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.
“It’s Econ 101 that’s to blame,” Karelis says. “It’s created this tired, phony debate about what causes poverty.”
Gee, I took Logic from Karelis my first year at Williams.
I like the Multiple Bee Sting imagery. It has a more poetic ring than anything I could have come up from my own experience.
There was an extended time in my life when I was very broke, if not poor, living in a city with essentially one industry. When that industry was failing, it took everyone down with it. I had a pretty good education and had never had trouble finding a job before. But after dragging my butt from one place to another looking for work, and finding nothing, it became a lot harder to muster the motivation to keep looking, or to feel positive about the little bits of intermittent work I could find. I did a spell of migrant farm labor, but the cost of transportation to the work site ate up most of what I earned. Eventually I was grateful to get some steady work washing dishes.
During that time I read an article (I can’t remember who wrote it, or whom it was quoting) that said lack of hope was one of the significant factors that kept the poor chronically poor. It might have been Daniel Patrick Moynihan. If he didn’t say it, it’s the sort of thing Moynihan might have said. It certainly rang true at the time. I think the exact words were closer to “lack of belief in a future.”
Eventually I got out of that situation, finished college, got used to a nice middle-class life. I might be nervous about my own economic future now, but I’m not poor, so I can’t claim to speak for poor people as a class.
Along the way I did some work among the urban poor in New York for about 2 years. I knew teenage kids who would have been incredulous if you suggested they would live into their 20’s, or have a reason for wanting to change their lifestyle to increase their chances of living that long.
It stuck me how government programs that were intended to remedy some disadvantage, became an incentive to hang on to that disadvantage or make it worse: a reward for having the disadvantage (and a penalty for not having it). One of the most obvious was Aid to Families of Dependent Children. It unintentionally rewarded women for having children out of wedlock, and associated a financial penalty or loss with raising children as a married woman. Not only that, but once you are in the anti-poverty “system,” it becomes your full-time job to be in the system. So who has time to get another job?
So I agree with Karelis’ point that non-cash “reliever” programs that support the transition to the workforce have more potential benefit than cash payouts that become a disincentive for working.
Now I live in a rural/small town area. Back in more prosperous times, more than 25% of the people in our county were reported to be under the poverty line, so I can’t imagine they are better off now. For a lot of these people the American Dream is bogus. Where they were born, geographically and socio-economically, is where they are destined to stay. They can’t imagine some other kind of future.
I don’t know who wrote that article that I read (almost 40 years ago now), but I think the point about hope is really significant. The Gospel offers a genuine hope that is more than Pie in the Sky, and it creates Community, which is a source of hope.
Actually I seem to have slightly misread this passage in the orignal article:
“…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.)”
I’m all for less bureaucracy. And experience has shown that government programs intended to change behavior have a mixed track record, at best. Somehow, when I first browsed through the article, it seemed to coincide with my own assumption that a future orientation has a lot to do with rising out of chronic poverty.