Poverty, Stress, And Loss Of Control

Any foray into the far-right blogosphere necessitates contact with Ayn Rand inspired rhetoric that assures readers that all can easily pull themselves up by their bootstraps with a little willpower and elbow grease.(Those posts frequently mix more metaphors than the previous sentence does.) The New York Times reports on a study that shows that poverty takes away many tools that the well off take for granted, especially a sense of control:

That sense of control tends to decline as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, with potentially grave consequences. Those on the bottom are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as those at the top. They’re also more likely to suffer from depression, heart disease and diabetes. Perhaps most devastating, the stress of poverty early in life can have consequences that last into adulthood.

Even those who later ascend economically may show persistent effects of early-life hardship. Scientists find them more prone to illness than those who were never poor. Becoming more affluent may lower the risk of disease by lessening the sense of helplessness and allowing greater access to healthful resources like exercise, more nutritious foods and greater social support; people are not absolutely condemned by their upbringing. But the effects of early-life stress also seem to linger, unfavorably molding our nervous systems and possibly even accelerating the rate at which we age.

The early effects last throughout an individual's life:

Scientists can, in fact, see the imprint of early-life stress decades later: there are more markers of inflammation in those who have experienced such hardship. Chronic inflammation increases the risk of degenerative diseases like heart disease and diabetes. Indeed, telomeres — the tips of our chromosomes — appear to be shorter among those who have experienced early-life adversity, which might be an indicator of accelerated aging. And scientists have found links, independent of current income, between early-life poverty and a higher risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and arthritis in adulthood.

If there is an ongoing class war, it looks as if the rich will win by attrition.

Number Of Students Needing A Free Lunch Rises

I don't think the following paragraphs from this NY Times article need much commentary unless one believes that school lunches are a plot to get poor people who support the New World Order.

Millions of American schoolchildren are receiving free or low-cost meals for the first time as their parents, many once solidly middle class, have lost jobs or homes during the economic crisis, qualifying their families for the decades-old safety-net program.

The number of students receiving subsidized lunches rose to 21 million last school year from 18 million in 2006-7, a 17 percent increase, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from the Department of Agriculture, which administers the meals program. Eleven states, including Florida, Nevada, New Jersey and Tennessee, had four-year increases of 25 percent or more, huge shifts in a vast program long characterized by incremental growth.

 According to this accompanying piece, South Dakota has seen a 5% in those receiving free or reduced school lunches.

The More Things Change. . .

Jonathan Bernstein stumbles across this little nugget from 1988.

I’ve been going through George H.W. Bush’s 1988 convention acceptance speech for another project, and came across a couple of fun items.

First, one of the great rhetorical tricks…of course, this was a lot fresher then than it is when they use it now:

But let’s be frank. Things aren’t perfect in this country. There are people who haven’t tasted the fruits of the expansion. I’ve talked to farmers about the bills they can’t pay. I’ve been to the factories that feel the strain of change. I’ve seen the urban children who play amidst the shattered glass and shattered lives. And there are the homeless. And you know, it doesn’t do any good to debate endlessly which policy mistake of the ‘70’s is responsible. They’re there. We have to help them.

First, as Bernsteiin notes, "It’s 1988, and there are, inexplicably, things still wrong in the nation despite eight years of Ronald Reagan…so which policy mistake of the 1970s was responsible? Cute."  Republicans are still running against Bill Clinton and forgetting the eight years that lead to the 2008 financial meltdown.


On the other hand, I'm surprised that I had forgotten that Republican candidates formerly blamed poverty on policies not people suffering its effects.  Cain, Gingrich et al would do well to research the recent history of their party's standard bearers.

Poverty's Pernicious Effects

The New Republic has published a provocative article entitled "Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty?: A radical new explanation from psychologists." (HT Big Boy Blogger Andrew Sullivan) Jamie Holmes reports that the answer is simple: poverty depletes willpower. 

Taking this model of willpower into the real world, psychologists and economists have been exploring one particular source of stress on the mind: finances. The level at which the poor have to exert financial self-control, they have suggested, is far lower than the level at which the well-off have to do so. Purchasing decisions that the wealthy can base entirely on preference, like buying dinner, require rigorous tradeoff calculations for the poor. As Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, “almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It’s distracting, it’s depleting … and it leads to error.” The poor have to make financial tradeoff decisions, as Shafir put it, “on anything above a muffin.”

Later in the article, Holmes writes,

Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost.

The most chilling result may be the loss of true freedom.  Holmes concludes,

The economist Amartya Sen, in his well-known volume Development as Freedom, notes how an individual’s “freedom of agency” is “constrained by the social, political and economic opportunities” available to them. He’s right: Fewer options do reduce freedom. But now, we may need to grapple with a new possibility: that poverty doesn’t simply reduce freedom by constraining an individual’s choices, but that it may actually alter the nature of freedom by reducing an individual’s willpower.

As if loss of freedom and will power were not destructive enough, this article points to a study that shows that poverty starts to inhibit learning is children as young as two. (HT @DianeRavitch)

Psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin gave a series of mental tests to 750 sets of young twins between 10 months and 2 years old. They found that half of the gains that wealthier children show on tests can be attributed to their genes. Fine. That's not shocking, but it's not the case for children from poorer families, who already lag behind their peers by age 2. That cohort in the study showed almost no improvements driven by their genetic makeup. If you are poor, then your mental development starts to stagnate before you even reach pre-school.

The lead author, Professor Elliot Tucker-Drob, makes a point of reminding us that his findings do not suggest that children from wealthier families are genetically superior or smarter. They simply have more opportunities to reach their potential. That's his lesson from this. So what exactly are those opportunities? That's what we need to know.

The study notes that wealthier parents are often able to provide better educational resources and spend more time with their children but doesn't conclude what factors, in particular, help their children reach their genetic potentials. That's the follow-up study Tucker-Drob is already planning. But these findings offer another a pretty obvious scientific example of why breaking the cycle of poverty is so difficult and why offering all children access to early childhood development programs is so important if we want to be a land of equal opportunity. [emphasis mine]

Studies like these make it abundantly clear that poverty leaves people behind at the beginning and makes catching up difficult if not impossible.