Poverty hurts children in ways we're beginning to understand

My dad was a very blue collar banker without a college degree at Bear Stearns, and we went bankrupt when 08 bubble burst.

We moved from our multi million dollar house to live in a trailer park where I slept in a bed with my brother and ate shitty food throughout middle and high school.

I would be really interested to have someone study the long term effects of it on me, because I think it's actually made me extremely ambitious and a little crazy. I'm the only person who made it out of that shithole, and I have very high standards for myself now. I just never stopped fighting, and probably will never stop. I'm 22 and my blood pressure is off the charts, but I guess that's the price you pay!

I guess I wonder how situational poverty (rich -> poor) affects you differently than just normal poverty. I've never met another person in a similar situation. Can anyone else relate?

> You cannot rationally hold the belief that people can be allowed to have as many children anytime they want and that all children will be provided for regardless of the ability of their individual parents to provide for them. Such parents have shown they have no limiting factor, so the end result is that all children will be poor as you divert greater and greater resources from parents who act in more responsible ways to those who don't.

Yes you can. Why not? Not to mention your (implicit) assertion that [poor] people, "have as many children anytime they want" is also ridiculous.

> Not to mention that for every poor kid in this country (assuming you meant the US when you said "the country") there are a five to ten in southeast Asia with a lower standard of living. How do you justify tapping the productivity of a Boeing working in Renton to provide for a poor kid in Mississippi who has no more connection to that worker than a poor kid in Cambodia, while simultaneously not ensuring that that Cambodian kid has the same standard of living and opportunities you want to give to the Mississippian?

This is true, but irrelevant to the USA's own government policies. Presumably other countries should do the same with their own children.

Of course, we can take your line of thought and cut off the supply of public services to children and adults alike. Then see how quickly your own quality of life erodes. Indeed it's this very philosophy you hold that will explain why humanity will never take action on climate change or any global scale catastrophe that isn't imminent.

Don't forget luck, it's a pretty important factor.

Yes, you can rationally hold that belief.

You have different priors about how society and people work than I do, very different.

Go ahead and try to come up with reasons parent and I are rational, instead of assuming the worst and belittling others' thought processes. Maybe you'll learn something.

I just listened to an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast from last May: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/09/721733303/whats-not-on-the-te...

The subject being interviewed is a Nobel Prize winning economist, James Heckman. The starting point was noting that people who get a GED (on average) score just as well on IQ tests as those getting an ordinary HS diploma. However, their life outcomes tend to be much worse than those who got a HS diploma the ordinary way. Why?

The economist said that 150 years ago schools taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, but spent as much time on "character building" lessons: diligence, persistence, working well with others, etc, but that mostly was removed by the mid 20th century for a couple of reasons. One was that the character building exercises were cast in terms of Protestantism, and as the US became more diverse, there was a push against it. Second, psychology was in the thrall of things that could be machine scored like IQ tests and looked down on squishy character traits.

Anyway, although the GED students did as well on IQ tests, they did substantially worse than normal HS graduates when scored on those other personality skills (not traits, the economist said, since those things can be taught to a large degree).

In the mid 60s a controlled experiment was run where a preschool for impoverished kids were split into the treatment group and the control group. The treatment group's teachers did non-standard stuff, eg, simply exposing the kids to the larger world by taking them on field trips to parts of the city they would never otherwise experience. They were read stories with those character building traits about fairness, persistence, etc. The teachers built relationships with the parents and emphasized how important the parent-child relationship was and not to expect that learning is simply the teacher's job. They provided child care for single/working mothers. This intervention lasted two years of preschool, so basically ages 3-5.

The kids were tested at age 10 and everyone was disappointed that there was no difference. But the economist (and others) revisited the test subjects decades later and found there was a profound difference in outcomes. The treatment group attained higher levels of education, had better incomes, better health, and lower crime involvement. The children of the treatment group were substantially better off in those regards than those of the control group.