This is the Ivy League on poverty:
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/03/22/opinion/1247467422908/bloggingheads-mental-bandwidth-scarcity.html

Not to be ugly, but we needed a study to tell us that dad is grumpy at home when work is stressful? The scarcity of mental resources is the key concept? At no point do they ask questions like, "Should the workplace be less demanding?" Or maybe we should ask whether we are "educating" people in such a way (Christians would call this "formation") that they have the tools to deal with their own exhaustion. It seems to me that in the air-traffic control study the relevant factors are (1) a high stress job, (2) the presumption that the dad's priority is job performance, and (3) that dad's shortness with the kids is justified by the absolute scarcity of his mental resources. All the video addresses is how to quantify (3). Really? This is the level of intellectual creativity/sophistication dealing with "poverty" coming out of the Ivy League??

Suppose instead we trash (3) altogether by saying first that an absolute scarcity of mental resources is a vacuous category (let's replace it with, say, a degree of virtue -- e.g., whether the dad has developed the habit of patience) and second that shortness with the kids is not justifiable (even if sometimes it is understandable... the difference, clearly, is that understandability has to do with our common experience of temptation while justifiability has to do with justice, or rendering to our kids what is proper, i.e., patience). Now, just trashing (3) it seems to me breaks the whole cycle of nonsense. The dad, recognizing his impatience now has to sit down and figure out (1) how better to respond to his kids and (2) whether he is capable of doing so in the face of the current level of temptation (i.e., exhaustion) generated by his job. If he doesn't have the virtue to deal with that temptation, then flee the temptation!

In a true situation of poverty, things get sticky quickly as for example when dad has no real choices for jobs and is only making enough to get by and, perhaps, on top of everything else is being exploited by the employer. It's a recipe for all sorts of problems, and in this case there is perhaps no "fleeing" the temptation to be impatient with the kids.

My presumptuous impression is that the dad's stress is driven primarily by the sense that there is no where to turn. If the church is being the church, then this shouldn't be the case.

This is where Peter Maurin comes in. The church has to make it easier for people to be good, by serving the poor and by bearing one another's burdens. The kind of poverty in the video is not just material poverty. It's also a poverty of virtue, a lack of the Spirit.

One more thought:

What if the rich become more sinful when the church fails to serve the poor? I wonder if we think about this in the church? We often talk about the communal nature of sin to point out that it is all our sins that generate the destitution and oppression of the poor. But if we are serious about helping our neighbor not to sin, then the failure of the church to serve the poor (a sin in itself) may be visited on the rich in a similar way. Our sin may tempt them/us to greater sin.

Do with it what you will.