the sting of poverty

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.

Os miseráveis

Nenhuma entrevista me persegue mais que uma conversa que tive em 1996 com uma camponesa cambojana chamada Nhem Yen. Ela tinha 40 anos, mas parecia mais velha, e vivia com a família numa aberta da selva cambojana. A área era conhecida pelos surtos de malária, mas a família era ambiciosa, industriosa e pensaram que o dinheiro que podiam fazer a cortar e a vender madeira valia o risco.

A filha mais velha de Nhem Yen, de 24 anos e grávida do segundo filho, rapidamente apanhou malária. Sem dinheiro para comprar os medicamentos (um tratamento efectivo custaria menos de 10$), ela morreu no dia a seguir ao parto. Nhem Yen ficou a tomar conta dos seus cinco filhos, mais os dois netos.

A família possuía um mosquiteiro com capacidade para três pessoas. Estas redes são efectivas contra a malária, mas custam 5$ e a Nhem Yen não podia custear mais. Assim, todas as noites ela agonizava na decisão de quais das crianças colocar no mosquiteiro e quais deixar de fora.

"É muito difícil decidir," ela disse-me. "Mas não temos dinheiro para comprar outro mosquiteiro. Não temos escolha."

Esta é a verdadeira face da pobreza: não tanto a dor da fome ou a humilhação dos trapos, mas a das escolhas impossíveis.

Início de um texto excelente: "Wretched of the Earth" de Nicholas D. Kristof no The New York Review of Books.

Tradução minha.