Poverty impacts memory and language, as Martha Farah showed, and that then impacts the ability to get good grades. Grading is a sociocultural system, which reflects one way we rank people in society. And rather than talking about the system, we generally focus on the “individual” who fails at school, thus providing a convenient ideology for a much more systemic problem. As today’s article relates, “Many children with poor working memory are considered lazy or dim. But Alloway said with early identification and memory training, many of these underachievers can improve.”

Here’s the link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080302/sc_nm/memory_learning_dc;_ylt=Au_0zmePpX4YzuAftbZXBZKs0NUE

And if you’re interested in how this sort of dynamic might play out based on further research, a great way to start is to combine two books: Gustafson & Magnusson’s Female Life Careers: A Pattern Approach, which uses longitudinal data to document the replication of inequality and social class from childhood, and MacLeod’s Ain’t No Making It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood, which shows the impact of social structures and lived experience on how and why poverty persists

I think what would be needed is to define what aspects of poverty might increase a person’s stress. You can be fairly poor material wise, but lead an unstressful lifestyle. If I got rid of my television, computer and telephone I think my own lifestyle would actually be less stressful. However, there are certain aspects of poverty which might lead to increased stress. Obviously if you don’t have enough money for food or are uninsured for healthcare you are going to be more stressful.

There is some indication that nutrition can have a substantial impact on cognitive functioning as well. Omega 3 fatty acids have been shown to increase brain volume in areas like the hippocampus. Nutritional deficiencies have also been tied to lower IQ levels. So that is another aspect to poverty that could potentially be addressed fairly cheaply.

If elevated stress hormones are the cause of many of these problems then it might be possible, in the future, to give at risk kids drugs which supressed the stress response (like cortisol reducing drugs). But that is a totally different ethical debate at how to best attack this problem.

I’m finding it interesting to check out the other blogs that are commenting on Krugman’s article. Many of them are vehemently critical: ‘Paul Krugman is a moron,’ ‘Only a PC liberal could come up with such nonsense,’ and the like. It seems to be a widespread insistence that, no, poverty is the effect of depression, lack of intelligence, being unhealthy mentally, etc., and a real refusal to consider the possibility that environment might have these profound effects on people. In fact, most of the research on which these studies are based is pretty sound (as I’m sure Daniel would agree), and the indications are that poverty has profound effects on IQ scores, likelihood of depression, and likelihood of all sorts of negative outputs.

The complexity of social causes is no reason to discount them. Absolutely, mental illness or other psychological troubles may be ‘inherited,’ but there are many mechanisms that might explain this other than an innate, biological (read ‘genetic’) one. Property, titles of nobility, religious affiliation and political persuasion are also patterned from generation to generation and demonstrate a pattern of inheritance. You’d be hard pressed to find any reputable scientists looking for a gene for these sorts of things.

But I agree with Michael that the sociological-level data can’t be easily tied directly to the psychological-level outcome; there might be many layers in between that would intervene, creating resilience, for example, in certain people who grow up poor or, inversely, placing people in socio-economic positions under stress that makes them as likely to have depression as someone born in much less secure socio-economic status. Unfortunately, one of the ways to study this is to look at the relation between parents’ and children’s likelihood of both suffering depression or stress-related illness or the like, and then the data is taken by some observers to show biological inheritance when, in fact, it’s a great indication of the environment that children are subjected to within the household.

The other problem I have with this is that the “stress of poverty” is a little too vague. It seems like there are so many factors that would be hard to tease out. Some children who are rich may get picked on at school so they may also have high levels of stress. Though, I think more studies would need to be done to tease out the real impact of poverty.

I think it would be good if schools could teach students ways to reduce their stress regardless of what their poverty level was. If stress has such a detrimental effect on cognitive functioning, then it could potentially pay big dividend in school performance.