow motion way. Poverty breeds more poverty if...

there's no intervention.

[redqueen]

11. K&R

This country is full of greedy, selfish people.

[El_Johns]

12. I recced the thread but I'm a little leary of the "brain" stuff. Poverty erects a social barrier;

that creates a sub-culture with different mores & customs.

Not so complicated.

It seems that this article is pathologizing the poor covertly, and when people do that & start talking about brain differences, it's worrisome.

[RainDog]

13. k&r n/t

[burfman]

14. poverty sucks...

I think everyone in this country can agree that poverty sucks, question is - is what is this country going to do about it. Probably not too much till there is another depression like back in the 30's of the last century, the way things seem to be going. Last serious effort was when LBJ changed the direction of this country towards poverty by using the Kennedy legacy. Reagan changed it back to something more Darwinian, so that it now appears that eventually the majority in this country will be working for Walmart wages, except for the usual few at the top of the heap. I guess another question would be - how come in a democracy people put up with this crap?