It's a bit exhausting to have to pick up all the citations but I can certainly find a good reference or two for the first part if you know a couple phrases. Fir

It's a bit exhausting to have to pick up all the citations but I can certainly find a good reference or two for the first part if you know a couple phrases. Firstly, there's a couple papers on the phenomenon of "acting black" that shows how even gifted black kids are held back by themselves almost http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2008/03/acting-black-hinders-gifted-black-student-achievement-58236/ http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2008/03/acting-black-hinders-gift... or perhaps as a set of papers by a Harvard professor that grew up poor and black in a rough area http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/meet-the-economist-who-grew-up-among-crack-dealers-and-won-a-mini-nobel-for-his-research-on-race/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/30/me... This other paper explores how drug use is correlated with peer drug use but can be mitigated by relationship strength with the mother, which can be rather darn hard if she's working 12-hour days http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.darnell/peer_pressure_and_drug_use http://sitemaker.umich.edu/356.darnell/peer_pressure_and_dru... If you add in anti-social behaviors, being poor translates quickly into anti-social behaviors as the sort of "unproductive behaviors" that is being banded about in the thread http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232460627_Poverty_Parenting_Peer_and_Neighborhood_Influences_on_Young_Adolescent_Antisocial_Behavior http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232460627_Poverty_Pa... We're not here on HN trying to solve the world's problems or something in comment threads anyway, so being a bit qualitative and subjective is something that goes with the territory of a lot of social science. We could go really rigorous but measuring people and behavior is really, really hard to do well without making the results of papers so narrow they're irrelevant for making meaningful social commentary arguments.