Does growing up poor harm brain development?
There is a study often cited by Thomas Sowell, which is never, ever mentioned by those on the political left in the US and never mentioned by the far right in the US -- as it goes against the narrative of both those groups. The study found that the school aged children of African American servicemen in Germany had the same average IQ as their classmates.<p>Something we&#x27;re doing to large numbers of urban children in the US is morally equivalent to putting lead in the water. It&#x27;s largely been the political left in the US which has had control of large urban areas. The culture of the US in the 1st half of the 20th century wasn&#x27;t harmful in this way. Poles and Italians were able to increase their average IQ&#x27;s to parity with the US as a whole in that period. African Americans were also making progress in that period, but this stopped in the 1960&#x27;s.<p>One of the historical patterns which comes across in Thomas Sowell&#x27;s work is that of minority elites continuing the cultural isolation of their own group to maintain their own power. One of the chief tools of maintaining cultural isolation is identity politics.