Posted on 06/11/2015 10:54:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
In the 1970s, crime was soaring, and American policymakers had all sorts of ideas for how to reduce it: longer sentences, more police, prison reform and more. But one of the most potent remedies was not conceived as a way to combat crime.
To clean up the environment and improve public health, the federal government banned lead in paint and gasoline. By diminishing lead, though, it reduced the harm it was doing to young brains -- harm that could push kids into delinquency. Curbing lead exposure was a big reason for the decline in violent crime that began in the 1990s.
Americans regard theirs as the land of opportunity, which makes the persistence of black poverty baffling and even exasperating. After all, the road out of permanent destitution is not hard to identify. Why do so many people refuse to take it?
Rick Santorum made this point when he ran for president in 2012. Experts, he asserted, have documented that as a rule, you have to do just three things to avoid poverty: "work, graduate from high school and get married before you have children."
There's much value in that formula. But putting it to use requires certain capacities. What research has starkly revealed is that poverty and other problems afflicting many black neighborhoods have a way of stunting the attributes needed to overcome them. There is a biology of poverty that is not easy to overcome.
One of the things you need to pull yourself up is a healthy brain. But poor people can't take that as a given. One enemy of sound mental function is lead, which seriously impairs cognitive development.
In 1995, as the Chicago Tribune's Michael Hawthorne recently reported, more than 80 percent of kids in some of Chicago's poorest areas had dangerously high lead levels. If you know the rate of lead poisoning among children younger than 6 in a Chicago neighborhood in 1995, he found, you can predict with uncanny accuracy its current rate of violent crime.
The kids whose brains were attacked by lead back then are now young adults. Many of them show the effects in lower intelligence and less self-control. Even today, poor African-American areas are unusually prone to lead poisoning.
But lead is just one of several hazards. Blacks are far likelier than other groups to live in areas of concentrated poverty. They pay a high price for that luxury.
A study this year in the journal Nature Neuroscience found that poor children, on average, actually have smaller brains than affluent ones. New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey concludes that "the effect of being raised in a family that lives in a poor neighborhood over two consecutive generations is roughly equivalent to missing two to four years of schooling."
Kids raised in these places suffer other problems besides material deprivation. Poor parents are less likely to read to and talk with their children. Violence is far more common than in other places, and violence has invisible but severe consequences -- not just on direct victims but on other residents.
Children who feel unsafe at school, who are disproportionately black, do measurably worse academically. Those who witness shootings or suffer violent attacks may develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
Chronic violence carries hazards for the mind, as well as the body. "Simply put," writes Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey, "people who are exposed to high levels of stress over a prolonged period of time are at risk of having their brains rewired in a way that leaves them with fewer cognitive resources to work."
Having fewer cognitive resources makes it harder to do those three things Santorum recommended. Getting and keeping a job is harder -- and the job you get will pay less than it might otherwise. Completing high school is harder. Exercising self-discipline and using contraception are harder.
It may be said in response that many whites and immigrants managed to overcome humble beginnings. That's true. But most of them didn't have to grow up in places where poverty, environmental contamination and gunplay were as pervasive as they are in many urban black areas.
Some kids can triumph over all these. But the chronic onslaught of adversity ensures that many, if not most, will be tripped up.
When these young people fail, a lot of Americans will blame them for not doing simple, obvious things to improve their lives. In reality, much of their fate is beyond their control.
This doesn’t pass the sniff test. Lead toxin?
Cause rich people took they stuff!
Cause the government pays them to.
The real reasons for group poverty: (1) generally low intelligence; (2) poor impulse control.
Nobody who is serious about getting out of poverty will fail. This country offers opportunities to everyone willing to work even at half speed.
If a person is poor, you can assume bad character.
What BS. The only lead issue is the lead in their behinds that they can’t get out to work for a living.
Because money invested in drugs and booze hos doesn’t pay much return.
does adversity breed laziness.....
or, does laziness breed adversity
“What research has starkly revealed is that poverty and other problems afflicting many black neighborhoods have a way of stunting the attributes needed to overcome them.”
Well, then we should see the same persistent, generational problems among poor whites. Why don’t we?
Because they think poor and imagine poor.
Another thing that predisposes people to failure is to have at hand multiple ready excuses for failure.
With a government as corrupt at this, did anyone expect the American standard of living/incomes and affordability would be increasing?
lol...
I'd say the lead poisoning in Appalachia is probably worse....yet are those people attacking others at will?....no....
and speaking of the poor, the poor exist in enormous numbers in places like India, and South America and Africa....yet do those young people go around shooting sales clerks in the face after facing NO resistance whatsoever?....do they shoot little girls while being held on their grandpa's lap on the porch?
a good number of the "poor" in this country are poor because they live poor...no manners, no politeness...no education...no respect...no saving money because they do not want to work....
Poverty is not a matter of money, it is a state of mind.
And poverty, like wealth, may be inherited, not entirely created by circumstances.
The necessary skill sets to accumulate and manage money are something that can be taught, but there are those who decline the apprenticeship, because it is “too hard”, or it is some kind of “surrender”, or any number of self-defeating strategies are adopted to protect oneself from the “responsibilities” of having and caring for possessions.
Some 95% of the personal woe in this world is self-induced.
the biggest overall cause of poverty anywhere is the State and its policies. The more active they are, the more the chance exists for poverty.
Uh, Oh...
This just in... UC Faculty Training: Saying ‘America Is the Land of Opportunity’ Is a Microaggression.
-PJ
If this is true about lead and crime/poverty, then whites would have shown the same tendencies prior to lead abatement activities. They don’t. Culture is the difference.
I confess to not reading the entire article ... but is there any reason that children should be able to ingest lead these days?
As the article said, lead paint was abolished.
I’ll read the rest when I get home.
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