Poverty of Ideas

...Thus he contends that civil rights leaders (think, for example, of those who disparaged the desirability of “dead end” jobs) harmed their constituents when their rhetoric reduced “the marginal relief to be expected from a small improvement in objective circumstances...

...It might even be argued that this rhetoric worsened the poverty problem it was meant to help relieve...

...But his book is entitled The Persistence of Poverty, not The Persistence of Bee-Sting Pain...

...Why isn’t it worth the while of poor people to earn that fi rst (or next) dollar...

...That law posits that the fi rst dollar of income has the most utility, the second dollar slightly less, the third still less, and so on...

...that claim was commonplace in the 19th century but is practically never voiced today...

...For this conduct is exactly the conduct that makes sense for them...

...He is currently research professor of philosophy at George Washington, and in this short but ambitious book, Karelis attempts the diffi - cult task of saying something new about poverty—a subject that has been exhaustively studied for decades...

...Elsewhere, however, Karelis takes a different view, arguing that poor people harm themselves when they exaggerate their plight and minimize what they might do to relieve it...

...What, then, causes the self-destructive behaviors of the poor...

...Joel Schwartz, adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is the author of Fighting Poverty with Virtue: Moral Reform and America’s Urban Poor, 1825-2000...

...Karelis acknowledges that “having children early and out of wedlock is . . . doubtless a big factor in poverty in the United States today,” but does not consider it “as global or as perennial as the other factors on our list...

...Karelis’s list of the problematic behaviors of the poor is useful, although in two respects it is idiosyncratic...

...Karelis argues that, given their economic situation, ‘Poor people engage disproportionately in the poverty-prolonging and poverty-worsening behaviors because they are poor—and rational.’ It seems unlikely that poor Americans like these are the metaphorical equivalent of people with seven bee stings, for whom the effort to work to buy one dab of salve is not worthwhile...

...He limits himself to a paragraph in an endnote, in which he alludes to “the famous income maintenance or negative income tax experiments conducted by the federal government between 1968 and 1982” which “have often been taken to show that [income] transfers reduce work effort...

...At least with respect to the American poor, data certainly indicate that many have fewer stings or more salve than a reader of Karelis might suppose...

...Despite Karelis’s earlier claim that the actions of the poor are rational, here he suggests that the failure to take a job is irrational...

...In short, he seems to question the basic premise of his argument...

...Karelis does not deal adequately with that obvious objection...

...But in the past few decades most Americans (and more, though not yet most, American poverty experts) have increasingly come to believe that simply giving money to the poor encourages the behaviors—in particular, not working and not marrying—that make and keep them poor...

...Karelis argues instead that, given their economic situation, “poverty-linked conduct is effi cient,” and he elaborates on this claim: “Poor people engage disproportionately in the poverty-prolonging and poverty-worsening behaviors because they are poor—and rational...

...His contention that drinking to excess is an important cause of poverty is refreshingly retro...

...Karelis claims that “marginalism is mistaken,” but in his view it is mistaken only in part...

...Three posit the irrationality and “dysfunction” of the poor, who are thought to be characterized by “apathy . . . fragmentation of the self, which leads to short time horizons, and weakness of the will...

...A typical poor person’s home is a three-bedroom house, with one-andahalf baths, a garage, and a porch or patio...

...The other three understand the behavior of the poor as a rational response to their situation and deny the dysfunctionality of the poor...

...Is there evidence to support this hypothesis...

...In effect, the poor person (like Cindy Sheehan, according to Maureen Dowd) has absolute moral authority...

...Karelis contends, though, that the marginalist view is inapplicable to the situation of the poor—and that it underlies all six of the theories of poverty that he fi nds wanting: “Conventional theories of poverty are divided into those that assert that the conduct in question really contravenes marginalist prescriptions [i.e., the dysfunction theories] and those that contend the contravening is a mirage—but neither side questions the validity of marginalism itself...

...Of course, the crucial question is why marginalism does not apply to the poor...

...For those who are well off, he agrees, the value of each additional dollar does, indeed, diminish...

...Its core idea is that “resources mean most to those who have least...

...Karelis’s effort to stake out an original position is laudable but doesn’t fi nally succeed...

...Let’s stipulate that Karelis has accurately stated the problem of someone who’s been stung multiple times...

...If so, he doesn’t cite it...

...Karelis offers six explanations, which fall into two categories...

...To simply assert the equivalence a priori is to be guilty of excessive abstraction...

...That conventional view may be wrong, Karelis asserts, because the benefi ciaries of the negative income tax may have underreported their earnings...

...The poor are poor because they “are not working much for pay,” are “not getting much education,” are “not saving for a rainy day,” are “abusing alcohol,” and are “taking risks with the law...

...He therefore needs to show, and not just to assert, that the poor—to be fair to Karelis, the “very poor”—can aptly be compared to people who have been stung seven times...

...But Karelis also supports no-strings assistance to the poor: that is, assistance that is not conditional on any efforts by the poor to help themselves...

...After all, if the poor are given funds to buy four dabs of salve, they’re more likely to work to be able to purchase three additional dabs themselves...

...To make this case, though, Karelis must refute the familiar contention that no-strings assistance discourages work: Why work, if you’ll be paid even if you don’t work...

...To the extent that signifi - cant numbers of poor people resemble people with only one or two stings (or, to look at it differently, people who already command the resources to pay for fi ve or six dabs of salve), Karelis’s analogy— and, more broadly, his critique of the relevance of marginalist economics for the poor—becomes less tenable...

...He mentions fi ve behaviors in particular...

...More surprising is a cause that Karelis omits: The propensity of the poor to produce illegitimate children...

...Nor is it the case that they lack opportunity, that their preferences differ signifi cantly from those of the nonpoor, or that public policy encourages their counterproductive behavior...

...To put it in terms of stings and salve, a poor Asian immigrant may regard an annual income of twenty thousand dollars as verging on suffi cient—as leaving just a few stings unsalved— while a poor African American may regard that same income as very insuffi cient—as leaving so many stings uncured that it is not worth much effort to get another dab or two of salve...

...Instead, their behavior is explained as a response to “opportunities [that] are unduly limited” or “perverse incentives created by public policy,” or as a result of “atypical preferences...

...Here Karelis contradicts himself...

...When it comes to offering solutions to poverty, Karelis mostly advocates the expansion of the course correctly adopted by current American social policy: that is, the policy known as “making work pay,” which seeks to make “work a more attractive option for low-income people through transfers and other provisions . . . whose benefi ts depend on the recipient’s working...

...Behavioral differences [between Asian immigrants and African Americans] are to be explained as equally rational, benefi t-maximizing responses to the same economic facts, seen and felt differently...

...That rule does not, however, apply to the poor: “Marginalist economics was an economics of more-than-enough that mistook itself for a general theory, applicable to both surplus and defi cit...

...He begins by making what is usually a conservative argument: Poverty results from the self-destructive behavior of the poor...

...In the fi nal analysis, Karelis advances a novel argument on behalf of a very familiar position: Giving money to the poor will solve their problems...

...BY JOEL SCHWARTZ The Persistence of Poverty Why the Economics of the Well-off Can’t Help the Poor by Charles Karelis Yale, 208 pp., $30 Charles Karelis is not a philosopherking, but he can fairly be described as a philosopherpublic servant...

...But Karelis goes on to reject all of these arguments...

...The typical poor American has more living space than the average (not the average poor) inhabitant of cities like Paris and London...

...To answer that question, Karelis, adopting a familiar philosophical practice, argues by analogy...

...To make this case, Karelis takes aim at a fundamental postulate of economics: the law of diminishing marginal utility...

...He explains: The person with seven bee stings . . . would not sacrifi ce much to relieve the sting on his hand, seeing that the pain of it was nearly drowned out by the pain of the six stings on his body...

...It’s reasonable to suppose that the poor can be placed on a continuum: Some of them would correspond to people with only one sting, others to people with two, etc...

...In effect, the hypothetical Asian immigrant’s reaction (“that $20,000 job is a step in the right direction”) appears objectively preferable to—and more prudent than—the hypothetical African American’s reaction (“that $20,000 job offers nothing but chump change...

...On this basis it is natural to conclude that poor people stand to benefi t especially from working for pay...

...A poor person is like someone who has suffered multiple bee stings...

...In one place he asserts that a poor person’s assessment of his condition can’t be disputed...

...Formerly the longtime director of the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (in the Department of Education), he has also been president of Colgate...

...For example, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has recently shown, using federal government statistics, that 43 percent of poor American households own their homes...

...To determine the resources of the poor and their capacity for self-advancement would, of course, require empirical study, not philosophical speculation...

...But for someone stung seven times, salve that would relieve only one sting would not be particularly valuable because the pain from the other six stings would remain...

...In addition to the problem of determining the number of stings from which the poor actually suffer, there’s also the problem of how many they suppose they have, and how many they should suppose they have...

...This would seem to be the position of very poor people, for whom work, schoolwork, and (in a much different way) moderation in alcohol use constitute sacrifi ces that would buy them too little felt relief to be worth making, so many are their troubles...

...It is unlikely that Karelis’s ingenious philosophical argument will cause many people to change their minds...

...The poor are not, for the most part, dysfunctional...

...For someone stung once, salve to relieve the sting would be very valuable...