'Crack baby' study ends with unexpected but clear result
Susan FitzGerald
For The Inquirer
July 21, 2013
Jaimee Drakewood hurried in from the rain, eager to get to her final appointment at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Ever since her birth 23 years ago, a team of researchers has been tracking every aspect of her development - gauging her progress as an infant, measuring her IQ as a prechooler, even peering into her adolescent brain using an MRI machine.
Now, after nearly a quarter century, the federally funded study was ending, and the question the researchers had been asking was answered. Did cocaine harm the long-term development of children like Jaimee, who were exposed to the drug in their mother's womb? MORE COVERAGE Possible Down syndrome genetic correction found Babies of Heavy Moms Grow Slower: Study Baby's Healthy Diet Feeds IQ, Study Finds The researchers had expected the answer would be a resounding yes. But it wasn't. Another factor would prove far more critical.
A crack epidemic was raging in Philadelphia in 1989 when Hallam Hurt, then chair of neonatology at Albert Einstein Medical Center on North Broad Street, began a study to evaluate the effects of in-utero cocaine exposure on babies. In maternity wards in Philadelphia and elsewhere, caregivers were seeing more mothers hooked on cheap, smokable crack cocaine. A 1989 study in Philadelphia found that nearly one in six newborns at city hospitals had mothers who tested positive for cocaine. Troubling stories were circulating about the so-called crack babies.
They had small heads and were easily agitated and prone to tremors and bad muscle tone, according to reports, many of which were anecdotal. Worse, the babies seemed aloof and avoided eye contact. Some social workers predicted a lost generation - kids with a host of learning and emotional deficits who would overwhelm school systems and not be able to hold a job or form meaningful relationships. The "crack baby" image became symbolic of bad mothering, and some cocaine-using mothers had their babies taken from them or, in a few cases, were arrested. I
t was amid that climate that Hurt organized a study of 224 near-term or full-term babies born at Einstein between 1989 and 1992 - half with mothers who used cocaine during pregnancy and half who were not exposed to the drug in utero.
All the babies came from low-income families, and nearly all were African Americans. Hurt hoped the study would inform doctors and nurses caring for cocaine-exposed babies and even guide policies for drug prevention, treatment, and follow-up interventions. But she never anticipated that the study, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, would become one of the largest and longest-running studies of in-utero cocaine exposure. One mother who signed up was Jaimee's mom, Karen Drakewood.
She was on an all-night crack binge in a drug house near her home in the city's West Oak Lane section when she went into labor. Jaimee was born Jan. 13, 1990, weighing an even 7 pounds. "Jaimee was beautiful when she was born. A head full of hair. She looked like a porcelain doll," Karen Drakewood, now 51, said recently in her Overbrook kitchen. "She was perfect." But Drakewood knew looks could be deceiving.
"My worst fear was that Jaimee would be slow, mentally retarded, or something like that because of me doing drugs," she said. She agreed to enroll her baby in the cocaine study at Einstein. Drakewood promised herself that she would turn her life around for the sake of Jaimee and her older daughter, but she soon went back to smoking crack. Hurt arrived early at Children's Hospital one morning in June to give a talk on her team's findings to coworkers. After nearly 25 years of studying the effects of cocaine and publishing or presenting dozens of findings, it wasn't easy to summarize it in a PowerPoint presentation. The study received nearly $7.9 million in federal funding over the years, as well as $130,000 from the Einstein Society. Hurt, who had taken her team from Einstein to Children's in 2003, began her lecture with quotations from the media around the time the study began.
A social worker on TV predicted that a crack baby would grow up to "have an IQ of perhaps 50." A print article quoted a psychologist as saying "crack was interfering with the central core of what it is to be human," and yet another article predicted that crack babies were "doomed to a life of uncertain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority." Hurt, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, is always quick to point out that cocaine can have devastating effects on pregnancy. The drug can cause a problematic rise in a pregnant woman's blood pressure, trigger premature labor, and may be linked to a dangerous condition in which the placenta tears away from the uterine wall. Babies born prematurely, no matter the cause, are at risk for a host of medical and developmental problems.
On top of that, a parent's drug use can create a chaotic home life for a child. Hurt's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results. The babies were then evaluated periodically, beginning at six months and then every six or 12 months on through young adulthood. Their mothers agreed to be tested for drug use throughout the study. The researchers consistently found no significant differences between the cocaine-exposed children and the controls.
At age 4, for instance, the average IQ of the cocaine-exposed children was 79.0 and the average IQ for the nonexposed children was 81.9. Both numbers are well below the average of 90 to 109 for U.S. children in the same age group.
When it came to school readiness at age 6, about 25 percent of children in each group scored in the abnormal range on tests for math and letter and word recognition.
"We went looking for the effects of cocaine," Hurt said. But after a time "we began to ask, 'Was there something else going on?' "
While the cocaine-exposed children and a group of nonexposed controls performed about the same on tests, both groups lagged on developmental and intellectual measures compared to the norm. Hurt and her team began to think the "something else" was poverty.
As the children grew, the researchers did many evaluations to tease out environmental factors that could be affecting their development. On the upside, they found that children being raised in a nurturing home - measured by such factors as caregiver warmth and affection and language stimulation - were doing better than kids in a less nurturing home. On the downside, they found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time. Those children who reported a high exposure to violence were likelier to show signs of depression and anxiety and to have lower self-esteem.
More recently, the team did MRI scans on the participants' brains. Some research has suggested that gestational cocaine exposure can affect brain development, especially the dopamine system, which in turn can harm cognitive function. An area of concern is "executive functioning," a set of skills involved in planning, problem-solving, and working memory.
The investigators found one brain area linked to attention skills that differed between exposed and nonexposed children, but they could not find any clinically significant effect on behavioral tests of attention skills.
Drug use did not differ between the exposed and nonexposed participants as young adults. About 42 percent used marijuana and three tested positive for cocaine one time each. The team has kept tabs on 110 of the 224 children originally in the study. Of the 110, two are dead - one shot in a bar and another in a drive-by shooting - three are in prison, six graduated from college, and six more are on track to graduate. There have been 60 children born to the 110 participants. The years of tracking kids have led Hurt to a conclusion she didn't see coming. "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture. Other researchers also couldn't find any devastating effects from cocaine exposure in the womb. Claire Coles, a psychiatry professor at Emory University, has been tracking a group of low-income Atlanta children. Her work has found that cocaine exposure does not seem to affect children's overall cognition and school performance, but some evidence suggests that these children are less able to regulate their reactions to stressful stimuli, which could affect learning and emotional health.
Coles said her research had found nothing to back up predictions that cocaine-exposed babies were doomed for life. "As a society we say, 'Cocaine is bad and therefore it must cause damage to babies,' " Coles said. "When you have a myth, it tends to linger for a long time." Deborah A. Frank, a pediatrics professor at Boston University who has tracked a similar group of children, said the "crack baby" label led to erroneous stereotyping. "You can't walk into a classroom and tell this kid was exposed and this kid was not," Frank said. "Unfortunately, there are so many factors that affect poor kids. They have to deal with so much stress and deprivation. We have also found that exposure to violence is a huge factor." Frank said that cocaine - along with other illicit drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes - "isn't good for babies," but the belief that they would "grow up to be addicts and criminals is not true. Some kids have stunned us with how well they've done." Jaimee Drakewood came to her last visit at Children's with her 16-month-old son KyMani in tow. It was the 31st time she had met with the researchers. "We do appreciate everything you've done, because it's not easy to get to all these appointments," said team member Kathleen Dooley, as she handed Drakewood a framed certificate of appreciation. "We are proud of you and we feel you are family, because you are." The team plans to stay in touch with study participants each year. They have started a new study that uses MRI and other tools to explore the neural and cognitive effects of poverty on infant development.
"Given what we learned," Hurt said, "we are invested in better understanding the effects of poverty. How can early effects be detected? Which developing systems are affected? And most important, how can findings inform interventions for our children?"
The team considers Jaimee and her mother, Karen, among their best success stories. Jaimee is heading into her senior year at Tuskegee University in Alabama and hopes to become a food inspector. She is home for the summer with her son and working as a lifeguard at a city pool. After a few starts and stops, including a year in jail, Karen Drakewood is off drugs and works as a residential adviser at Gaudenzia House.
Her older daughter just received a master's degree at Drexel University; her son is a student at Florida Atlantic University. Even in the worst moments, Karen Drakewood said she tried to show her kids "what their future could hold." "If a child sees the light, they will follow it." Jaimee Drakewood credits her big sister and mother for keeping her on track. "I've seen my mom at her lowest point and I've seen her at her highest. That hasn't stopped me from seeing the superwoman in her regardless of where she was at," Jaimee said. Despite her family's history, Jaimee believes she and her siblings are "destined to have accomplishments, to be greater than our parents."
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Saturday, July 13, 2013
Will sequestering permanently damage 5% of poor children by depriving them of Head Start?
"This was not the way sequestration was meant to go. The reductions were designed to be so painful -- to both defense and nondefense discretionary programs -- that Republicans and Democrats would flock to the negotiating table to find a compromise. Instead, the effects of sequestration have been uneven, with small pockets of intense upheaval rather than widespread but mild disruptions."
The Sequester's Devastating Impact on America's Poor
It's fashionable in political circles to say the mandatory budgets cuts haven't been the predicted disaster. Cuts to programs like Head Start suggest otherwise.
Nancy Cook
Jul 13 2013
The Atlantic
The federal government's across-the-board sequestration cuts, which began taking effect in March, may seem like an overhyped piece of political theater--that is, unless you're an unemployed adult living in Michigan. There, roughly 82,000 people, like Kristina Feldotte of Saginaw, have watched their federal unemployment checks dwindle by 10.7 percent since late March. That's as much as a $150 per month from payments that, at most, clock in at $1,440.
"It flabbergasts me that our government can't get its crap together," says Feldotte, 47, a mother of four and a laid-off public-school teacher. "With the air-traffic controllers, Congress fixed that right away because it affected the planes going in and out of Washington. But they're not doing anything that benefits the people."
That's especially true of poor people since Congress and the White House failed to reach a deal to undo the cuts in March. Air-traffic controllers and meat inspectors, represented by powerful unions and lobbyists, got reprieves. Agencies such as the Justice and Homeland Security departments found wiggle room in their budgets to stave off furloughs. But programs outside of D.C. for low-income or distressed people -- such as Head Start, Meals on Wheels, or federal unemployment benefits -- have suffered as the cuts kicked in, leading to cancellations, fewer meals, smaller checks, and staff layoffs.
"The impacts of the sequester have been hard to document, but it really is a diminution of services," says Sharon Parrott, vice president for budget policy and economic opportunity at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Take the Meals on Wheels program in Contra Costa County, California, which, like the national program, has had to cut 5.1 percent of its budget. After losing $89,000 in federal funding over a six-month period, the program had to scale back the number of meals it serves from 1,500 to 1,300 a day. This puts its director in the unenviable position of having to choose which low-income or lonely 80-year-olds are less deserving of a meal delivery. "We're only adding new clients in the direst circumstances -- like they will die or be institutionalized if we don't get to them," says Paul Kraintz, director of the county's nutrition program.
The Head Start program in Rockland County, N.Y., had to make similarly tough choices. It managed to keep open its summer program for the youngest children, ages 1 to 3, but had to cancel the summer sessions for 3-to-5-year-olds and lay off 12 staff members to save roughly $240,000, says Ouida Foster Toutebon, executive director of Head Start Rockland. Like the national program, it will lose about 5 percent of its budget -- in this case, $414,925 -- by the end of the fiscal year, September 30. "The parents were upset, because they needed to make other arrangements," Toutebon says.
This was not the way sequestration was meant to go. The reductions were designed to be so painful -- to both defense and nondefense discretionary programs -- that Republicans and Democrats would flock to the negotiating table to find a compromise. Instead, the effects of sequestration have been uneven, with small pockets of intense upheaval rather than widespread but mild disruptions...
The Sequester's Devastating Impact on America's Poor
It's fashionable in political circles to say the mandatory budgets cuts haven't been the predicted disaster. Cuts to programs like Head Start suggest otherwise.
Nancy Cook
Jul 13 2013
The Atlantic
The federal government's across-the-board sequestration cuts, which began taking effect in March, may seem like an overhyped piece of political theater--that is, unless you're an unemployed adult living in Michigan. There, roughly 82,000 people, like Kristina Feldotte of Saginaw, have watched their federal unemployment checks dwindle by 10.7 percent since late March. That's as much as a $150 per month from payments that, at most, clock in at $1,440.
"It flabbergasts me that our government can't get its crap together," says Feldotte, 47, a mother of four and a laid-off public-school teacher. "With the air-traffic controllers, Congress fixed that right away because it affected the planes going in and out of Washington. But they're not doing anything that benefits the people."
That's especially true of poor people since Congress and the White House failed to reach a deal to undo the cuts in March. Air-traffic controllers and meat inspectors, represented by powerful unions and lobbyists, got reprieves. Agencies such as the Justice and Homeland Security departments found wiggle room in their budgets to stave off furloughs. But programs outside of D.C. for low-income or distressed people -- such as Head Start, Meals on Wheels, or federal unemployment benefits -- have suffered as the cuts kicked in, leading to cancellations, fewer meals, smaller checks, and staff layoffs.
"The impacts of the sequester have been hard to document, but it really is a diminution of services," says Sharon Parrott, vice president for budget policy and economic opportunity at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Take the Meals on Wheels program in Contra Costa County, California, which, like the national program, has had to cut 5.1 percent of its budget. After losing $89,000 in federal funding over a six-month period, the program had to scale back the number of meals it serves from 1,500 to 1,300 a day. This puts its director in the unenviable position of having to choose which low-income or lonely 80-year-olds are less deserving of a meal delivery. "We're only adding new clients in the direst circumstances -- like they will die or be institutionalized if we don't get to them," says Paul Kraintz, director of the county's nutrition program.
The Head Start program in Rockland County, N.Y., had to make similarly tough choices. It managed to keep open its summer program for the youngest children, ages 1 to 3, but had to cancel the summer sessions for 3-to-5-year-olds and lay off 12 staff members to save roughly $240,000, says Ouida Foster Toutebon, executive director of Head Start Rockland. Like the national program, it will lose about 5 percent of its budget -- in this case, $414,925 -- by the end of the fiscal year, September 30. "The parents were upset, because they needed to make other arrangements," Toutebon says.
This was not the way sequestration was meant to go. The reductions were designed to be so painful -- to both defense and nondefense discretionary programs -- that Republicans and Democrats would flock to the negotiating table to find a compromise. Instead, the effects of sequestration have been uneven, with small pockets of intense upheaval rather than widespread but mild disruptions...
Sunday, April 29, 2012
The trust molecule: Why are some people trustworthy, while others lie, cheat and steal?
The Trust Molecule
Why are some of us caring and some of us cruel, some generous and some greedy? Paul J. Zakon the new science of morality— and how it could be used to create a more virtuous society.
By PAUL J. ZAK
Wall Street Journal
April 27, 2012
Why are some people trustworthy, while others lie, cheat and steal? Part of the answer may reside in a hormone called oxytocin. Claremont Graduate University's Paul Zak talks with WSJ's Gary Rosen about how a "vampire wedding" helped him understand how this chemical works to control trust, empathy and virtue.
Could a single molecule—one chemical substance—lie at the very center of our moral lives?
Research that I have done over the past decade suggests that a chemical messenger called oxytocin accounts for why some people give freely of themselves and others are coldhearted louts, why some people cheat and steal and others you can trust with your life, why some husbands are more faithful than others, and why women tend to be nicer and more generous than men. In our blood and in the brain, oxytocin appears to be the chemical elixir that creates bonds of trust not just in our intimate relationships but also in our business dealings, in politics and in society at large.
Known primarily as a female reproductive hormone, oxytocin controls contractions during labor, which is where many women encounter it as Pitocin, the synthetic version that doctors inject in expectant mothers to induce delivery. Oxytocin is also responsible for the calm, focused attention that mothers lavish on their babies while breast-feeding. And it is abundant, too, on wedding nights (we hope) because it helps to create the warm glow that both women and men feel during sex, a massage or even a hug.
Since 2001, my colleagues and I have conducted a number of experiments showing that when someone's level of oxytocin goes up, he or she responds more generously and caringly, even with complete strangers. As a benchmark for measuring behavior, we relied on the willingness of our subjects to share real money with others in real time. To measure the increase in oxytocin, we took their blood and analyzed it. Money comes in conveniently measurable units, which meant that we were able to quantify the increase in generosity by the amount someone was willing to share. We were then able to correlate these numbers with the increase in oxytocin found in the blood.
Later, to be certain that what we were seeing was true cause and effect, we sprayed synthetic oxytocin into our subjects' nasal passages—a way to get it directly into their brains. Our conclusion: We could turn the behavioral response on and off like a garden hose. (Don't try this at home: Oxytocin inhalers aren't available to consumers in the U.S.)
More strikingly, we found that you don't need to shoot a chemical up someone's nose, or have sex with them, or even give them a hug in order to create the surge in oxytocin that leads to more generous behavior. To trigger this "moral molecule," all you have to do is give someone a sign of trust. When one person extends himself to another in a trusting way—by, say, giving money—the person being trusted experiences a surge in oxytocin that makes her less likely to hold back and less likely to cheat. Which is another way of saying that the feeling of being trusted makes a person more…trustworthy. Which, over time, makes other people more inclined to trust, which in turn…
If you detect the makings of an endless loop that can feed back onto itself, creating what might be called a virtuous circle—and ultimately a more virtuous society—you are getting the idea.
Obviously, there is more to it, because no one chemical in the body functions in isolation, and other factors from a person's life experience play a role as well. Things can go awry. In our studies, we found that a small percentage of subjects never shared any money; analysis of their blood indicated that their oxytocin receptors were malfunctioning...
Friday, December 02, 2011
District Investigating if Schools Use Poor Kids for Cash
I don't know anything about principals recruiting students, but I have experience of teachers trying to keep kids out of their classrooms, or forcing kids out of their classrooms after they were placed. Usually the teachers tried to get the kids placed in another classroom in the same school rather than in another school. I can say this for certain: some educators do not feel an obligation to help the students in their care; instead, they just try to make their jobs as easy as possible by getting rid of students who require extra effort. Many teachers are lazy when it comes to helping kids who are behind. They just don't want to do it.
I also agree with those who think that sometimes a neighborhood school with less than spectacular scores is better for some children than a school with very high scores. The child is more likely to be taught an an appropriate level.
District Investigating if Schools Use Poor Kids for Cash
by Emily Alpert
Voice of San Diego
Dec. 1, 2011
Imagine this: Principals recruit poor children to come to their schools. The poor children are counted so that the schools get federal money for disadvantaged kids. Then after the money is secure, principals nudge the poor children to leave. They keep the money but drop the kid.
It's a nefarious scenario — schools using children to get money. School board member Shelia Jackson alleges that it happens in San Diego Unified. Now the school district is going to investigate.
Jackson raised her allegations Tuesday night in the middle of a school board debate about how to divide up federal money for poor children. The school board voted unanimously to start an investigation into the allegations, seeing if principals are indeed using kids to bring in cash.
Schools get a share of roughly $21 million in federal money based on their poverty rate. San Diego Unified calculates that rate from the number of families who apply for free or reduced price lunch at each school. It also uses census data to add in local families who are poor enough to apply but didn't...
I also agree with those who think that sometimes a neighborhood school with less than spectacular scores is better for some children than a school with very high scores. The child is more likely to be taught an an appropriate level.
District Investigating if Schools Use Poor Kids for Cash
by Emily Alpert
Voice of San Diego
Dec. 1, 2011
Imagine this: Principals recruit poor children to come to their schools. The poor children are counted so that the schools get federal money for disadvantaged kids. Then after the money is secure, principals nudge the poor children to leave. They keep the money but drop the kid.
It's a nefarious scenario — schools using children to get money. School board member Shelia Jackson alleges that it happens in San Diego Unified. Now the school district is going to investigate.
Jackson raised her allegations Tuesday night in the middle of a school board debate about how to divide up federal money for poor children. The school board voted unanimously to start an investigation into the allegations, seeing if principals are indeed using kids to bring in cash.
Schools get a share of roughly $21 million in federal money based on their poverty rate. San Diego Unified calculates that rate from the number of families who apply for free or reduced price lunch at each school. It also uses census data to add in local families who are poor enough to apply but didn't...
Friday, June 10, 2011
Researchers answer my question, "Why do nice people, like, say, schoolteachers, lie under oath?"
Nice teachers lie under oath. I've long wondered how Chula Vista Elementary School District, and, I'm sure, every other school district in the country, is able to get employees to lie under oath. But here's something I learned when I was deposing teachers: after they've told several lies, they will compensate by telling the truth a few times. I thought it was guilt that caused the switch, but new research indicates I may have been wrong.
Maybe their self-control was depleted.
They wanted to please their employer and their guilty friends. They really did. But it's hard for nice people to tell lies. They have to force themselves to do it. And after a while, some of them simply get fatigued, and what do you know, out pops a little piece of the truth.
"...Exerting self-control...immpaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain."
Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty?
A radical new explanation from psychologists.
Jamie Holmes
The New Republic
June 6, 2011
...In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”
Over the intervening 13 years, these results have been corroborated in more than 100 experiments. Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.”
In addition, researchers have expanded the theory to cover tradeoff decisions, not just self-control decisions. That is, any decision that requires tradeoffs seems to deplete our ability to muster willpower for future decisions. Tradeoff decisions, like choosing between more money and more leisure time, require the same conflict resolution as self-control decisions (although our impulses appear to play a smaller role). In both cases, willpower can be understood as the capacity to resolve conflicts among choices as rationally as possible, and to make the best decision in light of one’s personal goals. And, in both cases, willpower seems to be a depletable resource...
But the core of the breakthrough is that resolving conflicts among choices is expensive at a cognitive level and can be unpleasant. It causes mental fatigue.
Nowhere is this revelation more important than in our efforts to understand poverty. Taking this model of willpower into the real world, psychologists and economists have been exploring one particular source of stress on the mind: finances. The level at which the poor have to exert financial self-control, they have suggested, is far lower than the level at which the well-off have to do so. Purchasing decisions that the wealthy can base entirely on preference, like buying dinner, require rigorous tradeoff calculations for the poor. As Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, “almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It’s distracting, it’s depleting … and it leads to error.” The poor have to make financial tradeoff decisions, as Shafir put it, “on anything above a muffin.”
Last December, Princeton economist Dean Spears published a series of experiments that each revealed how “poverty appears to have made economic decision-making more consuming of cognitive control for poorer people than for richer people.” In one experiment, poor participants in India performed far less well on a self-control task after simply having to first decide whether to purchase body soap. As Spears found, “Choosing first was depleting only for the poorer participants.” Again, if you have enough money, deciding whether to buy the soap only requires considering whether you want it, not what you might have to give up to get it. Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost...
Some promising approaches have already been tried. Starting in 2002, economists Nava Ashraf, Dean Karlan, and Wesley Yin created and analyzed a unique type of savings account at a small rural bank on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. The Green Bank of Caraga’s SEED accounts (Save, Earn, Enjoy Deposits) let clients place restrictions on when they could access their money. SEED clients could set either a date before which or a minimum savings amount below which they couldn’t access their own funds. Twenty-eight percent of existing bank clients who were offered the accounts enrolled in them, and, after one year, the economists found, customers saved over 300 percent more with SEED accounts than they would have without them. The accounts offered an opportunity to circumvent self-control failure, in the same way Ulysses bound himself to the mast to resist the Sirens’ call...
The developed world offers numerous such “commitment products”: certificates of deposit, pension plans, government savings bonds, and education savings accounts, to name a few. But, in the developing world, institutional supports for flagging willpower are far fewer...
COMMENTS:
Michael Dunn said...
Blame the poor. They have bad will power. They have bad genes. They have too many babies. Analyze, medicate and castrate them. It doesn't matter. There will continue to be poor people (primarily the children of other poor people).
Poor people cannot escape their poverty because privileged people are unwilling to share their privilege, and they enact laws and unleash state power to protect their privilege (e.g., union busting, poor houses, bankruptcy "reform," and outright slaughter, as we are seeing in the Middle East).
Furthermore, privileged people inherit the wealth and privilege of their parents, directly through inheritance and indirectly through growing up with financial and social advantages. Poor children, for example, are much more likely to be born with low birth weight, suffer iron deficiency anemia, lead poisoning, malnutrition and numerous other problems that can impair cognitive development and cause learning disabilities. Poor children are read to far less often than middle class children, resulting in an academic achievement gap by the time they are 3. Poor people suffer far more stress than privileged people because of economic uncertainty and because they tend to have low status jobs and little or no control in the workplace. This chronic stress causes the overproduction of cortisol, which impairs memory and learning and increases risk of diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and cancer. Thus, there is a linear relationship between wealth and health.
The only solution to poverty (and the achievement gap, which is due almost entirely to social class differences) is to end poverty by ensuring that all members of society have material security. That can only happen if the privileged make do with less.
Blogger Maura Larkins said...
This article is not saying that the poor have less will-power and self-control. It's saying that MORE self-control is required of them by their circumstances. The circumstances, not the people themselves, perpetuate poverty.
The article also notes that in wealthy countries, people get outside help to force them to save. Money is taken out of their paychecks for pension plans, insurance premiums, etc., basically taking decisions out of their hands.
Maybe their self-control was depleted.
They wanted to please their employer and their guilty friends. They really did. But it's hard for nice people to tell lies. They have to force themselves to do it. And after a while, some of them simply get fatigued, and what do you know, out pops a little piece of the truth.
"...Exerting self-control...immpaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain."
Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty?
A radical new explanation from psychologists.
Jamie Holmes
The New Republic
June 6, 2011
...In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”
Over the intervening 13 years, these results have been corroborated in more than 100 experiments. Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.”
In addition, researchers have expanded the theory to cover tradeoff decisions, not just self-control decisions. That is, any decision that requires tradeoffs seems to deplete our ability to muster willpower for future decisions. Tradeoff decisions, like choosing between more money and more leisure time, require the same conflict resolution as self-control decisions (although our impulses appear to play a smaller role). In both cases, willpower can be understood as the capacity to resolve conflicts among choices as rationally as possible, and to make the best decision in light of one’s personal goals. And, in both cases, willpower seems to be a depletable resource...
But the core of the breakthrough is that resolving conflicts among choices is expensive at a cognitive level and can be unpleasant. It causes mental fatigue.
Nowhere is this revelation more important than in our efforts to understand poverty. Taking this model of willpower into the real world, psychologists and economists have been exploring one particular source of stress on the mind: finances. The level at which the poor have to exert financial self-control, they have suggested, is far lower than the level at which the well-off have to do so. Purchasing decisions that the wealthy can base entirely on preference, like buying dinner, require rigorous tradeoff calculations for the poor. As Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, “almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It’s distracting, it’s depleting … and it leads to error.” The poor have to make financial tradeoff decisions, as Shafir put it, “on anything above a muffin.”
Last December, Princeton economist Dean Spears published a series of experiments that each revealed how “poverty appears to have made economic decision-making more consuming of cognitive control for poorer people than for richer people.” In one experiment, poor participants in India performed far less well on a self-control task after simply having to first decide whether to purchase body soap. As Spears found, “Choosing first was depleting only for the poorer participants.” Again, if you have enough money, deciding whether to buy the soap only requires considering whether you want it, not what you might have to give up to get it. Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost...
Some promising approaches have already been tried. Starting in 2002, economists Nava Ashraf, Dean Karlan, and Wesley Yin created and analyzed a unique type of savings account at a small rural bank on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. The Green Bank of Caraga’s SEED accounts (Save, Earn, Enjoy Deposits) let clients place restrictions on when they could access their money. SEED clients could set either a date before which or a minimum savings amount below which they couldn’t access their own funds. Twenty-eight percent of existing bank clients who were offered the accounts enrolled in them, and, after one year, the economists found, customers saved over 300 percent more with SEED accounts than they would have without them. The accounts offered an opportunity to circumvent self-control failure, in the same way Ulysses bound himself to the mast to resist the Sirens’ call...
The developed world offers numerous such “commitment products”: certificates of deposit, pension plans, government savings bonds, and education savings accounts, to name a few. But, in the developing world, institutional supports for flagging willpower are far fewer...
COMMENTS:
Michael Dunn said...
Blame the poor. They have bad will power. They have bad genes. They have too many babies. Analyze, medicate and castrate them. It doesn't matter. There will continue to be poor people (primarily the children of other poor people).
Poor people cannot escape their poverty because privileged people are unwilling to share their privilege, and they enact laws and unleash state power to protect their privilege (e.g., union busting, poor houses, bankruptcy "reform," and outright slaughter, as we are seeing in the Middle East).
Furthermore, privileged people inherit the wealth and privilege of their parents, directly through inheritance and indirectly through growing up with financial and social advantages. Poor children, for example, are much more likely to be born with low birth weight, suffer iron deficiency anemia, lead poisoning, malnutrition and numerous other problems that can impair cognitive development and cause learning disabilities. Poor children are read to far less often than middle class children, resulting in an academic achievement gap by the time they are 3. Poor people suffer far more stress than privileged people because of economic uncertainty and because they tend to have low status jobs and little or no control in the workplace. This chronic stress causes the overproduction of cortisol, which impairs memory and learning and increases risk of diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and cancer. Thus, there is a linear relationship between wealth and health.
The only solution to poverty (and the achievement gap, which is due almost entirely to social class differences) is to end poverty by ensuring that all members of society have material security. That can only happen if the privileged make do with less.
Blogger Maura Larkins said...
This article is not saying that the poor have less will-power and self-control. It's saying that MORE self-control is required of them by their circumstances. The circumstances, not the people themselves, perpetuate poverty.
The article also notes that in wealthy countries, people get outside help to force them to save. Money is taken out of their paychecks for pension plans, insurance premiums, etc., basically taking decisions out of their hands.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Poverty supresses children's genetic potential, study says
Many teachers say it's the parents' fault that their children are failing, and that teachers shouldn't be asked to do the parents' job. But what if parents simply can't do that job? Are teachers in the right when they wash their hands of their students' fates? I think not. Teachers should continue to do as much as they can for every child, and not say, as I heard one teacher say at Castle Park Elemetary, "I don't have time to help the kids who are behind." Too many teachers feel justified in placing invisible "rejected" stamps on the foreheads of kids who are "too much work."
Jan 10, 2011
Poverty supresses children's genetic potential, study says
Psychologists at University of Texas say the difference is about opportunity, not superior wealthy genes
By Adam Clark Estes
Researchers at the University of Texas claim that poverty may affect how children achieve their genetic potential. Using 750 sets of twins as subjects, the team of psychologists led by assistant professor Elliot Tucker-Drob found that 50 percent of the progress wealthier children show on mental ability tests can be attributed to genetics. Children from poor families, however, showed almost no progress attributable to genetics.
Don't get too carried away with the conclusions this might suggest. Based on this study, rich kids are not genetically superior to children of poverty. They're simply provided with more opportunities to fulfill their potential.
Of course, this conclusion holds some interesting implications for the field of childhood development. From the University of Texas announcement about the findings:
These findings go to the heart of the age-old debate about whether "nature" or "nurture" is more important to a child's development. They suggest the two work together and that the right environment can help children begin to reach their genetic potentials at a much earlier age than previously thought.
As the nation pulls out of the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression, such a breakthrough could serve to shift attention toward taking better care of America's youth.
One out of every five children in the U.S. lives in poverty. That's a lot of lost potential...
Jan 10, 2011
Poverty supresses children's genetic potential, study says
Psychologists at University of Texas say the difference is about opportunity, not superior wealthy genes
By Adam Clark Estes
Researchers at the University of Texas claim that poverty may affect how children achieve their genetic potential. Using 750 sets of twins as subjects, the team of psychologists led by assistant professor Elliot Tucker-Drob found that 50 percent of the progress wealthier children show on mental ability tests can be attributed to genetics. Children from poor families, however, showed almost no progress attributable to genetics.
Don't get too carried away with the conclusions this might suggest. Based on this study, rich kids are not genetically superior to children of poverty. They're simply provided with more opportunities to fulfill their potential.
Of course, this conclusion holds some interesting implications for the field of childhood development. From the University of Texas announcement about the findings:
These findings go to the heart of the age-old debate about whether "nature" or "nurture" is more important to a child's development. They suggest the two work together and that the right environment can help children begin to reach their genetic potentials at a much earlier age than previously thought.
As the nation pulls out of the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression, such a breakthrough could serve to shift attention toward taking better care of America's youth.
One out of every five children in the U.S. lives in poverty. That's a lot of lost potential...
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Census Finds Record Gap Between Rich and Poor
Census Finds Record Gap Between Rich and Poor
AOL News
Sept. 28, 2010
The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its widest amount on record as young adults and children in particular struggled to stay afloat in the recession.
The top-earning 20 percent of Americans - those making more than $100,000 each year - received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4 percent earned by those below the poverty line, according to newly released census figures. That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968...
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Party Down: screwed-up rich people and the ordinary Joes who want to be like them
I watched the first season of Party Down on Netflix instant viewing. I think Netflix is awesome.
Adam Scott and Megan Mullally in "Party Down."
Apr 17, 2010
"Party Down": The best comedy you haven't heard of
Waiters follow their creative dreams to a life of drudgery, while Megan Mullally channels Sarah Palin, brilliantly
By Heather Havrilesky
Starz
Is it shameful to have dreams that might not come true? Most of us keep our dreams hidden, safe from the public's contempt. Why expose yourself and risk being called a dreamer, just another writer who boldly sends his manuscript to a publisher only to get a reject slip back in the mail, or a singer who shows up to the "American Idol" audition, only to have Simon Cowell tell her she's pathetic and untalented and she should go back to flipping burgers? (Easy enough to instruct others to stick to hard labor when you get paid to smirk and roll your eyes all day.)
But then you have the Susan Boyles and the Justin Biebers of the world, tipping the scales in the other direction, giving you hope that your dream might just come true one day. You just have to believe in it with all of your heart!
But are you just deluded?...
This is the driving question at the heart of Starz's "Party Down" (premieres 10 p.m. Friday, April 23), a brilliant half-hour comedy inhabited by creative types — actors and writers — working for a catering company in Los Angeles. The dilemma of the day job — do I keep myself afloat with this meaningless toil, or do I follow my dreams to bankruptcy and beyond? — looms ever present here.
..."Party Down" looks beyond the black-and-white messages our culture sends us about dreams and the creative life and success and failure, to show us the gray area in between. Even though we assume that the acclaimed novelist is automatically happy while the unknown, unpublished novelist is a depressed loser who's wasting his time, success brings far less of a guarantee of happiness than does an enjoyment of the work itself.
The dream may be beside the point entirely. If you enjoy the process and improve and learn every day, then success or failure is a footnote in your story. Likewise, if you're distracted by the spoils, if you're transfixed by a notion of "arriving" or being "done" with work — if you desire the ends more than the means, in other words — you may be dooming yourself to failure...
Adam Scott and Megan Mullally in "Party Down."
Apr 17, 2010
"Party Down": The best comedy you haven't heard of
Waiters follow their creative dreams to a life of drudgery, while Megan Mullally channels Sarah Palin, brilliantly
By Heather Havrilesky
Starz
Is it shameful to have dreams that might not come true? Most of us keep our dreams hidden, safe from the public's contempt. Why expose yourself and risk being called a dreamer, just another writer who boldly sends his manuscript to a publisher only to get a reject slip back in the mail, or a singer who shows up to the "American Idol" audition, only to have Simon Cowell tell her she's pathetic and untalented and she should go back to flipping burgers? (Easy enough to instruct others to stick to hard labor when you get paid to smirk and roll your eyes all day.)
But then you have the Susan Boyles and the Justin Biebers of the world, tipping the scales in the other direction, giving you hope that your dream might just come true one day. You just have to believe in it with all of your heart!
But are you just deluded?...
This is the driving question at the heart of Starz's "Party Down" (premieres 10 p.m. Friday, April 23), a brilliant half-hour comedy inhabited by creative types — actors and writers — working for a catering company in Los Angeles. The dilemma of the day job — do I keep myself afloat with this meaningless toil, or do I follow my dreams to bankruptcy and beyond? — looms ever present here.
..."Party Down" looks beyond the black-and-white messages our culture sends us about dreams and the creative life and success and failure, to show us the gray area in between. Even though we assume that the acclaimed novelist is automatically happy while the unknown, unpublished novelist is a depressed loser who's wasting his time, success brings far less of a guarantee of happiness than does an enjoyment of the work itself.
The dream may be beside the point entirely. If you enjoy the process and improve and learn every day, then success or failure is a footnote in your story. Likewise, if you're distracted by the spoils, if you're transfixed by a notion of "arriving" or being "done" with work — if you desire the ends more than the means, in other words — you may be dooming yourself to failure...
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Billionaire Among Us: How Mexicans See Carlos Slim
Billionaire Among Us: How Mexicans See Carlos Slim
Emily Schmall
AOL News
March 13, 2010
How does a country battered by a lethal drug war and the worst recession since the 1930s react when one of its own, Carlos Slim Helu, is deemed by Forbes magazine to be the world's richest person?
In a word, mixed.
"There's no way for a country with so many poor to have the world's richest man without something being awry," said Pedro Dominguez, a mechanic from Puebla. "The problem is, most Mexican people have no way to attain this kind of wealth."
"He has my respect," countered Rafael Contreras Martinez, a housepainter from Izucar de Matamoros, on his way to a job. "I'm not going to speak ill of a man who has worked and struggled."
Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim walks before a meeting in Cozumel, Mexico in 2009.
Luis Acosta, AFP / Getty Images
Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim uses public transportation and lives in the same Mexico City house he purchased with his wife Soumaya 40 years ago. Here, he heads to a meeting in Cozumel, Mexico, last summer.
Slim, a 70-year-old son of a Lebanese immigrant, built a fortune Forbes pegs at $53.5 billion on the privatization of Mexico's telecommunications. The bulk of that wealth consists of holdings in his companies, which carry an enormous weight in the economic life of Mexico...
Emily Schmall
AOL News
March 13, 2010
How does a country battered by a lethal drug war and the worst recession since the 1930s react when one of its own, Carlos Slim Helu, is deemed by Forbes magazine to be the world's richest person?
In a word, mixed.
"There's no way for a country with so many poor to have the world's richest man without something being awry," said Pedro Dominguez, a mechanic from Puebla. "The problem is, most Mexican people have no way to attain this kind of wealth."
"He has my respect," countered Rafael Contreras Martinez, a housepainter from Izucar de Matamoros, on his way to a job. "I'm not going to speak ill of a man who has worked and struggled."
Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim walks before a meeting in Cozumel, Mexico in 2009.
Luis Acosta, AFP / Getty Images
Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim uses public transportation and lives in the same Mexico City house he purchased with his wife Soumaya 40 years ago. Here, he heads to a meeting in Cozumel, Mexico, last summer.
Slim, a 70-year-old son of a Lebanese immigrant, built a fortune Forbes pegs at $53.5 billion on the privatization of Mexico's telecommunications. The bulk of that wealth consists of holdings in his companies, which carry an enormous weight in the economic life of Mexico...
Saturday, February 06, 2010
South Carolina governor candidate explains Bauer family values: don't feed the poor, or they'll breed like stray dogs
Andre BauerThey will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that.
--Grandmother of candidate Andre Bauer
Maybe Mr. Bauer's grandmother didn't think through her idea of how to get poor people to stop reproducing. A quick glance at world population proves that hunger doesn't end reproduction. Death by starvation, on the other hand, would solve the problem to Grandma's satisfaction, it seems. But so would abortion, and Grandma, as a card-carrying conservative, wouldn't approve of that, would she? The bottom line seems to be that Grandma was advocating a slow, painful death. Surely she didn't mean to do that, did she? I'm guessing Grandma herself may have had some poor ancestors who may have received food from others at some point. She would most likely not advocate that the world would be better off without her. Bauer explains, "My grandmother was not a highly educated woman..." It seems her grandson may not have outpaced her by much.
Oops, wait a minute. I see that Bauer was talking about not feeding kids with subsidized school lunches. Ah, well, that's a different story. If you starve them when they're young, then you would indeed keep them from breeding. So I'll give him credit for logical thinking.
At the same time, I'm wondering if we now have some insight into the motivations of people who oppose government subsidized health care.
So It’s Granny’s Fault?
January 28, 2010
New York Timnes
With its trysting governor and “you lie!” congressman, South Carolina has suffered more than its share of politician-induced embarrassment. Now Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has topped them, cruelly equating government help for the poor to “feeding stray animals.”...
He eschewed what he described as political correctness and sternly called for the state to “curtail that type of behavior” by taking away assistance if the parents of children receiving subsidized lunches don’t show up for school conferences...
In casting himself as the candidate of heartless civics, if not nitwit eugenics, Mr. Bauer at least stirred an encouraging furor. Outraged residents point out that South Carolina has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, with unemployment rising to 12.6 percent in a Great Recession the poor hardly caused. Fifty-eight percent of the state’s students receive subsidized lunches...
South Carolina governor candidate compares poor people to animals
San Francisco Examiner
January 25, 2010
Poor choice of words: South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer compared poor people to animals. (AP)
WHO: South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer
WHAT: Bauer, a Republican candidate for governor, is under increasing criticism after he compared poor people receiving benefits to “stray animals,” saying his grandmother had told him to stop feeding them. “You know why? Because they breed,” he reportedly told a crowd. “You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that.”
Saturday, November 14, 2009
This movie asks why we don't end poverty: How the rich steal from the poor
Nov 13, 2009
Beyond The Multiplex
"The End of Poverty?": How the rich steal from the poor
Does a confrontational new documentary try to resurrect Marx for the 21st century? And is that such a bad idea?
By Andrew O'Hehir
So here's the real question about capitalism, the one nobody really wants to face: Does it create gross inequality as an unfortunate byproduct of its energy and dynamism -- or is gross inequality itself, between rich and poor, between the industrialized North and the underdeveloped South, the principal product of capitalism over the last five centuries?
..."The End of Poverty?" seeks to remind us that the global victory of capitalism over the last 30 years has only brought its flaws into sharper focus. We now live in a world where 20 percent of the population -- that's you and me, bub -- use 80 percent of its resources, where upward of 1 billion people live on $1 a day or less, where 16,000 children die daily from malnutrition and where the people of sub-Saharan Africa, the globe's poorest region, spend $25,000 every minute servicing their massive debt to the rich countries of the North.
All those markers of extreme poverty have gotten dramatically worse since the '80s; despite rapid technological and agricultural progress in the developed world, the number of people suffering from chronic malnutrition has roughly doubled in the past 40 years....
It's become conventional to blame the culture and climate of poor countries and poor people, at least in part, for their own plight, as if corrupt dictatorships, ethnic warfare and raw-material economies were somehow intrinsic to Africa and Latin America. In depressing but largely convincing fashion, Diaz's film argues that all those things were the result of a lengthy historical process. Africa's dysfunctional and often anti-democratic regimes definitely aren't helping matters, for example, but they themselves -- along with the dire poverty they can't manage -- were produced by the European and North American powers' relationship to the global South, from 16th-century colonization right through 21st-century globalization...
Beyond The Multiplex
"The End of Poverty?": How the rich steal from the poor
Does a confrontational new documentary try to resurrect Marx for the 21st century? And is that such a bad idea?
By Andrew O'Hehir
So here's the real question about capitalism, the one nobody really wants to face: Does it create gross inequality as an unfortunate byproduct of its energy and dynamism -- or is gross inequality itself, between rich and poor, between the industrialized North and the underdeveloped South, the principal product of capitalism over the last five centuries?
..."The End of Poverty?" seeks to remind us that the global victory of capitalism over the last 30 years has only brought its flaws into sharper focus. We now live in a world where 20 percent of the population -- that's you and me, bub -- use 80 percent of its resources, where upward of 1 billion people live on $1 a day or less, where 16,000 children die daily from malnutrition and where the people of sub-Saharan Africa, the globe's poorest region, spend $25,000 every minute servicing their massive debt to the rich countries of the North.
All those markers of extreme poverty have gotten dramatically worse since the '80s; despite rapid technological and agricultural progress in the developed world, the number of people suffering from chronic malnutrition has roughly doubled in the past 40 years....
It's become conventional to blame the culture and climate of poor countries and poor people, at least in part, for their own plight, as if corrupt dictatorships, ethnic warfare and raw-material economies were somehow intrinsic to Africa and Latin America. In depressing but largely convincing fashion, Diaz's film argues that all those things were the result of a lengthy historical process. Africa's dysfunctional and often anti-democratic regimes definitely aren't helping matters, for example, but they themselves -- along with the dire poverty they can't manage -- were produced by the European and North American powers' relationship to the global South, from 16th-century colonization right through 21st-century globalization...
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