Bee stings and poverty

Drake Bennett writes in The Boston Globe that

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.

Why is this? The answer traditionally depends on your personal philosophy. Bennett continues:

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.

Charles Karelis, a philosopher and former president of Colgate University has a different answer. He believes that all these traditional answers are off the mark. Here's where the bees 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 ...

[P]eople stop thinking in terms of goods and start thinking in terms of problems, and that shift has enormous consequences.

Now, it's interesting reading, but let's not get carried away -- the Globe article does highlight some criticisms of the bee sting theory.

Link to The Sting of Poverty (from the Boston Globe)