Socioeconomic status
Chapter 2 - Society
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Welcome to the Socieoeconomic status page
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Socioeconomic status (SES) is an economic and sociological combined total measure of a person's work experience and of an individual's or family's access to economic resources and social position in relation to others.
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Core ideas
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Stress and poverty
There is strong empirical support for the notion that poverty gets “under the skin,” meaning that the experience of poverty can lead to long-lasting biological changes in individuals.
Childhood poverty is linked to both increased activity in threat-detecting brain circuitry and decreased activity in self-regulatory circuitry. When a child is extra vigilant to potential threats in the environment at school (e.g., remarks from a teacher or classmate, or a sense of being “behind” her peers) and lacks the tools to reason through and regulate that sense of threat, she is unlikely to be able to focus optimally on learning in the classroom.
Importantly, the same neural mechanisms may confer children growing up in adverse circumstances with “hidden talents” that facilitate their ability to function in harsh, unpredictable environments, including enhanced social perception, attention shifting, and creativity.
| Content source |
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| Disrupting links between poverty, chronic stress, and educational inequality - M. Harms - Science of Learning - 2023 |
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-023-00199-2 |
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Poverty and the all-consuming fretting that comes with it require so much mental energy that the poor have little brain power left to devote to other areas of life, according to the findings of an international study.
The mental strain could be costing poor people up to 13 IQ (intelligence quotient) points and means they are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that amplify and perpetuate their financial woes.
Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton who worked on the research team, said it was not stress in general, but financial worries in particular, that led to a reduced ability to make sound decisions. "The poor are often highly effective at focusing on and dealing with pressing problems," he said. "But they don't have leftover bandwidth to devote to other tasks".
| Content source |
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| Scarcity and cognitive function around payday: A conceptual and empirical analysis - CSAE Working Paper WPS/202004 |
| https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/709885?journalCode=jacr#:~:text=It%20is%20of%20course%20plausible,scarcity%20could%20diminish%20cognitive%20function. |
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Complex inequality
Something paradoxical has crept into the thinking about socioeconomic health differences over the past decades. The indicator with which we visualize vulnerable groups and complex problems has become both the explanation of the problem and the direction of a solution over time. Socioeconomic status (SES), often measured using education level, income, or professional status, is a good predictor of differences in (perceived) health. However, this has also led to a narrowing of the approach in many areas. It is now mainly focused on compensating for lack of knowledge by means of information, strengthening individual skills and promoting one's own healthy behaviour. That is good but not enough to achieve the set health goals.
If we want to tackle health inequalities at their core, a broad view of society's resilience is needed to supplement existing policy. It is good to realize that we are now seeing the result of what happened years ago, not of what is happening now. It is like looking at the stars: what we now observe in terms of health inequalities is partly the result of a policy that was implemented years and sometimes decades ago. That also contributes to the complexity.
| Content Source |
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| Gezondheidsverschillen voorbij - RVS (Dutch) |
| https://adviezen.raadrvs.nl/gezondheidsverschillen-voorbij/ |
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Stress is a symptom of something else. And we must dare to tackle that cause behind the cause. Otherwise, we are doing nothing more than treating the symptoms. We must first address the complex social inequality when we talk about health and health inequalities. Inequality makes us sick. It is so complex that there is often a build-up and interaction of inequalities. And these inequalities cause stress. That is true. Because the more you are confronted with an inextricable accumulation of problems, which also influence each other, the less your ability to solve them becomes. After all, it is about both existential insecurity and precarious housing. Or debts and an unstable family situation. Or low literacy and a migration background. Or a migration history and discrimination. Who wouldn't get stressed from it? But do we help people if we teach them to deal with stress?
| Content Source |
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| Robert Vonk - Sociaal bestek - Stress is het probleem niet (Dutch) |
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Do you want know more?
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World inequality
| World Inequality Database |
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| The World Inequality Database (WID) aims to provide open and convenient access to the most extensive available database on the historical evolution of the world distribution of income and wealth, both within countries and between countries. |
| https://wid.world/ |
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What science can tell us?
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| Ingrid Robeys - Why Economic Inequality Should be Central to Strategies for the Future - Journal of Human Development and Capabilities - 2025 |
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| I develop and defend the claim that we, humanity, will not be able to get significantly closer to a world in which there is ecologically sustainable human development if we do not tackle economic inequalities head-on. This implies that we should focus not only on poverty but also on the entire distribution of income and wealth, including extreme wealth concentration. For national and international policymaking, this means that reducing economic inequality must be one of the central priorities rather than assuming that it is indirectly covered by other social goals such as poverty reduction or formal equality of opportunities, or assuming that it is a problem that will solve itself over time under globalised neoliberal capitalism. |
| https://doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2025.2479028 |
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| Inclusion Health - The Lancet - 2018 |
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| The social gradient in health describes a graded association between an individual's position on the social hierarchy and health: the lower the socioeconomic position of an individual, the worse their health.1 The fact that the social gradient extends from the highest echelons of society to the lowest suggests that everyone is affected to a greater or lesser extent by the social determinants of health. |
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32848-9/fulltext |
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| Stress and Eating Behaviors - PubMed - 2014 |
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| Understanding the associations and interactions between stress, neurobiological adaptations, and obesity is important in the development of effective prevention and treatment strategies for obesity and related metabolic diseases. |
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4214609/ |
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| M. Tong - Making “Good” Choices: Social Isolation in Mice Exacerbates the Effects of Chronic Stress on Decision Making - Front. Behav. Neurosci. - 2020 |
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| Chronic stress can impact decision-making and lead to a preference for immediate rewards rather than long-term payoffs. |
| https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00081/full |
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