Plus, bee stings sometime make it hard to work.

[pktechgirlbackup]

I cringe every time someone says "the poor are no more lazy or stupid than anyone else." I get and agree with what they mean- that being poor doesn't make you inhuman, that we shouldn't make policy based on the idea that the poor are markedly different from those in power- but it hurts my inner data purist. Even if poverty was such a sick system that there was no escape, being middle class is not so secure- the lazy and stupid of the middle class will get more chance to right themselves than the lazy or stupid of the poor, but not an infinite number. Even people with serious inherited wealth can lose it in a cocaine habit. So if you define poverty by income quintile, the lowest quintile is going to have a disproportionate number of the stupid, the lazy, and those with poor impulse control. And since I don't believe that poverty is 100% sticky, I think that some people born to lowest-quintile parents will work themselves into other quintiles, at which point they no longer count as "poor." The point of my long series of posts is examining how to set up a system so that transition happens more often, at which point the link between bad behavior and poverty will become even stronger.

Just to be clear: I am not claiming that negative traits affect the poor and non-poor equally. The more money you have, the more insulation you have from your poor choices, and from random bad luck. This isn't a claim that life is fair, just that life is not completely random.

I think this is a weakness of discussing "the poor" instead of "people who earn little to no money." Clearly, we can agree on a definition of stupid (or lazy, or poor impulse control) such that it leads to earning less money, and which point it's tautological that the stupid will be overrepresented among the poor. But because we've set income markers up as tribal identities rather than descriptors of income, this feels like an attack on the tribe.

And then there's the issue of defining stupid/lazy/poor impulse control. I'm going to take lazy for my example because it's the easiest, but first I have to define some economics terms:

Income effect: When people earn less per hour (due to change in wages, or income tax), they work more, to make up the difference

Substitution effect: When people earn less per hour, they work less (i.e purchase and consume more leisure time), because work is less rewarding.

This is why it's basically impossible to predict the effect on work hours of an income tax change: we have no way to predict which effect will dominate.

Bee Sting theory: a description of nonlinear returns to money. Imagine you have n bee stings, and the opportunity to buy enough ointment to permanently cure one sting for m dollars. Your first m-1 dollars buy you no happiness at all. The mth dollar doesn't do much either, because you still have n-1 bee stings. But the money to buy the last dollop of ointment brings you incredible joy, because now you are pain free. In the real world, this translates to things like "reaching just enough money to move to a safer neighborhood" or "buying a car so you're not dependent on crappy public transit". If that goal is a long way off, and it's likely something else will claim the money in the mean time (=you'll get more bee stings), why even bother? In the expanded version of this metaphor, we introduce alcohol. Alcohol does not cure bee stings, but it provides substantial relief for one day. Clearly the homo economicus choice is to buy ointment and eschew alcohol, but here in the real world, if you have a lot of bee stings and can't afford to buy enough ointment for all of them, purchasing alcohol is the rational short term choice. And the more real world you make this, by introducing things like the chance of randomly losing your savings, the better the case for alcohol. But then you're stuck buying alcohol every day because your bee stings never get better.

Continuing with an attempt to define laziness: Wealthy people work more hours than poor people You could argue that this is tautological, that of course people who work more earn more, but that has not been true for most of human history. It appears that people who earn more *per hour* also work more hours. In this economy that doesn't prove anything about anyone's inclination to work, but the data is older than that, including periods where jobs really were there for the taking. This suggests to me that the substitution effect is dominating, and I suspect the bee sting effect is the reason for that. If you're not going to make enough money to buy ointment (a safe apartment, a car, better schools for your kids, a trip to the decent grocery store), you might as well consume that money in alcohol (leisure).

But wait, it gets worse. Remember I mentioned introducing the random chance of losing your money? Even if that chance was randomly distributed among income levels, which it's not, it will disproportionately effect those who earn less money per day, since their money is sitting around for longer before being used to buy ointment. And if we want to be really unfair/realistic, we can introduce the idea that bee stings reduce your earning potential.

Coming at this from another angle: I think most people on welfare would trade earning situation for mine. My job pays well, has flexible hours, and I'm treated with respect. Quotes in American Dreams indicate they would in fact be thrilled to trade welfare for jobs substantially less awesome than mine. Alas, these jobs are still substantially more awesome than what you can realistically get with a high school education and minimal experience. You have to endure a lot of crap before you can work up to a job that's actually better than welfare (this is made worse by the way we handle benefits, but would be true even without that). So I don't deserve any not-lazy merit badges for picking my job over welfare. I like to think that if I was magically transformed into someone who needed to start at the bottom, I would work my way up, but even that is dependent on me growing up in a world where hard work was reliably rewarded.

So in summary, there are 3 different things you can define as laziness:

1. true genetic not wanting to try hard
   
2. being in a situation where trying hard will not benefit you, relative to the alternatives
   
3. Being in a situation where trying hard would benefit you, but that resembles a lot of other situations where trying hard did not benefit you, and so you rationally believe trying hard will not benefit you
   

With bonus 4th option: trying hard and having it fail anyway. We can't do anything about #1 and I'm not sure why we should bother, but what do we do about 2-4? For once, I actually have an idea.

Comments

[pktechgirl.livejournal.com]

This reminds me a lot of when (some) feminists say all X is bad because all pornography is degrading, and then much later s that they've defined pornography as degrading, non-degrading material designed to arouse is erotica. They're not technically lying, but they're not contributing to the conversation. Or for a less charged example, Americans who hear the word "Asian" think "Chinese, Japanese, Korean." Britains who hear "Asian" think "India, Pakistan". Both would cop to the existence of southeast Asia on the map, but it's not what they think of.

So I accept your distinction but worry that it's impossible to implement with demographic data as currently collected. I suggest that we use poor as the broad sense including both "lazy broke-ass" and some term yet to be decided. I'm leaning towards something like "caught in the gravity well", but that's just brainstorming.

And I'm glad you liked this. This post was by far the one whose reception I most worried about.