https://psych-neuro.com/2020/02/28/the-neuroscience-behind-intergenerational-poverty-your-childhood-really-does-shape-you-neurobiologically-too/
When Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz wrote the words below, he was surely not thinking about genetics: "The hypocrisy of America’s claim to be a land of opportunity: Yes, anyone can get ahead, so long as they are born of rich, white parents." Nor, presumably, was Thomas Piketty, Professor at the Paris School of Economics, when he wrote in his new book about wealthy American parents using financial contributions to secure admission to elite universities for children who “would not otherwise qualify.”
Yet the article linked above points to something far more disturbing: inequality may begin before a child is capable of making a single meaningful choice. Childhood poverty can become biologically embedded, leaving measurable effects on brain development itself. In other words, the accident of birth may shape not only the school a child attends, the opportunities available or the wealth eventually inherited, but the very neurological foundations from which that child is expected to compete. Under such conditions, the rhetoric of “equal opportunity” begins to look less like a social reality than a comforting fiction in deeply unequal societies.
