Slashdot Mirror
Poverty May Affect the Growth of Children's Brains
sciencehabit writes: Stark and rising inequality plagues many countries, including the United States, and politicians, economists, and — fortunately — scientists, are debating its causes and solutions. But inequality's effects may go beyond simple access to opportunity: a new study finds that family differences in income and education are directly correlated with brain size in developing children and adolescents. The findings could have important policy implications and provide new arguments for early antipoverty interventions, researchers say.
It already exists. Blame the liberals.
Smart people pay more in taxes because they are often successful, and they have to prop up the worthless part of society by paying much higher taxes. This holds true until we get to the top .1%, which are so rich they pay almost no taxes because they have an army of lawyers looking for loopholes (most of them written into the system by the super rich for exactly this reason in the first place).
Total government expenditures in the US were around 10% of GDP in 1930. Was the US a lawless hellhole at 10%?
Cause it's around 40% today.
The link is between nutrition and brain development, and considering the odds of poor nutrition is higher in poorer families than in wealthier families, the conclusion does not seem bad at all. Nothing says that all families that live in poverty will have children with developmental problems, but it does argue you're much more likely to see the phenomenon in such families.
I can't imagine why anyone would see this as controversial.
EXACTLY...
For instance, there is a whole generation in North Korea where starvation was common during the second Kim's reign and they show marked problems with mental development if they where malnourished during specific phases of their development. They will NEVER recover, nor will they reach their potential but the real tragedy is that this will affect their children too. So you loose not one but two generations. (According to the documentary I remember watching once.)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The link is between nutrition and brain development
Could it also be related to poorer parents working more hours, thus having less time to be with the kids during their early years playing with them, reading for them and otherwise stimulating their brain development? Or has that been corrected for?
The intentional homicide rate in the 1930s in the US was more than twice what it is today. So, yes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
I don't know why you think so.
Here's an interview on PBS: "I went to visit indigenous people and hunter-gatherers...they don’t get that much meat because hunting is hard work."
Look at the chart half-way down, of some of the hunter/gatherer tribes that still exist. There is huge variety in one they eat....some are mostly meat, some are mostly plants.
The Paleo diet today isn't good for your health.
Unsurprisingly, here is a study in Nature that points out copying Paleolithic diets would not be very useful anyway (not in the least because we've evolved since then, through the Neolithic era).
The paleo diet is yet another fully trademarked fad diet.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From time to time whenever I find myself some free time I take long bus rides which zip through areas of poverty as well as places with posh mansions
I observe what the passengers carry, and eat and it never fails me --- people boarding buses from the poverty stricken areas often feed their children junk, and I mean, junk --- like 'flavored ice' which has been mixed with coloring and sugar, and stuffs like that
Passengers boarding from more wealthy area, I never see children eating those kind of junks
The finding of the sociologists may be sound, but their conclusions have missed a big fact --- that no matter how much money those junk-minded parents get they will still feed their children with junk
There is strong evidence that the lead ban had a direct causal impact on lowering the crime rate post-1990.
But it couldn't have been a factor in 1930 since the lead pollution levels at that time was still ridiculously low. The single biggest contributor: tetra-ethyl-lead (as was used in gasoline) wasn't even invented yet.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *