Poverty and identity

Poverty does not only deprive of material resources; it attacks the self — through the chronic stress of scarcity, the social shame that poverty-stigmatizing cultures deploy, and the way that lack of resources forecloses the very self-determination that identity development requires. What psychologists call the 'bandwidth tax' — the cognitive cost of managing scarcity — means that poverty systematically undermines the examined life. The poverty of resources and the poverty of identity are not the same injury, but they compound each other with terrible efficiency.