You are what you live in
In Jungian dream interpretation, the house is the self:
A house in a dream generally speaks of one’s psychological house, the house of the “soul.” We often see different homes that we’ve lived in. Ask yourself, if the home in your dream is a childhood home, or a current home. Each of these may have different meaning that relate to an overall sense of what you were like or struggling with at that time.
Tell me about your dreams
Perhaps that’s because the house is a shell around our selves, just as our skull is a shell around our minds. Certainly our childhood residence imprints itself indelibly on our minds – we learn about the universe as the world outside our front door, and within our house – be it single-family, condo, apartment, or shared – is the space that defines our family.
What lies inside is who I am
I thought about this with a shock a couple of months back, when I read a Boston Globe article profiling a book, The Persistence of Poverty, that offers a striking way of thinking about poverty from the poor person’s point of view:
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
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.
In short, they give up on their dream.
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.
Karelis, a professor at
My family never owned a new car. Not for me the 00000 odometer. It was always used cars of one sort or another – always bought cheap, always driven until they died underneath us.
Ours always had big numbers on it
Used cars were depressing; you didn’t want to be in one. Finally, in the mid-1980s, my Mom’s financial position was a little better, and when her latest station wagon was on its last legs, I talked her into buying a new one. Metallic green Subaru. With that new-car smell. I remember telling her, “you have to have one place in your life that’s quality.”
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.
That’s well said. You have more burdens than you can solve, so you tend to solve none of them.
It’s important to believe we can carry all our burdens
The other problem of poverty is interdependence – every problem is related to every other problem, and there’s no way to isolate one. Cities, being the most complex human constructions, are the most interdependent, one of the many reasons improving slums is such a challenge.
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.
That’s what buying a new car was about. Fix one thing, create one haven.
Make a start.
It begins with one push
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.”
Hear, hear.
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.”
As an author, I find that all too believable J.
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.
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.
You can drive it, but don’t try to fix those dents
The car
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.
Or in reverse, unloading the dishwasher may seem too daunting at first, but you can talk yourself into unloading just the big items. Then, once you’ve started …
See? All done!
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.”
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 the global south, most of the poor people I’ve seen are quite willing to work. In the global north, I’ve seen many demotivated ones, but perhaps they are caught in the poverty trap, a variation of the dependency trap.
I’m caught in a trap/ I can’t get out
As I wrote a couple of years ago:
Consider the plight of the typical Section 8 recipient. A family who moves from joblessness to income faces at least 48% marginal cost of doing so:
Resident share of rent equals 30% of income.
Income taxes equal to at least 10%.
Withholding takes another 7.5%.
Plus, in individual circumstances, workers lose Medicaid, to say nothing of the marginal costs of working: day care, transportation, and so on.
Once upon a time, I read a lengthy Wall Street Journal article [If anyone can find it, please email me a link or the text! — Ed.] analyzing the Zero Improvement Wage — that is, the wage at which a benefit recipient would have the same take-home cash, factoring in (a) incremental and inescapable costs of employment, and (b) loss of mean-testing benefits. It was in the range of $10 an hour, above that person’s likely entry-level capacity. In short, she (for it was a single mother) was economically trapped just as surely as if the hurdle rate had been the
Related to the poverty trap is the Sisyphean challenge, otherwise known as the slippery pole. Some changes in personal circumstances work only if they are a complete success, not a partial success. You may work like the dickens to climb a greasy pole, and the moment you rest, you start slipping back.
Holding on takes plenty of work … and still isn’t good enough
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.
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.
We don’t know if Karelis’s theory is sound – and it probably varies greatly by individual, as even the observant herd has numerous mavericks.
Give me more money and I’ll just gamble it
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.
Because markets always clear, any directed resource (like food stamps) immediately creates a secondary market, and the more you target the resource, the greater the discount at which it trades.
The more you target, the less I get when I evade your targeting
Personally, I’ve always been skeptical of these directable benefits. Indeed, the biggest argument against portable Housing Choice Vouchers is precisely that they can clear in poor-quality housing — but housing, being immovable, is harder to factor at a discount than other social benefits (like food stamps).
One federal measure Karelis particularly likes is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which, by subsidizing work, helps strengthen the “reliever” effect he identifies.
Tax credits also transfer risk. In this case, you get a job, then we pay you, rather than we pay you, then you get a job.
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 it’s parapsychological, I’m skeptical
If Karelis is right, we should see even more defeatist behavior than we do from the poor, says Kevin Lang, chairman of the
Or maybe it encouraged people to claim poverty.
You never get what you don’t claim
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.”
Probably not worth fixing, is it?
Count me among those who think Karelis is on to something – and if you’re going to change something to help change people’s poverty, it starts with housing.
You are what you live in.
Change your housing, change your self
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