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 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. David Ellwood, an economist and the dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has called this “the helping conundrum.” It was this concern that drove the Clinton administration’s welfare reform efforts.

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. 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.

With apologies for the repost: this block of the article is more central than the one I posted before.

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.

That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue.

The above is a quote from John Maynard Keynes reproduced from Paul Krugman’s blog. While Krugman uses it to explain the puzzling call for interest rate hikes, made by certain economists, I think it is equally applicable to a wide range of fields whose practitioners often seem to suffer from acute Physics envy. Their solution was often mimicry of the results (of Physics), if not the method: the very act of positing counter-intuitive theses (similar to some of those of Physics) or prescriptions accrues intellectual prestige, irrespective of whether these results can stand analytical examination or were even analytically arrived at in the first place.

A good example is the natterings of Larry Summers (unsurprisingly, another economist) on the ability of women to do advanced mathematics… on which question Summers is, with great show of regret, pessimistic. This opinion is offered without much analysis but instead explicitly justified by appeal to toughness and the need to accept unpalatable conclusions. Unsurprisingly, Summers has found a strong defender in Steve Pinker, the leader of the evolutionary psychology pack whose arguments similarly are high on radical claim and calls for dealing with “reality”.

With regard to the use of analogies in the criticism of Apple’s closed App Store method for installing applications on the iPhone and iPad, John Gruber quotes Neven Mrgan who wonders why the idea of a “walled garden” is considered an obviously bad idea, even if one were to ignore the fact that public gardens are also regulated.

Rather than ignore the last bit, let us get it out of the way first: regulation of public parks and gardens are defined by the public and are designed to serve their interest. The opposite is the case for regulation of access as carried out by device vendors (Apple) or access providers (AT&T).

And now for why “walled gardens” are obviously undesirable, perhaps the substitution of the term with an older and (as is almost always the case) more appropriate term will bring out the obvious: “gilded cage”.