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.
Juana