Consequences Of Poverty

Now let's turn to the second question. Could it be that these psychological consequences of poverty have implications for economic decision-making that make it hard to escape poverty? And there's two ways that you might imagine this could happen. The first is that the stress that's brought on by poverty might affect economic choices in subtle ways. And there's now evidence suggesting that when you're under stress you're much more impatient than you are when you're not stressed. And that's not a good thing if you're supposed to make long-term decisions and investments in things like health care and education. And so unless you, poverty causes stress, stress makes you impatient. And then that impatience doesn't help you to lift yourself out of poverty. But there's a second sense in which the psychological consequences of poverty might exacerbate poverty. And that is that they may simply incapacitate you. So when chronic stress turns into full-fledged clinical depression, it's very hard for people to keep earning a living. So you don't think your efforts will amount to anything. You know no amount of information about returns to education can convince you otherwise. It's hard for you to even get out of bed in the morning and your livelihood crumbles. So this is bad enough when you're wealthy, but it's worse when you're poor. And you don't have as much of a safety net to fall back on. So as a result of this, there's a silent epidemic of depression among the poor. And that's the problem not only for psychological well-being but also for economic outcomes.