The Price of Poverty

But does poverty affect the way people feel, think, and act? This seems like an obvious question, and indeed, it is neither new nor mine: over the centuries, scientists, policymakers, and writers have asked whether poverty has psychological and behavioral consequences. Yet for many years, the question has been difficult to study because asking it has often been confused with blaming the poor for their poverty or attributing to them deficiencies that caused it. One prominent example is a 1965 report [1] by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was assistant secretary of labor at the time, entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” In the paper, Moynihan argued that many poor black families in the United States were caught in a “tangle of pathology” -a combination of absent parents, low educational attainment, unemployment, and delinquency -and urged Washington to step in. Although Moynihan’s aim was to describe external circumstances that made it difficult to escape poverty, not inherent deficiencies within poor families themselves, he was widely perceived as blaming the victims. As a result, his analysis was broadly panned.