Monkeys can teach us a lot about economics. Emotionally, their brains are very similar to ours. As fellow mammals, monkeys and humans both develop strong emotions that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom — emotions that govern our lives, our society, and our economy.
In the early 1990s, a team of psychologists set out to determine how a mother’s attentiveness affects her children as they grow up. They took two groups of monkeys and placed them in two different environments. In the first environment, the mother always had access to food. She didn’t have to spend any time looking for it. She could focus all her attention on her baby. In the second environment, the food was harder to find. The mother had to spend so much time looking for food that she often neglected her child.
The results were tragic. The second group of babies grew up with noticeable despair and anxiety issues. Their brains literally looked different. Their brain cells couldn’t regulate emotions like their healthier peers’. Once they became adults, the second group of monkeys was shy, clingy, weak, and socially awkward. They had trouble making friends, and they never became leaders.
They were forever scarred — and their potential forever stunted — by their distracted mothers.
In a way, the same experiment is taking place in American society today. Some mothers have easy access to the basic necessities of life — food, shelter, clothing, transportation, health care — but many do not. Millions of mothers live paycheck-to-paycheck, working multiple jobs and long hours, leaving them too busy and too exhausted to give their children the same attention as their wealthier peers.
The difference is so drastic that children raised in poverty have brain activity that looks like it’s been damaged by a stroke. Study after study show that these early scars last long into adulthood, affecting everything from job prospects to marital happiness.
It would be cruel and illogical to argue that these children are responsible for their lot in life, but every time I write about income inequality, that’s exactly what I hear. “I strongly disagree with your statement that more people ‘deserve’ the opportunity to succeed,” one reader told me recently. “Success is in everyone’s face. One has to reach out and grab it.”
But clearly not everyone is staring success in the face after childhood. In fact, many children are raised not to reach out and grab it.
Psychologists have spent decades studying the different attitudes that people develop by living in different social classes. According to a recent article in the Annual Review of Psychology, they’ve come to some striking conclusions.
First, higher-income parents encourage their children to follow their dreams. They encourage critical thinking and support expression of likes, dislikes, feelings, and thoughts — and then give them opportunities to pursue those interests. Lower-income parents tend to emphasize toughness and pride in the face of adversity. They emphasize rules that must not be broken — and then let the children figure out the rest on their own.
From there, the children go to school, where higher-income children are given opportunities to work independently, think creatively, and ask questions. Their parents take an active role, challenging practices that they disagree with. Their teachers treat them like adults and reward students who speak up and take initiative. Lower-income children, on the other hand, usually find themselves in a more regimented environment. They walk through metal detectors and aren’t trusted with basic classroom equipment. Their parents want to be involved, but they don’t assert themselves. Their teachers demand respect and reward students who show deference.
By the time they enter the workforce, it isn’t hard to see how these two groups have been ingrained with two different attitudes toward success. The higher-income children have learned leadership skills like taking initiative, treating authorities as equals, and thinking outside-the-box, while their lower-income peers have learned to keep their heads down and do only what they’re told.
For those Americans who have been materially successful, it may seem like everyone else simply chose not to follow the same path, but the reality is that most Americans don’t know how to find that path. And in the greatest tragedy of all, for many Americans in today’s economy, the path may not even exist as long as they live.
==========
This op-ed was originally published in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Huffington Post.
Only a liberal like Anthony Orlando can get away with comparing poor children (who are disproportionately minority) to a monkey. Perhaps the only thing even more despicable is his final thought, “most Americans don’t know how to find that path [of success]”. This is the cynical infantilization of the poor by America’s left. Essentially, Orlando is patting the poor on the head, comforting them by telling them that the liberals will take care of them and slay those nasty dragons (aka rich).
He and his bretheren have forgotten that America is one of the few places in the world where people can rise from their current circumstances. Look at the students of places like Stuyvesant which is filled not with children of the rich, but rather children of hard working middle class (often Asian) families. While there is an inequality of income in this country, there is equally an inequality of education and of family. These problems will not be corrected by more of the left’s redistribution. It will only exacerbate the difference.
It appears that the beat goes on with the conservative complainer on here. He thinks that SCIENCE he doesn’t like the results of is a LIBERAL plot ! In fact, the 8/9 article by Mr. Orlando merely summarizes what anyone who has ever been around the children of wealth versus the children of poverty already know ! The conservative complainer should get out of his gated community or mansion and listen to how the parents of 90% of the rest of America raise their children.
I can tell you a parents’ income level in 5 minutes by talking to their school aged children. There are the children of serfs and there are the other 10% whose parents do NOT deluge them with “chores”, “tough love”,”follow the rules or else” “learn the hard way” “I’ll give you something to cry about if you don’t stop crying” “how dare you question my authority” , “kids should be seen and not heard”, “corporal punishment is absolutely needed to keep kids in line”, “I’ll beat that mouth out of you”, “you have to learn to accept pain”, etc. etc.
93% of kids in poverty have NO CHANCE to be anything but what they are raised to be, except for 7% of them who go on to higher education. The children of the rich have NO CHANCE to fail in school (their parents will find a school at which they will succeed – money talks) and end up in positions of authority regardless of IQ level or pathetic SAT scores (despite expensive SAT test tutoring before the test) and get promoted for having the right connections or having parents who get the mediocre kids with the parents’ legacy status. A kid in a family making $120,000 yearly has over an EIGHTY per cent chance of becoming a college graduate. Despite the fact that IQ scores are distributed equally across all income levels, being rich increases the “success” rate of the average rich kid to ELEVEN times as much as the kids with the same IQ’s who are not rich. You have kids with IQ’s 40 points higher than their bosses taking orders from people who have no clue howo to do their jobs. All because of having rich parents. It is the opposite of what the American dream is – work hard and you succeed. In fact, once the parents get a few million in the bank, all it takes for their children to succeed is to breath. And that gets passed on generation after generation, even with the “Death Taxes” they are forced to pay…