Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

Why We Should All Be Severely Allergic (Anaphylactic) to Poverty. 

A charge sheet for the Have-Nots, and a plea to the Have-Lots to stop romanticising the dock.

An allergy is the body refusing to negotiate. Pollen arrives and the immune system does not ask about the pollen’s childhood, its hardships or its hustle. It does not say shame, it is trying. It reacts. Loudly, inconveniently, and sometimes out of proportion, but it reacts.
South Africa has developed the opposite condition towards poverty. We have tolerance. We have been exposed so often, for so long, that the body no longer flinches. Poverty has become weather. We talk about it the way we talk about Highveld hail: unfortunate, seasonal, nobody’s fault, and occasionally beautiful in photographs.

I grew up across Gugulethu, Valhalla Park, eXesi and Khayelitsha. I did not learn about poverty from a report. But I have also now spent 28 years inside Unilever, Vodacom, Nike, Google and Canva, which means I have sat in many rooms where poverty was discussed by people who had only met it in reports, and a few rooms where it was discussed by people like me, who had met it in person and then, somewhere along the way, started speaking about it with a fondness it has not earned.
Last month, in Broke Is Not the Same as Behind, I separated poverty (not having enough) from inequality (having less than the person next to you). This piece is the sequel. Once we agree on what poverty is, the next questions are what it does to a person, and why so many of us who escaped it keep defending its reputation.

My answer to the first question is a charge sheet. My answer to the second is an accusation, and some of it is aimed at the mirror.

To Be a Have-Not Is to Win.
Poverty is a lottery in which every ticket wins. The prizes are simply ones nobody queued for. Here is the prize list, sorted into five counts. For each one I have tried to give you the global science and the South African mirror, and, where my own first draft of this list overstated the case, I have said so. An argument against poverty does not need exaggeration, moralisation and minimisation. The true numbers are heavy enough.

Count one: the body keeps the score and invoice. born in poverty more likely to die in poverty.

Faster ageing. Arline Geronimus called it weathering: the cumulative biological wear of living under chronic threat and chronic shortage. Newer tools, the epigenetic clocks that estimate biological age from chemical marks on DNA, have made the idea measurable. Studies using these clocks find that children raised in disadvantaged homes and neighbourhoods are already ageing faster, biologically, than their better-off peers before they finish school. The stress hormones that are meant to save your life in a crisis become corrosive when the crisis never ends.

A shorter life. In the United States, Raj Chetty and colleagues found that the richest 1% of men outlive the poorest 1% by nearly fifteen years, and the gap for women is about ten. South Africa does not publish life expectancy by income bracket in the same way, so be careful with anyone who quotes you a precise local gap. What we do know is the national average, which my first draft had wrong. Stats SA’s 2025 mid-year estimates put life expectancy at birth at 64.0 years for men and 69.6 for women. That average blends Sandton and Sterkspruit into one number, which hides more than it shows.

A sicker life. The UNDP’s Multidimensional Poverty Index counts roughly 1.1 billion people who are poor across health, schooling and living standards at once. In South Africa the sharpest edge is food. Stats SA found severe food insecurity (the kind where a household has run out of food and may go a day or more without eating) rose from 6.4% of households in 2019 to 8% in 2023. A 2026 study of households already relying on community kitchens, by FoodForward SA and UCT’s SALDRU, is worse still: 70% of those households face moderate-to-severe food insecurity, one in four go entire days without food, and nearly 78% of parents say they talk to their children directly about there not being enough. And the damage lands earliest on the smallest bodies. The Children’s Institute’s 2024 Child Gauge reported that 7 in 10 young children live below the poverty line and 3 in 10 are stunted. Stunting is not a weight problem that a good December can fix. It is a height-and-brain problem that follows a child into the classroom, the interview and the clinic.

Count two: the mind pays a tax
Aenemic Cognitive Bandwidth. This is the count closest to my own discipline, so let me be precise. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir showed that scarcity captures attention. It narrows the mind onto the immediate shortfall (they call it tunnelling) and leaves less bandwidth for everything else. In one of their studies, the same Indian sugarcane farmers performed measurably worse on cognitive tests before harvest, when money was tight, than after harvest, when it was not. Same farmers. Same brains. Different bank balance. That study matters because it destroys the lazy reading of my own list. My draft said poverty leads to heuristics, short-term thinking, risk aversion and hyperbolic discounting. True, but the order of causation is the point. Johannes Haushofer and Ernst Fehr reviewed the evidence in Science in 2014 and concluded that poverty produces stress and negative emotion, which in turn produce short-sighted and risk-averse choices, which in turn keep people poor. It is a loop, not a character. And a 2020 review in Science by Ridley, Rao, Schilbach and Patel found that poverty and mental illness cause each other, and that cash transfers measurably reduce depression and anxiety.

The biases are not a trait of poor people. They are what any brain does under scarcity. Put a Sandton CEO on R370 a month and watch how quickly he discovers hyperbolic discounting.

Trust and social capital. Here I have to correct my own list, and I get to use my own earlier argument to do it. My draft said the poor have low to zero social capital. That is wrong, and I argued the opposite in Isandla Sihlamba Esinye (Social Capital). Townships run on stokvels, burial societies, church networks and the aunt who knows everybody. What poor communities have in abundance is bonding capital: ties to people like themselves. What they lack is bridging and linking capital: ties to people and institutions that hold the doors, the jobs and the budgets. Poverty does not make you friendless. It makes your friends poor.

Stress and happiness. The 2023 reconciliation between Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers settled an old argument: for most people, wellbeing keeps rising with income well past the old ceiling, and the part of the curve where money matters most is at the bottom. Money cannot buy happiness is a sentence mostly spoken by people who have never had to choose between taxi (iphela) fare and bread.

Count three: the classroom leaks
Dropping out. Nic Spaull’s widely cited funnel puts it roughly like this: of every 100 South African children who start Grade 1, about 60 reach matric, about 40 pass it, about 14 enter university, and about 6 earn a degree within six years. Most of that leakage happens before the child is old enough to be blamed for it. PIRLS 2021 found that 81% of our Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning. A child who cannot read at ten is not a dropout at sixteen. He was dropped at ten.
Believing education is useless. My list included the belief that school does not pay. The honest answer is that this belief is rational locally and wrong on average. When most of the young people on your street are unemployed (and for South Africans aged 15 to 24 the rate is above 65%), the evidence in front of you says certificates do not work. But the national data says a degree remains one of the strongest protections against unemployment this country offers. Poverty’s cruelty here is informational: it shows you the worst sample and hides the best one.
Fewer inventors. The Lost Einsteins study by Bell, Chetty, Jaravel, Petkova and Van Reenen found that American children born into the top 1% were about ten times more likely to become inventors than children from below-median homes. Even maths prodigies from poor families rarely went on to patent anything. The strongest predictor was exposure: children who grew up around inventors became inventors. The talent was evenly spread. The doorway was not. So when my draft says the poor are less likely to invent a Tesla, the correct reading is that we are throwing away Teslas.

Count four: the home is overloaded
Parenting on empty. My draft wrote poor parenting, and I want to rephrase that before anyone else does. The parenting is not poor. The parent is poor, and time-poor. Spatial apartheid put the workers far from the work, so millions of parents leave before the children wake and return after they sleep. That is not neglect. It is a commute designed in the 1950s still collecting its toll. Layer migrant labour on top, which I have written about in Ubaba Akekho and Ufile Kimi, and you get fatherhood by remittance.
Marriage and single parenting. My draft cited a precise figure for South Africa having the lowest share of married women in Africa. I could not verify it, so it is out. What the research does support is the mechanism. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas found that poor women do not value marriage less; they value it so highly that they wait for a financial stability that may never arrive, while children do not wait. Here, Dorrit Posel and Stephanie Rudwick have shown how the rising cost of ilobolo acts as a financial barrier to marriage. The result is the same everywhere: fewer marriages, more single parents, more mouths per earner.
The environment. Poverty is loud, crowded and exposed. Gary Evans’s work on cumulative risk shows that it is not one stressor but the stacking of noise, crowding, poor housing and danger that does the damage. And it is spreading into places we think of as safe. The Children’s Institute reports that child poverty in Gauteng rose from 35% in 2019 to 54% in 2024, and urban child poverty nationally from 41% to 56%. Johannesburg is not immune to what it used to watch on the news.

Count five: the street and the wallet
Crime. My draft called South Africa the fifth most dangerous country in the world and cited crime as costing 10% of GDP. Both claims trace back to crowd-sourced indices and loose estimates, so I have dropped them. The official figures need no help. SAPS recorded 24,692 murders in 2024/25, down more than 10% from a peak of 27,621 the year before. That is still around 40 murders per 100,000 people, several times the global average. In SAPS’s station rankings for late 2024, the three  worst stations for murder in the country were Nyamga east, Mfuleni and Delft. Those are not the Cape Flats. That is the geography of my black  childhood. Violence, like hunger, does not distribute itself evenly.
The poverty premium. Being poor is expensive. You buy in small quantities at a higher unit price because you cannot afford bulk. You borrow from the mashonisa (loan shark) at rates commonly reported at 30% to 50% a month, far above anything the National Credit Act allows, because the bank will not lend to you. You pay for time with more time: queues, taxis, clinics. And the state’s floor is below the floor. The official food poverty line, the bare minimum for basic nutrition, was R855 per person per month in May 2025 prices, while the SRD grant for unemployed adults pays R370.
Climate. The World Inequality Lab’s Climate Inequality Report 2023 estimates that the poorest half of humanity bears roughly three-quarters of climate-related income losses while contributing least to the emissions. In the Highveld and the Vaal, the poor breathe what industry exhales.

The Genes Are Not the Villain.
The most dangerous line in my original notes was the one about polygenic indices, because it can be read as saying the poor are poor because of their genes. That reading is old, it is ugly, and in this country it has a body count. So let me state the science carefully.
A polygenic score is fixed at conception. Poverty cannot reach into your DNA and lower it. What poverty can do is stop your DNA from expressing what it carries. In 2003 Eric Turkheimer and colleagues found that among affluent American families, a large share of the variation in children’s IQ was associated with genes, while among the poorest families that share was close to zero. Environment was doing almost all the work, and the work it was doing was suppression. Elliot Tucker-Drob and Timothy Bates later pooled the evidence and found the pattern held in the United States but largely disappeared in Western Europe and Australia, where the social floor is higher.
Poverty does not lower the ceiling written inside you. It lowers the ceiling of the room you are standing in.

Two further cautions. First, most polygenic scores were built from people of European ancestry and predict poorly in African populations, which I unpacked in Isiqingatha. Anyone waving a polygenic score at a South African township child is waving the wrong instrument. Second, the Tucker-Drob and Bates finding is the most hopeful sentence in this essay: raise the floor and genetic potential stops being wasted. That is not an argument for charity. It is an argument for infrastructure.

Stop Glamorising the Dock.
Which brings me to the second question. If poverty is this costly, why do so many comfortable people, and some formerly poor people, speak of it so warmly?

Because a romanticised poverty is a convenient poverty. If scarcity builds character, nobody needs to fix it. If resilience is beautiful, nobody needs to fund the plumbing. The Have-Lots do not usually defend poverty directly. They do something subtler: they give it good PR. Here are the five campaigns I see most often.

Two fairness notes, because I do not want to commit the sin I am accusing others of. Resilience is real. Ann Masten calls it ordinary magic, and I have seen it in every township I have lived in. But resilience is the cost of a bad system, not its product. Admiring it is fine. Relying on it is theft. Second, not every township tour is exploitation. When residents own the business, set the story and keep the income, it can be the opposite. The test is simple: who holds the microphone, and who holds the money?

The exhibit is me.
Now the mirror. People like me ( and even more successful than me – Siya Kolisi, Trevor Noah, Black Coffee, Somizi et al),  are the most useful weapon the poverty  glamour industry has. The boy from Gugulethu, Khayelitsha, eXesi village  with a PhD, an MBA  a C level title, and a corner office is the living advert: see, it can be done. Every time I tell my story, everytime Siya, Trevor, Nathi, somebody in the audience hears proof that the system works, when what my (our) story actually proves is that the system occasionally fails to stop someone.

Abraham Wald understood this in the Second World War. The engineers wanted to armour the parts of returning bombers that had the most bullet holes. Wald pointed out that those were the planes that came home. The holes that mattered were on the planes that did not. The escaped testify for the system. The ones it kept cannot take the stand. My scouting, my USA  scholarship, living and working abroad, the mentors who opened doors I did not know existed: that is linking capital, not character. The Lost Einsteins finding describes my life exactly. Exposure, not Exceptionalism.

When a man who escaped poverty praises it, he is thanking the flood for teaching him to swim, while standing on the bodies of those it drowned.

What an Allergy Would Look Like.
An allergy is not guilt. Guilt is a feeling; an allergy is a reaction. Here is what reacting would look like.

1. Change the language. Retire humble beginnings as a compliment. Poverty was not humble; it was humiliating. Say I grew up poor, and it cost me and the people around me. Precision is respect.
2. Fund floors, not ceremonies. The evidence on cash is strong. The GiveDirectly trials in Malawi, Kenya (Haushofer and Shapiro) found unconditional transfers improved consumption, assets and psychological wellbeing, and in South Africa research on the Child Support Grant has linked earlier receipt to better child growth. A grant set below the food poverty line is not a floor. It is a trapdoor with a carpet on it.
3. Audit the payslip before the press release. If you are a company, publish the ratio between executive pay and the median worker before you publish the shoe-donation photo. The cheapest anti-poverty programme you run is your wage bill.
4. Manufacture exposure. If inventors produce inventors, then mentors produce mentees. That is why CMB and the Men’s Resource Groups exist, and why #TakeYourChild asks fathers to bring children into rooms they would never otherwise see. Bridging capital does not happen by accident. It is built one introduction at a time.
5. Vote on the floor. On 4 November 2026 South Africans vote in the local government elections. Water, electricity, refuse, clinics and safe streets are the physical floor of every count on this charge sheet, and they are municipal. Ask every candidate which floor they will raise, by when, and with what budget.

The Allergy Audit: six questions to ask yourself
Q1. When I tell my story of coming from nothing, do I tell the cost as honestly as the triumph?
Q2. Have I ever used the word resilient about a community to avoid using the word underfunded?
Q3. Who held the doors I walked through, and whose door am I holding right now?
Q4. Do I judge the short-term choices of poor people by standards I only meet because I have bandwidth to spare?
Q5. If my company or congregation is doing charity, can I name the cause it is leaving untouched?
Q6. Would the child I was recognise the way I now talk about the place I came from?

Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu.
A person is a person through other people. We usually quote that line to celebrate community. Today I want to quote it as a warning. If my personhood is bound up with yours, then your hunger is my malnutrition, your stunting is my lost Einstein, your two-hour commute is my child’s absent father, and your mashonisa is my interest rate. Poverty is not their problem that we are kindly concerned about. It is a disease in the body we share.

My name, Mzamo, means try. I am proud of it. Trying is a virtue. But having to try twice as hard for half as much is not a virtue. It is a tax. And the day we stop admiring people for paying that tax, and start being allergic to the fact that it is levied at all, is the day this country begins to heal.

Be Anaphylactic. React. Loudly, inconveniently, and in proportion to the harm.

Sources (References)  and notes.
– Statistics South Africa, Mid-Year Population Estimates 2025; Stats SA    food-security report comparing 2019, 2022 and 2023.
– FoodForward SA & SALDRU (UCT), State of Household Food Insecurity in South Africa 2026.
Children’s Institute (UCT), South African Child Gauge 2016, 2024 and 2025; Children Count child-poverty indicators.
– SAPS annual crime statistics 2023/24 and 2024/25; SAPS Q3 2024/25 station rankings.
World Bank, June 2025 update to global poverty lines. UNDP, Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2024.
– Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir & Zhao (2013), Science. Haushofer & Fehr (2014), Science. Ridley, – Rao, Schilbach & Patel (2020), Science.
– Chetty et al. (2016), JAMA, on income and life expectancy. Bell, Chetty, Jaravel, Petkova & Van – – – Reenen (2019), QJE, “Who Becomes an Inventor in America?”.
– Turkheimer et al. (2003), Psychological Science. Tucker-Drob & Bates (2016), Psychological Science.
– Geronimus on weathering; Evans on cumulative risk; Masten, Ordinary Magic; Edin & Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep; Posel & Rudwick on ilobolo and marriage.
– Killingsworth, Kahneman & Mellers (2023), PNAS. Chancel et al., Climate Inequality Report 2023. Haushofer & Shapiro (2016), QJE. Spaull on the schooling funnel; PIRLS 2021.
– Between Thoughts-Intellectual Musings articles. Related Between Thoughts posts: Broke Is Not the Same as Behind; Broke by the 15th; Isandla Sihlamba Esinye; Imali Yinkululeko; Isiqingatha; Ubaba Akekho; Ufile Kimi; The Gladiators for the Have Lots.
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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings.

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table..