OTOH, poverty is multidimensional in a way that simply giving money to the poor will not (because it cannot) solve. Which is not an argument against giving money to the poor, of course. My point is only that real scholarship on poverty and its many effects actually is useful for more than just academics’ job security. What the article said about identity and aspirational aspects of poverty rang absolutely true to me (aside from what I think was a too ham-handed attempt to shoehorn it under SIL’s language preservation stuff). Source: teacher in urban Title I public school. Indeed, I had some ninth graders identifying pieces of those very issues in a reflection thing I had them write that I just graded (e.g., one girl writing about seeing a connection between slavery and jokes/tropes that you often hear among black kids today about darker versus lighter skinned folks; like, yeah, those are rooted ultimately in theories and perceptions of the majority white society (beginning in the 1600s) about darkness of skin indexing mental and physical abilities in a fairly straightforward (if absurdly crude) way. And it gets filtered through and rooted in perceptions of fucking 14 year olds in this Year of Our Lord 2023 (though, again, not in some linear way; we’re talking about large-scale social and cultural conceptualizations that work themselves out over generational time-scales)).