Dr. Ben Carson has officially become poor people’s worst nightmare. He’s one of the right’s most effective messengers, reinforcing ugly stereotypes about the poor — even when he doesn’t mean to.
That’s what happened when he went on SiriusXM Radio this week to do an interview with his longtime friend Armstrong Williams.
“I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind,” he said.
That elicited immediate and understandable outrage from critics wanting to remind Carson that not having enough to eat or a house to live in is not a state of mind — it is a lived reality. The “right” mindset can’t provide a poor kid with the clothes he needs to survive or the books he needs for school.
Researchers and economists from Stanford and Harvard have shown that where you grow up and which family you are born into have a profound effect on your future earnings and socioeconomic status. In other words, inequality is not simply the difference between those who work hard and make the right decisions and those who don’t. The nature of the neighborhood and county where you grow up — comprised of its schools, recreational outlets, demographics, crime rate — help determine your financial success, or lack thereof, in life.
What’s been dubbed “social capital” by sociologists — the benefit of the doubt when you make a mistake and the networks connecting you to those from a higher economic status — something the already wealthy take for granted, is also a major factor.
Long-term problems created by this country’s history of systemic discrimination is another. Old housing laws that ghettoized minorities and barred them from educational and professional opportunities limited their ability to transcend their economic class — and have lasting effects, even today.
There is also research that details what “toxic stress,” or being forced to grow up in a prolonged state of adversity, can do to a developing brain. It’s not a poverty “mindset” that holds people back, but the actual reshaping of the mind itself.
The New Yorker summed up this research as follows: “But income had its own distinct effect: living in the lowest bracket left children with up to six percent less brain surface area than children from high-income families. At the lowest end of the spectrum, little increases in family earnings could mean larger differences in the brain. … In other words, wealth can’t necessarily buy a better brain, but deprivation can result in a weakened one. A person whose brain has been undermined in this way can suffer long-term behavioral and cognitive difficulties.”
The best remedy for this kind of deprivation? Get kids out of toxic stress situations as early in life as possible and provide them with positive role models and outlets for their creative energy.
It’s disturbing that Carson, a man who knows poverty first-hand and is a pioneer in pediatric neurosurgery, spends so much time arguing in favor of the pull yourself up by your bootstraps philosophy and so little time helping the public understand how prolonged poverty can literally reshape the architecture of the brain.
As head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, maybe the country’s most important inequality-fighting agency, Carson is perfectly positioned to popularize that research and convince more schools, government agencies and others to think through their policies with that reality in mind. Instead, he’s chosen the easier path, one that has turned him into a conservative star even as it diminishes the standing he once had among the people he says he really wants to help.
“You take somebody that has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there,” he said. “And you take somebody with the wrong mindset, you can give them everything in the world, they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom.”
Science and common sense tell us that the root cause of poverty is more complex than that. Donald Trump was born into extreme wealth and has had several bankruptcies. The right “mindset” didn’t help him regain his lost funds. Tax loopholes favoring the wealthy and social capital — including access to rich bankers who gave him second and third chances — did.
I don’t doubt Carson wants to see more people do better. But his current approach would do more harm than good.
