The sting of poverty
What bees and dented cars can teach about what it means to be poor - and the flaws of economics


IMAGINE GETTING A bee sting; then imagine getting six more. You are now in a position to think about what it means to be poor, according to Charles Karelis, a philosopher and former president of Colgate University.

In the community of people dedicated to analyzing poverty, one of the sharpest debates is over why some poor people act in ways that ensure their continued indigence. Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.

To an economist, this is irrational behavior. It might make sense for a wealthy person to quit his job, or to eschew education or develop a costly drug habit. But a poor person, having little money, would seem to have the strongest incentive to subscribe to the Puritan work ethic, since each dollar earned would be worth more to him than to someone higher on the income scale. Social conservatives have tended to argue that poor people lack the smarts or willpower to make the right choices. Social liberals have countered by blaming racial prejudice and the crippling conditions of the ghetto for denying the poor any choice in their fate. Neoconservatives have argued that antipoverty programs themselves are to blame for essentially bribing people to stay poor.

Karelis, a professor at George Washington University, has a simpler but far more radical argument to make: traditional economics just doesn't apply to the poor. When we're poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated. This is where the bee stings come in: A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.

Poverty and wealth, by this logic, don't just fall along a continuum the way hot and cold or short and tall do. They are instead fundamentally different experiences, each working on the human psyche in its own way. At some point between the two, people stop thinking in terms of goods and start thinking in terms of problems, and that shift has enormous consequences. Perhaps because economists, by and large, are well-off, he suggests, they've failed to see the shift at all.

If Karelis is right, antipoverty initiatives championed all along the ideological spectrum are unlikely to work - from work requirements, time-limited benefits, and marriage and drug counseling to overhauling inner-city education and replacing ghettos with commercially vibrant mixed-income neighborhoods. It also means, Karelis argues, that at one level economists and poverty experts will have to reconsider scarcity, one of the most basic ideas in economics.

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"It's Econ 101 that's to blame," Karelis says. "It's created this tired, phony debate about what causes poverty."

In challenging decades of poverty research, Karelis draws on some economic data and some sociological research. But, more than that, he makes his case as a philosopher, arguing by analogy and induction. This approach means that he remains relatively unknown, even among poverty researchers. The book in which he laid out his argument, "The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Poor," wasn't widely read when it was published last year.

A few, though, have taken notice, and are arguing that Karelis does have something important to say.

"There's not much evidence in the book, and there are a lot of bold claims, but it's great that he's making them," says Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University. It "was a really great book, and it was totally neglected."

The economist's term for the idea Karelis takes issue with is the law of diminishing marginal utility. In brief, it means the more we have of something, the less any additional unit of that thing means to us. It undergirds, among other things, how the US government taxes people. We assume that taking $40,000 in taxes from Warren Buffett will be a lot less onerous to him than to an elementary school teacher, because he has so much more to begin with.

In many cases, Karelis says, diminishing marginal utility certainly does apply: Our seventh ice cream cone will no doubt be less pleasurable than our first. But the logic flips when we are dealing with privation rather than plenty. To understand why, he argues, we need only think about how we all deal with certain familiar situations.

If, for example, our car has several dents on it, and then we get one more, we're far less likely to get that one fixed than if the car was pristine before. If we have a sink full of dishes, the prospect of washing a few of them is much more daunting than if there are only a few in the sink to begin with. Karelis's name for goods that reduce or salve these sort of burdens is "relievers."

Karelis argues that being poor is defined by having to deal with a multitude of problems: One doesn't have enough money to pay rent or car insurance or credit card bills or day care or sometimes even food. Even if one works hard enough to pay off half of those costs, some fairly imposing ones still remain, which creates a large disincentive to bestir oneself to work at all.

"The core of the problem has not been self-discipline or a lack of opportunity," Karelis says. "My argument is that the cause of poverty has been poverty."

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The upshot of this for policy makers, Karelis believes, is that they don't need to fret so much about the fragility of the work ethic among the poor. In recent decades, experts and policy makers all along the ideological spectrum have worried that the more aid the government gives the poor, the less likely they are to work to provide for themselves. David Ellwood, an economist and the dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, has called this "the helping conundrum." It was this concern that drove the Clinton administration's welfare reform efforts.

But, according to Karelis, that argument is exactly backward. Reducing the number of economic hardships that the poor have to deal with actually make them more, not less, likely to work, just as repairing most of the dents on a car makes the owner more likely to fix the last couple on his own. Simply giving the poor money with no strings attached, rather than using it, as federal and state governments do now, to try to encourage specific behaviors - food stamps to make sure money doesn't get spent on drugs or non-necessities, education grants to encourage schooling, time limits on benefits to encourage recipients to look for work - would be just as effective, and with far less bureaucracy. (One federal measure Karelis particularly likes is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which, by subsidizing work, helps strengthen the "reliever" effect he identifies.)

Few economists are familiar with Karelis's work, and when it's presented to them, they tend to be skeptical of its explanatory power. If Karelis is right, we should see even more defeatist behavior than we do from the poor, says Kevin Lang, chairman of the Boston University economics department and author of "Poverty and Discrimination." Plus, he argues, there's little evidence that simply making poor people less poor increases their work ethic - and some evidence that it does the opposite. In the early 1970s, a large-scale study gave poor people in four cities a so-called "negative income tax," a no-strings-attached payment based on how little money they made. The conclusion: the aid tended to discourage work.

Karelis responds that the data from that experiment is in fact quite ambiguous, and there has been debate among economists over how to interpret the results. But ultimately, he believes, the strength of his arguments is less in how they fit with the economic work that's been done to date on poverty - much of which he is suspicious of anyway - but in how familiar they feel to all of us, rich or poor.

"The bee sting argument, or the car dent one," he says, "I've never had anybody say that that isn't true."

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail [email protected].

Poor is lazy. Lazy is poor. End of story.

Is he really trying to make the case that the perception of marginal utility causes poverty?

If so, he's ignoring Franklin's advice to "drive them from it."

You gotta work too hard to get to the break even point, thus most folks just live off the dole.  Add into that generations of folks that have no family members that have worked.

WILLINGNESS TO BE POOR

makes sense to me

Problems caused by poor choices.

That's the most ridiculous statement on the subject I've ever read.

Thats it

So, he tap danced all around the stage to make the tired old libtard argument that giving poor people money makes them work.

Same old bullshit, with a oddly colored new coat of paint.

Fixed it. That's better.

In general I agree with this. Lately there is a genuine unemployment problem where talented folks with good work ethics and lots of experience can't find work. I have empathy for them. Setting this group aside, I believe that poor people deserve to be poor. They deserve to be much poorer than they are. The reason that they can continue to make the idiotic decisions that are responsible for their plight and live to tell about it is because government steals from me so that they can have free shit.

Fuck 'em. Work for your chow or starve.

I'm campaigning on that.

Im poorer than I could be because we opted to raise our kids and now pawn them off on other peoples or businesses and for the fact I place Principle and Family above all else, Im pretty sure we may even be under the poverty line depending where its set

That being said I have taken a grand total of $0.00 handouts from the government or at the expense of taxpayers(myself included) and think all the excuses of why scum are scum because of poverty is bullshit, I grew up in a dirt poor hick town in the Appalachians

Wouldn't say genetics, as in DNA, have as much to do with it as does upbringing.  That movie The Blind Side, based on a true story, puts the genetic hypothesis to rest.  Sure, Michael Oher is genetically suited to being an NFL player but I doubt he wouldn't have gotten where he is without the direction of the Tuohy's.



Michael's previous failures were due to the kid gloves of the state.  His success is due to the strong family that "adopted" him.  If you haven't seen it, please do.



 

We have taken Darwin out of the equation. Next stop, Idiocracy.    Welcome to Costco, I love you.

How many of you come from poor families?  My parents did.  

He does have a point - what if we just gave people on welfare a check instead of funneling the same amount of money through this complex, multi-level bureaucracy (AFDC, School Lunches/Breakfasts, WIC, etc.)? It would save money as you'd cut out most of the middleman.



And honestly, is it really going to make a difference if they blow it on stuff they don't need? The worst case scenario is that they end up right back where they are.

Could you link us to the source of this article?  Is globe.com for the writer the Boston Globe?

Since it's MY MONEY they are giving them, HELL YES it makes a difference!

Frankly, the aid given the poor should be WAY more tightly controlled.  No damn microwave dinners on food stamps, only bulk basics.

No damn cable tv.  No A/C, fans only.  Cut ALL handouts to the bone.  

It should REALLY suck to be poor.  Poor people have to WANT to do better, or they never will.  If forty years of Johnson's fucking "great society" have not proven that, you are not paying attention.

Genetic vigor? We're not talking about plants here. We're talking about people.
I grew up in an impoverished, multi-cultural community. Genetics had fuck-all to do with it. White, Indian, Mexican, Black... everyone I knew was poor. And we weren't all in-breeding.
When all you see around you is broken down cars, run-down homes, grafitti, crime, drug abuse, alcoholism... crap... you're not going to develop the same mentality of someone born in an environment of prosperity & hope.
Like begets like I'll agree with... but that doesn't only apply on a genetic level. It applies much more so on a societal level in regards to the topic at hand.

Can people crawl out of that shit & better themselves? Yes. Does someone's environment give them an excuse to waste their lives? No.
But you can only take the personal responsibility argument so far. Because as numbers go, someone that's raised in a shithole has a statistically much greater chance of becoming shit themselves.
People who haven't grown up in poverty first-hand have no clue what's involved in breaking the cycle & pulling yourself up out of it. It's like asking neanderthal man to build a wheel when he's never even seen one.

And no - I don't subscribe to giving the poor handouts. I know first-hand that this only makes the problem worse.
But shuffling them under the carpet & labeling them as genetically defective is - respectfully - a load of crap.

So what happened to the Kennedy dynasty?  How about Howard Hughes Jr?  
 

Culture. Sure. If it makes you feel better. I guess 'culture' is the latest in cutting edge apologetics where we make up complicated excuses for neanderthal behavior.

"There's nothing wrong with those people They're perfect people. They're not even responsible for their own actions. It's the culture they've 'fallen into'." (They're victims!)

Then all the idiots say, "AAAAHHHHHhhhhh ..... yes ..... the culture .....," because it's much easier for conflict-avoiding limp wristed douche bags to lay the blame on some ambiguous abstraction. There's no danger in that. They can let loose their impotent rage on the abstraction. The abstraction never gets in your face for calling it out. Pussies.

Just sayin'

I grew up in the woods of South GA, poor as shit. My dad worked in a Mobile Home plant making cabinets for ~$8 an hour.
He taught me the various things that southern men teach their sons, like Respect, Hard Work, etc...
I never went to college, and went into the MIL at 17. Did my service, got out, and worked my way up the ladder. I spend my first 2 years in my career working 80 hour work weeks and missed my youngest kids first few years of life.
I now have a gorgeous wife, 5 kids, a stellar career, and live in a big ass house with 5 cars.
Poor folks are poor because they don't try hard enough. Just my 2 cents.

Fail. The more dents and scratches a car has, the more likely I'm going to go over the whole body since it will be worth it to repaint the whole thing.

I wouldn't expect someone who never worked with their hands to ever understand that though. How can someone who says "to have it done" rather than fixing it yourself claim to understand the poor?



Who needs empirical evidence when you have an untested hypothesis based upon improper metaphors?

I'd like to know about Mr. Karelis's experiences with poverty. Somehow I don't think it will surprise me.

So you're saying your Dad didn't work hard enough, right?

There's not A DAMNED THING wrong with that. Not in a million years. Making the decision to give up materialism in favor of involved parenting is something to be proud of.

Congratulations on being a man and finding a good woman. Hold your head high. Seriously.

Actually no, he didn't. When he started actually trying, he went from cabinet maker, to plant manager in 5 years.

60 years of the democrat party being around is why people are poor and have rotten cultures.

The central point he seems to be making, that at a certain level of poverty you end up spending all your time and energy just dealing with the specific problems of poverty, has some merit. It can be really difficult to claw your way out, it takes a lot of time and commitment. OTOH there's a ton of opportunity out there for anyone looking for it. I sometimes think, much as I dislike the idea of a dole, that a better alternative to the way we do it now would be to give everyone a one-time payment at majority assuming they meet some basic requirements, maybe HS graduation or something, and then that's it, one shot at a jumpstart and no more sucking the tit.

Similar concept, the misery threshold, it's human nature to completely lose it if things go against you badly enough, even to the point where you throw away whatever you have left. People do this all the time in life, lose something important to them and go on a bender or destroy friendships, burn bridges, or the clearest example of all, the poker player on tilt.

Thank you sir.
I call them a few times a week and thank them for it. They are good folks. My mother and father and I are best friends, and still spend a lot of time together.

We didn't have shit and no one came by doling out free shit for some odd reason.

I'm not dumping my family history into GD, but everything my entire family has, in material wealth or achievement, was gained through work ethic and will power. Government programs have subtracted from and penalized our efforts every step of the way. I have no sympathy for the folks who don't lift a finger for themselves despite being afforded every conceivable advantage. I resent being forced to feed, house, and medicate them. I'll dance for joy when they get their Darwin awards.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/03/30/the_sting_of_poverty/

No longer are the Kennedys a dominant family in American politics.  Well, they should have stuck to liquor importing..guess the end of National Prohibition was the end of their monopoly.  Howard Hughes Sr. left a huge empire in American business.  His son, Howard Jr, pissed it all away, becoming nuttier than a squirrel turd by the time of his death.  



 

Everybody comes into this world naked and crying. There are no exceptions to that fact.





What you do with your life afterward makes the difference. It is their choice.





Some are enticed by the golden shackles of the welfare state. They sit in front of the TV, drinking 40 ouncers, waiting for the dignity card fairy to flutter through the window and bestow other people's hard-earned riches upon them. They make excuses and want Obama to play Robin Hood for their benefit.





Others are driven to work 18 hour days and become CEOs of mega-corporations.

 

Well said

What's the Zing for?
According to your logic, his father was genetically inferior... the cause of his poverty.
So how exactly did he improve his lot in life?
Was he exposed to high levels of radiation that changed his genetic code?
Is he the Bruce Banner of socioeconomics?

They got mixed up with weak blood lines?

Having first hand reports from ERs in multiple states over the past 13 years I can say without reservation that entitlement mentality figures significantly into this issue.

  some of the hardiest working people I know don't have a pot to piss in.  Granted they don't take any hand outs from the government either.

The Great Society created a huge bureaucracy because it sought to distribute aid with the goal of social engineering. Just sending people a check and telling them "Good luck, see you next month" without trying to regulate every aspect of how they spend it would cost much, much less. If they spend it all on hookers and blow five minutes after walking out the door then it's too bad for them.
If you really wanted to be an evil genus you'd pay welfare benefits in small bills and ease up on anti-drug operations in areas with high numbers of welfare recipients with the eventual goal of having all the ones who waste their welfare money on drugs overdose and no longer be a burden to the system. Unethical? Perhaps. But it would certainly be an example of Darwinism in action and would most likely work in the long term.
Look at any number of the threads here about people who have worked in stores that accept WIC or similar - there's already plenty of welfare abuse going on. There are some people who have used welfare as it was intended - as a way to stay afloat in hard times - and have worked their way off the dole as quickly as possible. This is due to their own perseverance, not because some bright-eyed social worker planned out every aspect of their budget for them. Those people wouldn't be hurt by this.
Everyone else? Fuck 'em. They've had their chance to do anything they want with their benefits and have chosen not to do so. The biggest lesson of the past 50 years of attempted social engineering through welfare is that you can't fix stupid. Why waste any more money trying?
 

I'll agree with this  I bet him or his parents have never been poor a day in their lives.

I get ya but how about a great percentage are just fucking lazy and you perceive their sloth asses as genetic morphs???