CWA 1180 - News

Poverty Is Poison

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times February 18, 2008 Op-Ed Columnist

"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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