Confirming the Effects of Scarcity on the Mind -- and the Body
I've been ruminating on the discoveries in Mullainathan and Shafir's Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much in preparation for discussing it in depth, chapter by chapter. And then I come across an article about how the stress of poverty takes a toll on the body as well as the mind.
As I read the discussion of the concept of "allostatic load," I realized that I'd come across the idea before, but just under a different term. A friend of mine once told me about a doctor he knew who believed that the illnesses of aging were not the result of any specific damage, but of what he called "the cumulative insult of the body." That that continual grinding of all the little daily knocks wears the body down until things begin to fail.
And I'm not surprised that poor people would have more health problems, and not just because of less access to healthcare, or less access to nutritious food. Being poor is stressful. Heck, just being broke is stressful, especially if you don't have a clear path out, or what looks like good paths out turn out to be full of potholes. Constantly juggling income and obligations, dreading any possible unexpected problem that could leave us short, etc. take an enormous amount of our headspace. Worse, they leave us in a constant state of low-grade fear that trips a fight-or-flight response which was pro-survival for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but becomes profoundly dysfunctional in a modern civilization. We can't run away from these stressors, and neither can we attack them, so it just eats at us from the inside out.