Poverty and Fear: Two readings, no comments

1. From Boston.com, The Sting of Poverty: What bees and dented cars can teach about what it means to be poor - and the flaws of economics.

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.

2. From Skeptic.com, Journalist-Bites-Reality! How broadcast journalism is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil. (by Steve Salerno).

a. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in a given year there are about 88,000 documented cases of sexual abuse among juveniles. In the roughly 17,500 cases involving children between ages 6 and 11, strangers are the perpetrators just 5 percent of the time — and just 3 percentof the time when the victim is under age 6. (Further, more than a third of such molesters are themselves juveniles, who may not be true “predators” so much as confused or unruly teens.) Overall, the odds that one of America’s 48 million children under age 12 will encounter an adult pedophile at the local park are startlingly remote. The Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute puts it like so: “Right now, 90 percent of our efforts go toward protecting our children from strangers, when what we need to do is to focus 90 percent of our efforts toward protecting children from the abusers who are not strangers.” That’s a diplomatic way of phrasing the uncomfortable but factually supported truth: that if your child is not molested in your own home — by you, your significant other, or someone else you invited in — chances are your child will never be molested anywhere. Media coverage has precisely inverted both the reality and the risk of child sexual assault. Along the way, it has also inverted the gender of the most tragic victims: Despite the unending parade of young female faces on TV, boys are more likely than girls to be killed in the course of such abuse.

b. Far worse than hyping a story that represents just .5 percent reality, is covering “news” that’s zero percent reality: There literally is no story. Even so, if the non-story satisfies other requirements, it will be reported anyway. This truism was not lost on the late David Brinkley, who, towards the end of his life, observed, “The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news, we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.”

On June 9, 2005, as part of its ongoing series of “Security Updates,” CNN airs a special report titled “Keeping Milk Safe.” Over shots of adorable first-graders sipping from their pint cartons, CNN tells viewers that the farm-to-shelf supply chain is vulnerable at every point, beginning with the cow; with great drama, the report emphasizes the terrifying consequences such tampering could have. Nowhere does CNN mention that in the history of the milk industry, no incident of supply-chain tampering has ever been confirmed, due to terrorism or anything else.

c. However history may remember Mad Cow as an actual pathology, this much is sure: The media inflamed scare has been fatal to jobs — most directly in the meat packing industry, but in related enterprises as well. It has soured consumers on beef. It has caused volatile swings in livestock prices. It has mandated new protocols that add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the average cattle rancher’s cost of doing business. It has caused us to cut ourselves off from key beef suppliers, fomenting minor crises in diplomacy and commerce. A 2005 survey reckoned the total cost of Mad Cow to U.S. agricultural interests at between $3.2 billion and $4.7 billion. This, for something that has killed far fewer Americans in 10 years than the 200 who die each month from choking on food or food substances.