Poverty is Poison

Posted by Christine on: 02.21.2008 /

by Christine Wicker

Those of you who keep up with the New York Times know that Paul Krugman is a liberal economist who hasn’t got anything good to say about Bush. My husband, a moderate man, thinks Krugman is so strident that he no longer reads him. I am less moderate and I love Krugman, but sometimes he’s too much even for me.

This week, however, he wrote a column that seemed so true to me. I come from a poor family that rose into middle class. I rose with it but I know some things about growing up poor that people from better circumstances don’t know. This column validates so much that we see around us and that I’ve seen in my own family. I doubt that this topic will get much press exposure, but it is so important. The column starts:

“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life.

Later he writes:

“Growing up in poverty puts you at a disadvantage at every step.

I’d bracket those new studies on brain development in early childhood with a study from the National Center for Education Statistics, which tracked a group of students who were in eighth grade in 1988. The study found, roughly speaking, that in modern America parental status trumps ability: students who did very well on a standardized test but came from low-status families were slightly less likely to get through college than students who tested poorly but had well-off parents.”

He debunks the idea that Johnson’s War on Poverty didn’t have an impact and says that if we would stop making excuses, we could do something about poverty and the brain damage it causes.

Here’s the link if you want to read the whole thing.

While you’re there, you might check out Bob Herbert, another liberal. He’s about the only columnist around writing about women and sexism.

Two of his recent ones were The Wrong Target, Feb. 19, about underage girls in prostitution and Politics and Misogyny, Feb. 15, about Hillary.