Poverty is rising. Will we turn a blind eye‪?‬ 30,000 Days Podcast by Sarb Johal

Listen above to an interview I did today with Bernard Hickey from the excellent The Kākā Substack. It really is rather excellent and I can highly recommend you take a look if you haven’t already.
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Financial insecurity tightly constrains how we experience the world. It also limits the trajectories of life that may be available to us. 
This is not about personal responsibility and having the resourcefulness or energy to ‘choose’ to do something about your situation. Many of these ‘choices’ are not available for us to make - not because we don’t have money at the moment, but because our entire relationship with money and its inter-relationship with how we meet our most fundamental needs have become warped. 
Financial precarity means this is not a level playing field
In modern society, money is very much tied up in our sense of self-worth. I’m not talking about the amount of money you need to buy a flash car, or an iPhone.
I’m talking about the basics.
Not just feeding, clothing and housing ourselves and our loved ones, but also not sticking out and being socially identified as impoverished. Not being that kid with the gaping holes in their uniform, or shoes that are leaky or don’t fit. Or perhaps not having shoes at all.
A life of dignity, not unending shame.
And according to a report by the Child Poverty Action Group in 2017, over 1 in 4 children in New Zealand were living in relative income poverty. It’s unlikely things have got much better, especially in these inflationary times. 
We often think that mental health issues cause poverty. But this simplifies and misrepresents the relationship in all kinds of ways. The link between poverty and children’s mental health is well recognised in a range of international research. This relationship not only affects childhood experience, but also extends out into adulthood too. Not only does impoverishment cause mental health issues, it also means people who are financially insecure just don’t have the bandwidth available, the luxury of being able to think about wide-ranging life issues and pleasurable pursuits in ways that people who are financially stable are able to do.
Scarcity ‘consumes your mental bandwidth’ …
It crashes your IQ by 13-points - that the equivalent to trying to think after being forced to stay up all night without sleep. That’s how powerful scarcity is.
Imagine that, day in, day out. 
Financial insecurity corrodes your adaptive capacity
Think about it like this: when you have financial security, when you have money to deal with short-term stresses that need cash to solve them, you have a reserve of adaptive capacity that helps to smooth out the ups-and-downs of life. Sure, they may throw you off kilter for a while, and while money won’t solve everything, it can go a long way towards solving your problem. Other stresses that pop up during this time will be unpleasant, but are manageable.
People without that cash, without that financial security are going to not only feel that short-term stress a lot more because they know they don’t have the financial means to deal with them, but it then cascades to how they experience further short-term stresses: much more acute, and far more disturbing. 
Constant financial insecurity can also change how we process information
Have a comfortable buffer of cash means that you’re less likely to see the world as a threat all the time. Stresses come and stresses go, but being financially stable enables you not only to think strategically and creatively but also not to ruminate and obsess about how to get yourself out of a tricky situation. Money he