Alexander Finnegan, J.D. Law, Marxist Leninist
The worst effect of poverty is not material. In America few people actually starve. If necessary, most people will move in with family or friends, more or less avoiding homelessness.
The worst effect of poverty is spiritual, physical, and psychological. Poverty robs people from becoming their full selves, and ultimately, self-actualization. We are human beings, and humans have biological needs that must be met before higher order needs are addressed. Poverty is an assault on our humanity, because it stunts our growth in all areas.
Studies have shown that poverty even makes us dumber.
Poverty and the all-consuming fretting that comes with it require so much mental energy that the poor have little brain power left to devote to other areas of life, according to the findings of an international study published on Thursday.
The mental strain could be costing poor people up to 13 IQ (intelligence quotient) points and means they are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that amplify and perpetuate their financial woes, researchers found.
“Our results suggest that when you are poor, money is not the only thing in short supply. Cognitive capacity is also stretched thin,” said Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan, part of an international team that conducted the study.
In a series of experiments, researchers from Harvard, Princeton and other universities in North America and from Britain’s University of Warwick found that pressing financial worries had an immediate impact on poor people’s ability to perform well in cognitive and logic tests.
Far from signaling that poor people are stupid, the results suggest those living on a tight budget have their effective brain power, or what the researchers called “mental bandwidth”, dramatically limited by the stress of making ends meet.
On average, someone weighed down by money woes showed a drop in cognitive function in one part of the study that was comparable to a 13 point dip in IQ, and similar to the performance deficit expected from someone who has missed a whole night’s sleep.
“Previous views of poverty have blamed (it) on personal failings, on an environment that is not conducive to success,” said Jiaying Zhao, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
“We are arguing that the lack of financial resources itself can lead to impaired cognitive function,” she said.
Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton who worked on the research team, said it was not stress in general, but financial worries in particular, that led to a reduced ability to make sound decisions.
“The poor are often highly effective at focusing on and dealing with pressing problems,” he said. “But they don’t have leftover bandwidth to devote to other tasks.
“So, if you live in poverty, you’re more error prone and errors cost you more dearly — it’s hard to find a way out.”
The researchers studied two very different groups - shoppers at a mall in New Jersey in the United States, and sugar cane farmers in rural India.
In the mall study, they gathered dozens of low and middle-income shoppers and subjected them to a battery of tests to measure IQ and impulse control.
Half of the participants were first asked to think about what they would do if their car broke down and the repair cost $1,500 - designed to kick off worries about money. It was among these people that performance dipped significantly.
In India, the researchers found that farmers had diminished cognitive performance before getting paid for their harvest compared to afterwards, when their coffers have been replenished.
“One month after the harvest, they’re pretty rich, but the month before - when the money has run out - they’re pretty poor,” Mullainathan said in a report of the research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.
“What we see is that IQ goes up, (when they are rich)... errors go way down, and response times go way down.”
He said the effect in India was about two-thirds the size of the effect in the mall study - equal to around nine or 10 IQ points difference from one month to the next.
Poverty traps us in a cycle of ignorance. It also means less non economic forms of poverty, such as low cultural capital. People who are poor and don’t have access to education “don’t know what they don’t know.” This means the inability to use the library or Internet to break through their inability to process the vast amount of information which is free and available. It is like being given a violin but with no instruction, or being given movies in foreign language but no ability to translate it.
How we speak, etiquette, even the music we prefer and hobbies influence our ability to get jobs, even after we have the same level of education as others.
Every fall, tens of thousands of law students compete for a small number of coveted summer associateships at the country’s top law firms. The stakes are high: getting one of these rare internships virtually guarantees full-time employment after law school. The salaries are unbeatable, six-figure sums that catapult young students to the top 5% of household incomes nationally and are often quadruple of those offered in other sectors of legal practice. These jobs also open doors to even more lucrative employment in the private sector as well as prestigious judiciary and government roles. For these reasons, employment in top law firms has been called the legal profession’s 1%.
Now imagine four applicants, all of whom attend the same, selective second-tier law school. They all have phenomenal grade point averages, are on law review, and have identical, highly relevant work experiences. The only differences are whether they are male or female and if their extracurricular activities suggest they come from a higher-class or lower-class background. Who gets invited to interview?
We set out to answer this question in a series of studies reported in the December 2016 issue of American Sociological Review. Based on prior research showing that hiring in top professional services firms is highly skewed toward applicants from wealthy families, we expected that an applicant’s social class background would play a decisive role in determining interview invitations. And indeed, we found that, in contrast to our national lore that it is individual effort and ability—not family lineage—that matters for getting good jobs, elite employers discriminate strongly based on social class, favoring applicants from higher-class backgrounds. But our research uncovered a surprising — and disturbing — twist: coming from an advantaged social background helps only men.
We uncovered this through a field experiment with the country’s largest law firms. Specifically, we used a technique — known as the resume audit method — that is widely seen as the gold standard for measuring employment discrimination. This method involves randomly assigning different items to the resumes and sending applications to real employers to see how they affect the probability of being called back for a job interview. All in all, we sent fictitious resumes to 316 offices of 147 top law firms in 14 cities, from candidates who were supposedly trying to land a summer internship position. All applicants were in the top 1% of their class and were on law review, but came from second-tier law schools. This was important because graduates from the most elite law schools (e.g., Harvard and Yale) are typically recruited on-campus. But law school students from second-tier schools must compete for coveted internship positions by sending in their resumes directly to firms in hopes of attracting employers’ attention by virtue of their C.V.s.
We signaled gender by varying the applicant’s first name (James or Julia). Directly indicating a parent’s occupation or income on a resume might be strange for an employer to see, so we signaled social class position via accepted and often required portions of resumes: awards and extracurricular activities. Reflecting the fact that social class is a complex characteristic that cannot be boiled down to income, education, or lifestyle alone, we used a constellation of resume items to signal social class.
For example, to capture the economic component of class, our lower-class applicants received an award for student-athletes on financial aid. To incorporate its educational competent, they listed being a peer tutor for fellow first-generation college students. By contrast, our higher class candidate pursued traditionally upper-class hobbies and sports, such sailing, polo, and classical music, while the lower-class candidate participated in activities with lower financial barriers to entry (e.g., pick-up soccer, track and field team) and those distinctly rejected by higher-class individuals (e.g., country music). But crucially, all educational, academic, and work-related achievements were identical between our four fictitious candidates.
Even though all educational and work-related histories were the same, employers overwhelmingly favored the higher-class man. He had a callback rate more than four times of other applicants and received more invitations to interview than all other applicants in our study combined. But most strikingly, he did significantly better than the higher-class woman, whose resume was identical to his, other than the first name.
Why did the higher-class man do so much better than the higher-class woman? To further explore this issue, we conducted a follow-up experiment with a sample of 210 practicing attorneys from around the country. We asked each attorney to evaluate one of the same resumes we used in our field experiment and to tell us whether they would like to bring the candidate in for an interview. We also asked them to rate their candidate on factors proven to influence how favorably people view job candidates but that vary between men and women. These included perceptions of the candidate’s competence, likability, fit with an organization’s culture and clientele, and career commitment.
Just like the employers in our audit study, the attorneys we surveyed favored interviewing the higher-class man above all applicants, including the higher-class woman. This time, though, we were able to understand why. Attorneys viewed higher-class candidates of either gender as being better fits with the culture and clientele of large law firms; lower-class candidates were seen as misfits and rejected. In fact, some attorneys even steered the lower-class candidates to less prestigious and lucrative sectors of legal practice, such as government and nonprofit roles, positions that tend to be more socioeconomically diverse than jobs at top law firms.
But even though higher-class women were seen as just as good “fits” as higher-class men, attorneys declined to interview these women because they believed they were the least committed of any group (including lower-class women) to working a demanding job. Our survey participants, as well as an additional 20 attorneys we interviewed, described higher-class women as “flight risks,” who might desert the firm for less time-intensive areas of legal practice or might even leave paid employment entirely. Attorneys cited “family” as a primary reason these women would leave. Parenting strategies vary between social classes, and the intensive style of mothering that is more popular among the affluent was seen as conflicting with the “all or nothing” nature of work as a Big Law associate. One female attorney we interviewed described this negative view of higher-class women, which she observed while working on her firm’s hiring committee. The perception, she said, was that higher-class women do not need a job because they “have enough money,” are “married to somebody rich,” or are “going to end up being a helicopter mom.” This commitment penalty that higher-class women faced negated any advantages they received on account of their social class.
Our findings confirm that, despite our national myth that anyone can make it if they work hard enough, the social class people grow up in greatly shapes the types of jobs (and salaries) they can attain, regardless of the achievements listed on their resumes. More broadly, our results illustrate a phenomenon that social scientists call “intersectionality” — a fancy way of saying that, when it comes to understanding sources of advantage and disadvantage, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Crucially, we have found that privilege works differently for men and women in the labor market. While coming from a higher-class background helps men, it can actually hurt women.
Poverty influences the likelihood we go to jail, even apart from us breaking laws directly.
Working doesn’t pull you out of poverty.
Poverty is a death sentence for the medically vulnerable.
The tragic deaths from insulin rationing
In the past two years, the type 1 diabetes community has lost at least six men and women to insulin rationing, because they could not afford to buy enough insulin. Here are their stories:
Meaghan Carter, age 47 (December 25, 2018) — Meaghan Carter had type 1 diabetes for 18 years. When she lost her job and insurance, she struggled to afford her insulin which cost more than $800 a month. She resorted to buying NPH insulin (intermediate-acting insulin) from Walmart, which is cheaper but much more unpredictable than the insulin she normally used. On Christmas Day, 2018, Meaghan died of diabetic ketoacidosis, one day before she would have received a paycheck that could have saved her life.
Micah Fischer, age 26 (November 4, 2018) — Micah aged off his father’s insurance plan in June of 2018. His new insurance did not cover Humalog, the insulin that worked best for him and was recommended by his doctor. It would cost $1,200 out-of-pocket. Micah rationed his insulin and go without eating so that less insulin was needed. He was excited to start a new job in October with an insurance plan that covered the insulin he needed, but the plan had a one month waiting period. He only had two and a half weeks to go until his new insurance kicked in when he died.
Jesse Lutgen, age 32 (February 7, 2018) — Jesse was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when he was 12. Jesse had no problems with his diabetes as a child, but as an adult, the high cost of insulin and supplies became his largest financial problem. When Jesse lost his job in November 2017, it became even harder to manage his diabetes. He had made too much money that year to qualify for Medicaid, and the cheapest insurance available had a $10,000 deductible. He decided to pay out of pocket for insulin, but resorted to rationing because the out-of-pocket cost was so high.
Alec Raeshawn Smith, age 26 (June 27, 2017) — Alec Smith was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 23. When he turned 26 he was no longer able to be covered under his parents’ health insurance. Alec made too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but his job did not provide insurance. The cheapest insurance plan had a $7,500 deductible, so he decided to go uninsured. He was paying $1,300 a month for insulin and supplies, almost half of his salary. He died on June 27, 2017 from diabetic ketoacidosis, less than one month after going off of his mother’s insurance.
Antavia Lee Worsham, age 22 (April 26, 2017) — Antavia struggled to afford insulin when she turned 18 and was no longer eligible for insurance coverage through the state. She had resorted to borrowing insulin from others, changing her diet, and rationing insulin because she couldn’t afford it. Her insulin and supplies cost $1,000 a month. Her brother found her dead from diabetic ketoacidosis on April 26, 2017.
Shane Patrick Boyle, age 48 (March 18, 2017) — As a comic book writer, Shane had struggled to afford insulin, but received help from friends and his community in Houston. When he went to visit his dying mother in Arkansas, he had no way of buying insulin. In February 2017, Shane Patrick Boyle started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for a month of insulin. He was $50 short of the amount he needed and died from diabetic ketoacidosis on March 18, 2017, a few days after his mother died.
This woman’s family member died from rationing insulin due to cost. Throughout America families of dead diabetics have been spreading the ashes of their loved ones on the steps of the insulin manufacturers, who have been price gouging for years.
In a nation that relies on money to influence politicians, those with no money have no influence over public policy. The poor cannot afford to be represented, so they are not.
Conclusion
- Poverty is not just about wealth. It has implications for us psychologically, physically, spiritually, and politically.
- People die from poverty, not from starvation, but other causes.
Mark Twain on French Revolution and the Reign of Terror:
“There were two Reigns of Terror if we would but remember and consider it. The one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood. The one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years. The one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million. Our shudders are all for the 'horrors' of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak. But what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak?
3. Poverty is a catch-22. You don’t have the knowledge enough to process all the knowledge around you. You are stuck in your own lack of understanding, so access to libraries and the Internet doesn’t help. You cannot “pull yourself up from your own bootstraps” because you are too ignorant to know what to do. Further, poverty actually makes you dumber, which has been scientifically proven. It is a trap.
4. Poverty will make you die earlier.
5. Poverty harms children even more than adults.
6. Poverty influences how many words we hear as children, shaping brain development and intelligence for our entire lives.
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