Social Determinants of Health: The Canadian Facts
Poverty does bad things to your brain
Futurity, (2013).
A new study suggests that being poor may keep some people from concentrating on ways that would lead them out of poverty. Cognitive function is diminished by the constant and all-consuming effort of coping with the immediate effects of having little money, such as scrounging to pay bills and cut costs.
So a person is left with fewer “mental resources” to focus on complicated, indirectly related matters such as education, job training, and time management.
A series of experiments show that pressing financial concerns have an immediate impact on the ability of low-income individuals to perform on common cognitive and logic tests. On average, a person preoccupied with money problems exhibited a drop in cognitive function similar to a 13-point dip in IQ, or the loss of an entire night’s sleep.
COSTLY MISTAKES
The fallout of neglecting other areas of life may loom larger for a person just scraping by, Shafir says. Late fees tacked on to a forgotten rent payment, a job lost because of poor time-management—these make a tight money situation worse. And as people get poorer, they tend to make difficult and often costly decisions that further perpetuate their hardship.
“They can make the same mistakes, but the outcomes of errors are more dear,” Shafir says. “So, if you live in poverty, you’re more error prone and errors cost you more dearly—it’s hard to find a way out.”
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Hennessy, J. (2011).
A number is never just a number. Hennessy Index.
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Conference Board report card gives Canada a B, ranked 7th out of 17
developed countries.
Canada's Middle Class Falling Behind Everyone Else, Report To Flaherty Finds
Tencer, D. (2013). Huffington Post Canada: Mind the Gap.
If you’re wealthy in Canada, things have been good for you in recent decades. And if you’re poor, you’ve likely seen some wage gains and increased support from the government in the form of tax decreases.
But if you’re in the middle, you’ve likely been getting nowhere — or, at best, getting somewhere thanks to ever-larger debt loads.
According to the Finance Ministry report, Canada’s middle earners saw income grow a measly seven per cent between 1976 and 2010, when adjusted for inflation. That’s just 0.2 per cent per year.
Meanwhile, the top one-fifth of earners saw their incomes grow 38 per cent during that period, adjusted for inflation. For the country as a whole, the overall rate was 18 per cent.
The median wage in Canada (the wage right in the middle of all wages) fell six per cent during the same period, suggesting a larger proportion of Canada’s workers are in low-wage jobs.
“Middle-class families have not received significant hourly wage increases. This is true in absolute [terms] and relative to other income groups,” the Post quoted the presentation as saying.
The numbers more or less square up with other research. In a report released earlier this year, TD Bank found that low- and middle-wage jobs are shrinking as a portion of the economy, as job growth concentrates more and more in the high-wage category.
This “hollowing out” of middle class jobs is different from the phenomenon seen in the U.S., where job growth has been stronger at both the top end of the labour market and at the bottom end, while middle-wage jobs suffer. But in Canada, both middle- and low-wage jobs are shrinking (relatively), while only high-end jobs are growing as a share of the economy.
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