Poverty has been identified as a causal factor in lower IQ and psychiatric disorders. What can this tell us about public policy and the minimum wage?
By Christian Exoo and Calvin F. Exoo | Originally Published at Truthout. |
Truthout | Op-Ed February 22, 2014 09:19
Talking about poverty and inequality is all the rage these days. President Obama wants to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who delivered the official response to the State of the Union address, said that the problem isn’t “income inequality, but the real gap we face today is one of opportunity inequality.” Rand Paul has offered that we need to stop giving money to unwed mothers, and David Brooks has recently written two columns about inequality, the first saying that poverty and inequality have nothing to do with each other and will you please stop talking, please; the second brushed Brooks’ solutions with the thin veneer of science – mentioning “prefrontal cortexes” and “cortisol levels” – and offered a litany of solutions to treat the symptoms of child poverty (“students can’t control their impulses, can’t form attachments, don’t possess resilience and lack social and emotional skills”) without ever quite understanding that instead of treating the symptoms, it might be easier to just cure the disease.
Research has only recently been able to identify poverty as a causal factor (rather than merely correlational) in debilitating medical conditions that leave people sick, unable to work and unable to think – all factors that then perpetuate poverty, leaving the poor trapped in a vicious biological cycle.
So what can actual science (not Brooks’ buzzword-laden version of it) tell us about poverty? What are its effects and how is it perpetuated? And if we did decide to end poverty, what would it look like, and what