What Poverty Does to the Young Brain | Hacker News Reader

What Poverty Does to the Young Brain

newyorker.com

95 pointsakbarnama50 comments

The effects of poverty on a child's IQ are at this point indisputable. (Duncan et al. 1998)

Chronically inadequate diet in the early stages of development will disrupt brain development. Missing meals will impair functioning and learning on the day of. These kids see reduced access to health services and often all around inadequate parenting from overworked and stressed guardians.

In ALL countries that have been studied, children with wealthy homes score higher on IQ tests than kids from poor homes (Case, Griffin, & Kelly; Keating & Hertzman, 1999). Also of interest is that in the US and developed countries in which the gap is widest, the differences in IQ is much larger than in countries with a smaller wealth gap.

Some kids overcome this challenge. They are the "resilient children" and their ability usually came from a shielding of negative influence through quality parenting or guardianship. Be careful not to absorb the narrative of these achieving kids and dismiss the very real effects of low SES on children.

You are not accounting for the fact that IQ is heritable, one of the more obvious truths we're tempted to ignore. Pinker's The Blank Slate is a good book on the topic.

At this point improving nutrition does not add much to IQ. Ours is a well fed nation. Soon, the cheapest means of raising IQ will be iterated embryo selection, later direct genetic modification.

Iterated embryo selection could raise IQ by 80 points:http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/embryo.pdf

I look forward to when Singapore makes it available to its citizens and ideologues here try to insist that vitamins will do the same.

Interesting point on heritability. I wonder though if poor populations are full of genetically assisted high IQs that are being suppressed through the effects of poverty.

Improving nutrition among poor kids will do a lot to improve cognitive functioning. I'm not sure you can claim that "our's is a well fed nation" in a discussion of the effects of poverty. I've been involved in breakfast programs in high schools and the number of kids coming to school unfed is significant. There are poor kids in developed nations suffering the effects of malnutrition and it is impairing their development. Low energy, susceptibility to illness, infection and even physical growth delays.

Low SES is a multifaceted attack on a kid's start in life and poor nutrition is just the jab to the gut.

> Soon, the cheapest means of raising IQ will be iterated embryo selection, later direct genetic modification.

So many people on the internet go on about the inevitability of genetic engineering for traits like intelligence. There's pretty much zero experimental evidence it's going to work as of yet. It's all statistical wankery. Find me one mouse experiment where they can repeatedly engineer a faster mouse or a smarter mouse from common mice. Oh, they can make its fur green (or whatever), but there's not even a hint anyone is close to manipulating complex aspects of phenotype any better than dog breeders.

Genetic engineering is really hard. A huge amount of genes contribute to IQ. It's not possible now and it won't be until we can safely alter thousands of genes in an embryo. I don't see direct engineering in the near future. Iterated embryo selection (and just plain embryo selection) however, do seem likely in the next two decades.

There is zero experimental basis to assume embryo selection will work better than breeding for complex traits in the near future. It's a scifi idea that for some strange reason gets nerds excited.

Who cares of it works better than being for complex traits? If it works as well as being for complex traits that's really great. Selective breeding can move a population mean about half a standard deviation per generation. That's not iterated embryo selection, just once. I would pay a lot of money to be guaranteed a child in the upper 50% of what is possible with me and my girlfriend's genes.

If you want an illustration of the power of selective breeding contemplate the various breeds of dog. For a modern and well documented example see the domestication of the Silver Fox. It only took them six generations to domesticate them.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox The least domesticated foxes, those that flee from experimenters or bite when stroked or handled, are assigned to Class III. Foxes in Class II let themselves be petted and handled but show no emotionally friendly response to experimenters. Foxes in Class I are friendly toward experimenters, wagging their tails and whining. In the sixth generation bred for tameness we had to add an even higher-scoring category. Members of Class IE, the "domesticated elite," are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs. They start displaying this kind of behavior before they are one month old. By the tenth generation, 18 percent of fox pups were elite; by the 20th, the figure had reached 35 percent. Today elite foxes make up 70 to 80 percent of our experimentally selected population.

what about that NIMH research lab? they had some promising results until the mice escaped

Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?

Human astrocytes are apparently better than other mammalian astrocytes. How do we know that? We've put them in mice. It made the mice smarter.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26639-the-smart-mouse-...

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/48/16153.abstract

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/labs/Nedergaard-Lab/publicati...

Thankfully you are being downvoted. Reading between the lines you are arguing that poor people are simply genetically stupid.

I counter that by saying that even though only a few can win a marathon most people with some training can finish it within a reasonable time.

Getting a doctor degree is the exact same thing. Sure, there are a few geniuses but you need not be one to become a medical doctor.

My point is that most people are intelligent enough. Hence most poverty is no because of the lack of it. Other issues are at play. Birth lottery is a strong one.

IQ is heritable, to the extent intelligence increases one's human capital ( quite a bit) intelligent people will on average be richer than less intelligent people. This explains much of the differences in educational outcomes. I'm all for improving outcomes for poor children, but the solutions will need to be technological not environmental. I don't expect people to be able to separate the normative from the descriptive when it comes to their sacred issues, but the whole "education and nutrition is all that matters" approach is basically Lysenkoism.

We are in this strange dynamic where our inability to perceive ugly truths cause us to perpetuate the outcomes we so bemoan, leading to an arms race of ineffective interventions and reflexive shunning of people who actually care about the real cause of the problem. It might be nice if everyone were equally intelligent, but that's an engineering goal not the state of things now.

Unfortunately, you are not.

It is evident that /some/ of the poverty is due to genetically caused low IQ. That is a completely factual and unideological statement.

It is probably not the sole cause of poverty.

Wouldn't it be nice to figure out what the actual causes are and how much they each contribute?

Otherwise, the treatment would be more like blodletting and using perfume against miasmas than anything actually helpful.

It is worth distinguishing between first world poverty and third world poverty with statements like this. They're different things.

I can easily believe third world poverty causes permanent IQ deficiencies. First world poverty, I'm sure there are cases, but I'd expect much less significantly. I'd like to hear more details.

Especially with first world poverty, it is not enough to point to a bad outcome associated with poor people and call it an effect of poverty. If it is financially possible to give your kids proper nutrition, but you don't know how to do it, or you just don't care about doing it, it isn't poverty that is causing your kids to suffer. But you would still expect to see this more in poor families than well off ones.

But the poverty IS effecting the ability for these parents to feed their kids right, even if technically money isn't the limitation. I see where you are coming from, but my argument is that the effects of being poor are preventing these parents from the tools, time, education, patience... and so on to properly feed their kids. So yeah, it's direct and indirect.

My main point is that poverty is creating an interconnected web of issues for kids. What might seem like a parent not caring about feeding their kids right might be connected to that parent living in an unsafe neighbourhood where a bus ride to the best food source is impractical compared to the corner store's junk food.

> But the poverty IS effecting the ability for these parents to feed their kids right, even if technically money isn't the limitation. > my argument is that the effects of being poor are preventing these parents from the tools, time, education, patience

This is assuming the conclusion all over again, one level further out. How do you know that the lack of education, patience, etc is caused by lack of money?

> My main point is that poverty is creating an interconnected web of issues for kids.

There is a web of issues, that much I agree with. Lots of outcomes are worse for poor people, and one bad result interacts with another. But the fact that it is an interconnected web means it is harder, not easier, to indisputably assign all those effects to a single cause.

food only effects mental abilities when they are extremely deficient in them, which is virtually impossible in the united states. it may not fit your world view, but even junk food isn't going to destroy their brains - i grew up on junk food.

it really just comes down to one thing: valuing education. most people who are poor don't value education, and those values are passed on to children.

these types of studies are dangerous because they measure one thing (poverty) and try to garner one outcome from it and suggest claims of causation.

Education's financial value is only seen over long time scales, i.e. It takes many years to finish your degree and start making money with it. When you have been living your whole life paycheck to paycheck and the timescales you're used to are weeks and months, things like dedicating years to a degree simply feel out of reach and not worth consideration.

My point is, even if families with low SES don't "value education" as you've described it, it doesn't mean it's something within their control.

yes, it takes many years to harvest the value of education, it is moot point to argue that they choose to ignore the benefits regardless of what is going on around them.

the point is, just because they don't have access to trader does doesn't ruin them. their genetics probably don't make them stupid, and what ever umpteen dozen excuses you can come up with does not permanently seal their fate in a class.

what does change things is valuing education. being born poor is usually the situation of people prior making bad decisions, most usually not valuing long term benefits such as education. staying poor is continuing those beliefs.

and it is totally within their control. it doesnt sit well with many, because its hard to believe people cant be fixed, that they have to fix themselves. its hard to believe that people in a bad situation need to start making better decisions for themselves. its hard to believe this isn't something this can be fixed by throwing more money at bad, by taxing more, etc etc

in many places, this isnt always true. In the Philippines for example, you can value education all you want but opportunities are rare. but not in the US, there are ample opportunities for those who want to take them, and now with the internet it is even easier for those to find the resources they need.

>it really just comes down to one thing:

When this phrase prefaces an explantion for something as complex as poverty and its effects, what follows is virtually guaranteed to be a short-sighted oversimplification. And, so it was.

What's actually dangerous is the tendency of some to make dismissive moral judgments about those who find themselves in unfortunate life circumstances.

To ignore the cyclical, systemic, and even endemic nature of poverty and suggest that it can all be overcome if the impoverished would only decide to value education is ridiculous on its face.

Right on. And this is why attempts to eliminate poverty fail. Poverty itself is not "one thing" nor is there any one cause for it, nor is there any one solution.

> If it is financially possible to give your kids proper nutrition, but you don't know how to do it, or you just don't care about doing it, it isn't poverty that is causing your kids to suffer.

Depends, were those parents once impoverished children themselves? If so, you may be seeing multigenerational effects of the same cause.

It depends.. I spent my childhood riding fright trains, visiting every dump and basically coming home only to sleep. I don't regret.

Another common situation, is when parents or relatives or mere circumstances are forced children to perform some very restricted, repetitive tasks, like agricultural jobs or any other kind of dumb labor. This is usually a disaster.

Add to this a constant abuse, social pressure and wrong, primitive conditioning, especially for girls, to complicate the matters.

Basically, unless one is lucky enough to be a lonely street kid, not a member of some gang, to develop a habit of reflective thinking and acquiring knowledge by understanding the causes of events, one will end up what they call "developmental delay", or just aggressive ignorance.

BTW, some Eastern countries, where there are most population are poor, there are much less problem in urban areas, where kids could escape restricted repetition of rural life in poverty.

OK. According to non-meme based psychology, there are two major developmental factors - genes and environment, your parents and your neighborhood, nature and nurture.

Leaving leaving genes aside, environmental factors consists of conditioning - social, cultural, of personal experiences and of chance events. There is nothing but conditioning and nutrition that accounts for a development.

The conditioning is vastly complex and highly interrelated, but it boils down to the variety and 'intencity' of experience.

Common sense tells us that a brain is a muscle - it must be trained and nourished. Any impoverishment results it failure to develop appropriate habits and skills, which later will handicap one's performance compared to the members of favourable social classes.

The point is, any external causes, such as developmental disorders aside, poverty leaves one developmentaly delayed due to restricted, repetitive behavior and wrong conditioning.

In some Eastern societies, like Indian and of most Buddhist counties, with emphasis on community and family rather than individuality and competition, the effect of poverty is less dramatic. Poor of India or Nepal or Cambodia are incomparable better that those of Russia, which is a social shithole, famous of its ignorance and cruelty amongst its poor.

I think it is unfortunate when people do not express their biological potential, but I'm not sure that's what people actually want to talk about. I'm not sure that really improves the human condition.

I see the problem as the sum of human economic actions creating a structure where only a few people can win and most people must lose. What does it matter if we bump up people's IQ? Would that make it so that more people try to apply to be leaders and CEO's of tomorrow, when there are so few positions available?

Is the lack of meritocracy the principle emotional bother here? Does society become better if it were meritocratic? I don't think so. Why not focus on the fact that there's a race where only a few people win? Is it because we're okay with the current distribution of wealth if we find out that it corresponds with intelligence?

All I see from this is a more efficient nation due to better labor allocation, which is an agreeable value, but is that what people wanted to talk about? Economic inefficiency due to bad labor allocation?

I think GATTACA shows a meritocratic world. A very meritocratic world. Now, it may be that the movie has some moral message to deliver on "true potential" being more than biology, but that society was largely on target with identifying potential, at least way better than our current world. A few errors now and then sounds very tolerable for a futuristic system, even if it results in a few tragic stories about a denied astronaut with heart problems. I'm sure they can improve and become even more accurate at identifying aspects of human merit.

But in that world, we have corporate dominance of working opportunities, elite rule over inferior biology, a feeling of fate, and shitty jobs -- a world of winners and losers. There will always be more people of merit than there will be jobs of merit. If this last statement is true, what are the implications for the losers of society?

There will always be more people of merit than there will be jobs of merit. If this last statement is true, what are the implications for the losers of society?

This makes me think of the Hunter S. Thompson letter posted a few days ago[1]:

Let’s assume that you think you have a choice of eight paths to follow (all pre-defined paths, of course). And let’s assume that you can’t see any real purpose in any of the eight. THEN— and here is the essence of all I’ve said— you MUST FIND A NINTH PATH.

[1] http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/hunter-s-thompson-life-co...

You're accepting a number of premises there without questioning them, including corporatisation, labour/management/owner caste splits, and the fact that a silly science fiction movie is the best of all possible worlds.

I suspect none of those are a given.

>There will always be more people of merit than there will be jobs of merit.

Which explains why it's so hard to hire good people, I guess.

> Over the past decade, the scientific consensus has become clear: poverty perpetuates poverty, generation after generation, by acting on the brain.

Is that true? It sounds rather controversial to me, but I am not a neuroeconomist.

Edit: Although, I suppose that sentence makes no claim as to how large the effect is in relation to other systemic problems, so maybe it's not as bold a claim as I first thought.

Well, I do believe we treat people in poverty (or poor people) differently than we do others. Both in our personal interactions with them, and how we deal with them as a social-group or problem (see, I myself used the term "deal with them").

The underlying theme that is quite pervasive in the media and through social programs: "If you are poor, you can not help yourself out of it, you need to be helped". I think that basic tone/message is a large contributing factor to perpetuating poverty, and conditioning them into not attempting to enact positive change in their own behavior.

Book recommendation: Scarcity by Mullainathan and Shafir which discusses "scarcity traps" at length, esp. in the case of poverty, but also in other contexts (such as time scarcity for busy people, food scarcity for dieters, socialization scarcity for lonely people, etc.):

http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/...

It doesn't seem controversial that poverty can lead to worse education, negative behaviours and overall worse outcomes eg. due to things like stress, altered priorities, prejudice etc. The idea that this is because poor people sustain brain damage as children (or foetuses) is the bit I'm not sure about.

I think I misread your comment by skipping the effect-on-the-brain bit. The book is indeed about altered priorities and resultant behaviour due to scarcity, but it is a good read anyway.

To sum it up- poverty brings you the experience of a thirld world enviroment. Constant stress and existential crisis/dread.

Can you write a app for that? One where creatures in crisis find other creatures in crisis nearby, forming a add-hoc anti-stress community that also teaches itself the basics to startup society against all odds?

Extreme poverty, especially where violence is involved (common), is likely to cause symptoms of PTSD. So I'm not so sure about forming an ad-hoc anti-stress community. Currently the only thing that could be compared to that would be a mental health clinic. Which I would think would be a much healthier approach than putting a bunch of PTSD sufferers together in an ad-hoc manner.

You've basically just described street organizations (gangs), which needed no app to be created. Maybe you can end their criminalization, end the war on drugs, or figure out a way to create gang unity with am app?

The problem with that is: Once you build this service, how do you give access to the impoverished people?

For instance, I would be homeless sleeping on benches if not for my parents and my computer is almost 8 years old, my mobile phone is over a decade old. I would seek people who feel like I do but they also look after themselves first, since the conditions are "eat or get eaten". There was also one guy who just surrendered to his fate and all he did was abuse the fact that his parents provide him with a soft pillow to stand, only to play video games day in and day out. The very definition of NEET.

My point being, someone else has to provide them with internet access, and even then, there is not much that you can do.

we have obamaphone. now we have obama-app

To sum it up- poverty brings you the experience of a thirld world enviroment.

Western poverty does not do this. Most folks suffering western style poverty have an abundance of food, clean water, power, sanitation, leisure, education and health care. Having just come back from India, it's not even a close comparison.

Any stress/existential crisis/dread is purely based on status envy or pathologies caused by other (relatively) poor westerners.

This kind of judgmental appeal to worse problems is completely counterproductive to solving western poverty, and ignores those who do not have access to abundant food, leisure, and health care. This can happen for a number of reasons, including stigmatization of welfare assistance, lack of awareness of available programs, incomes too high to qualify for aid but too low to live on (especially for those poor who do not have children), medical conditions that prevent one from reaching the social services before 5PM close (even things as simple and unappreciated as chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, delayed sleep phase, and PTSD), or lack of transportation ($5 for food, or for bus/gasoline?).

There's been a bunch of research on Korean War orphans adopted to the West. Kids literally stunted from malnutrition, and traumatized by the direct experience of war as well as the death of their parents and families. As adults they test higher for intelligence than the native occidental populations they joined. Take that for what it's worth.

> they test higher for intelligence than

oh, why?

You are looking in the wrong direction for a solution.

The world doesn't need another * social app.

The comment you're replying to almost seems satirical in nature but I cant be sure. Poe's law in effect.

I desperately want to agree, but this is HN.

The other week someone suggested an app that gamified escaping homelessness as a solution to homelessness.

Is not so simple in fact. Twins with similar diets can have differences in IQ just by growing in different cities. Between 20 and 40 Ascaris roundworms in the body of a child can lower their IQ to 5-10 points, delay the psychomotor development and end in poor growth until properly treated (IQ is restored them to normal levels). Powerty can mean that people don't have a reliable source of water, or feels fine about eating roadkills because is in their culture (increasing the probability of having roundworms or other parasites from carnivores). A bad Malaria in children can lead to permanent low IQs also.

Any research about this question should check and discuss parasite loads also.