In terms of goods and services consumed, grad school was definitely comparable to poverty. Insofar as it differs it's by perhaps a few thousand dollars/year. A

In terms of goods and services consumed, grad school was definitely comparable to poverty. Insofar as it differs it's by perhaps a few thousand dollars/year. Are you suggesting that if we took poor Americans, but gave them health care an extra couple of thousand $/year, that they would suddenly reduce their crime levels to that of graduate students? I feel like this can be tested by comparing the generosity of various state-level welfare programs. Or again, by looking it (very poor) upper class Indians. There's also a big difference between being low paid in a generally high paid cultural group vs being in a generally low paid cultural group, in terms of social safety net and psychological climate. If you switch on showdead you'll see that in my now flagged post, we are discussing whether economics causes poor people to become "bad people". You might be right that psychology does, but that's a totally different claim.