“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.
So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America’s record of failing to fight poverty.
L.
B. J. declared his “War on Poverty” 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical
legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next
few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall
from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969.
But progress
stalled thereafter: American politics shifted to the right, attention
shifted from the suffering of the poor to the alleged abuses of welfare
queens driving Cadillacs, and the fight against poverty was largely
abandoned.
In 2006, 17.4 percent of children in America lived
below the poverty line, substantially more than in 1969. And even this
measure probably understates the true depth of many children’s misery.
Living
in or near poverty has always been a form of exile, of being cut off
from the larger society. But the distance between the poor and the rest
of us is much greater than it was 40 years ago, because most American
incomes have risen in real terms while the official poverty line has
not. To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be
an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us,
is what poisons a child’s brain.
America’s failure to make
progress in reducing poverty, especially among children, should provoke a
lot of soul-searching. Unfortunately, what it often seems to provoke
instead is great creativity in making excuses.
Some of these
excuses take the form of assertions that America’s poor really aren’t
all that poor — a claim that always has me wondering whether those
making it watched any TV during Hurricane Katrina, or for that matter
have ever looked around them while visiting a major American city.
Mainly,
however, excuses for poverty involve the assertion that the United
States is a land of opportunity, a place where people can start out
poor, work hard and become rich.
But the fact of the matter is
that Horatio Alger stories are rare, and stories of people trapped by
their parents’ poverty are all too common. According to one recent
estimate, American children born to parents in the bottom fourth of the
income distribution have almost a 50 percent chance of staying there —
and almost a two-thirds chance of remaining stuck if they’re black.
That’s not surprising. 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.
None of this is inevitable.
Poverty
rates are much lower in most European countries than in the United
States, mainly because of government programs that help the poor and
unlucky.
And governments that set their minds to it can reduce
poverty. In Britain, the Labor government that came into office in 1997
made reducing poverty a priority — and despite some setbacks, its
program of income subsidies and other aid has achieved a great deal.
Child poverty, in particular, has been cut in half by the measure that
corresponds most closely to the U.S. definition.
At the moment
it’s hard to imagine anything comparable happening in this country. To
their credit — and to the credit of John Edwards, who goaded them into
it — both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are proposing new initiatives
against poverty. But their proposals are modest in scope and far from
central to their campaigns.
I’m not blaming them for that; if a
progressive wins this election, it will be by promising to ease the
anxiety of the middle class rather than aiding the poor. And for a
variety of reasons, health care, not poverty, should be the first
priority of a Democratic administration.
But ultimately, let’s
hope that the nation turns back to the task it abandoned — that of
ending the poverty that still poisons so many American lives.
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