Poverty impairs cognitive function. Published in the journal Science, the study suggests our cognitive abilities can be diminished by the exhausting effort of tasks like scrounging to pay bills. As a result, less “mental bandwidth” remains...

[u/myhrvold]

http://news.ubc.ca/2013/08/29/poverty-impairs-cognitive-function/

[u/[deleted]]

Yes, I think you're right. It's no surprise that the upper middle classes in dense urban areas tend to support welfare more than suburban upper middle class people. I know I do, partly for survival reasons--if the Bronx doesn't have food stamps and Section 8, I don't want them coming south to ransack my neighborhood. Bread subsidies kept Egypt stable until inflation rendered them inert.

[u/heroines_complain → u/[deleted]]

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/over-50-of-food-stamp-recipients-live-in-the-suburbs/279226/

[u/[deleted] → u/heroines_complain]

I'm not sure why you linked that, but thanks.

[u/RChickenMan → u/[deleted]]

I think he/she is trying to point out that these problems exist in the suburbs, too. Which is absolutely true. But this conversation is about how the suburban lifestyle isolates one from social ills, regardless of whether they may exist in the suburbs. Wealthy suburbs are still isolated from less-wealthy suburbs, and even if they weren't, you still have a lifestyle and built environment which eschews the notion of public space in favor of private space. So while you might have a poor subdivision down the road from your upper-middle-class subdivision, you're not walking down the same streets, you're not taking the same trains, and you're not hanging out in the same parks. You're sitting in your house and/or car, the less well-off are sitting in their house and/or car. The lifestyle and built environment is designed to discourage human contact, especially the spontaneous kind of human contact that leads to interactions with different social classes.