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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonio:
Unicef is rightly celebrating new figures on child mortality—down
below nine million a year for the first time in two decades. That's
10,000 fewer deaths a day, says director Ann Venemen, and that's the
number that got the press—but when I heard it, all I could think was
that if "10,000 fewer" is the good news, what's the bad? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Dana, on your recommendation, I saw the scream-filled, sharply funny Drag Me to Hell this weekend, and I didn't think the protagonist was punished for being a striving woman. I thought she was punished for trying to raise up from her humble farm girl origins... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Ann, I find it interesting that there was a burst of optimism (much of it over-optimistic) about neuroplasticity when it came to Baby Boomers staving off Alzheimer's by doing Sudoku and crossword puzzles. But there seems to be much less when it comes to assessing the effects of poverty stress on young kids. On the one hand, there's a powerful reason for that: It would seem tactless, and tasteless, to speculate (Never mind! Maybe their brains will adjust) when the problem is poverty and a solution needs to be found. On the other, it does reveal, at least a little, how many different assumptions we bring to these issues, how quick we are to succumb to fatalism or revert to the status quo...
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I always feel queasy about such studies, Ann, because of the potential problem you mentioned, namely fatalism. These researchers are writing about the circumstances of poverty, which puts them on the traditional left of the poverty and social policy spectrum. But I'm not sure the effect is all that different from Charles Murray, who made many of us furious when he argued that differences in I.Q. were enduring and a predictor of success. Unlike Murray, the latest crop of brain researchers are careful to steer clear of race issues, or use words such as innate. Instead, they have recast the evils of poverty in the latest neutral neuroscience language. The NAS studies you mention focus on "cognitive development," and "working memory." Still, in reading the study one feels like by age 3 or 4, some permanent architecture has been erected that can't be undone.
In his great book, Whatever It Takes, Paul Tough does a wonderful summary of all the studies that come to a similar conclusion as the one you mentioned. The gist is that early intervention is crucial, because the circumstances of poverty leave children farther and farther behind. I suppose one can't elide or ignore this fact. And Tough's book is about a program—the Harlem Enterprise Zone—that grapples with the evidence. But that program is so comprehensive and well, expensive, that I can't help but think that in this economy, it won't be replicated so easily.
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