Poverty is Poison

http://www.demos.org/blog/7/28/13/poverty-poison

by Matt Bruenig on July 28, 2013


On Saturday, Moises Velasquez-Manoff had a piece in the New York Times titled "Status and Stress." In the piece, the author provides a rundown of a very small portion of an immense literature on the damaging effects of poverty-induced stress. The most interesting part of this literature pertains to the effects of poverty on children, a topic about which most people seem to have a wrong or incomplete understanding.

For the most part, people believe one of two things about the long-term consequences of growing up in poverty. They either believe poverty has no effect and that your life outcome is almost entirely self-determined; or, they believe poverty negatively affects your life outcome insofar as it damages your opportunities. The first belief is obviously wrong, but the second belief is also not totally correct.

As Velasquez-Manoff details, poverty does not merely reduce the opportunities of kids to, for instance, go to a quality school, participate in costly enrichment activities, have access to networks, and develop cultural and social capital. It does certainly do all of those things, but more importantly, poverty-induced stress physically messes up kids, their brain development in particular.

So while we usually talk about poverty as an opportunity-destroyer for the nearly 1 in 4 American kids forced to suffer through it, it is probably better understood as a toxic poison that causes physical, permanent damage to kids' bodies. In that sense, poverty is -- as Elizabeth Stoker points out -- very similar to lead, a neurotoxin that also screws up the brains of kids exposed to it.

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