The punchline is this:
"It's 2021.
The research participants are in their late-30s now, which means they've had plenty of time to shape their own destinies. But we can clearly see that the experiences of their childhood had a huge effect on their financial situation as adults.
It also has an effect on virtually everything else in their lives."
You cannot infer the direction of causality from this data, i.e. that the traumatic experiences themselves cause the poorer outcomes. I remember reading about how in Chicago someone had noticed that kids who did better had more books at home, so they decided to give poor kids books. Certainly not a bad thing to do, but just giving them some books is not going to make them like the better off kids in all of the other (highly correlated) ways that they're different.
Just as an example, one of the traumatic factors they identify is if a kid had witnessed someone being shot. The wealthy kids are way less likely to see anyone get shot, because if people were regularly getting shot in their neighborhood, they would move. The poor kids' parents don't always have that option. In this case it could be the poverty itself, not the shooting that is causing the poor outcomes. But then you get into why the parents are poor in the first place, and there are many causes, but a lot of them get passed down to the next generation in one way or another.
"It's 2021.
The research participants are in their late-30s now, which means they've had plenty of time to shape their own destinies. But we can clearly see that the experiences of their childhood had a huge effect on their financial situation as adults.
It also has an effect on virtually everything else in their lives."
You cannot infer the direction of causality from this data, i.e. that the traumatic experiences themselves cause the poorer outcomes. I remember reading about how in Chicago someone had noticed that kids who did better had more books at home, so they decided to give poor kids books. Certainly not a bad thing to do, but just giving them some books is not going to make them like the better off kids in all of the other (highly correlated) ways that they're different.
Just as an example, one of the traumatic factors they identify is if a kid had witnessed someone being shot. The wealthy kids are way less likely to see anyone get shot, because if people were regularly getting shot in their neighborhood, they would move. The poor kids' parents don't always have that option. In this case it could be the poverty itself, not the shooting that is causing the poor outcomes. But then you get into why the parents are poor in the first place, and there are many causes, but a lot of them get passed down to the next generation in one way or another.