Last week, Matt Yglesias had an extremely insightful critique of the view that unemployment remains high because “we are not as wealthy as we thought we were”:

It is both true that we are not as wealthy as we thought we were and that there’s a lot of joblessness in the United States, but I struggle to grasp a model in which the former causes the latter. Imagine a reverse situation. A town full of working-class people sees its unemployment rate suddenly shoot up from 11 percent to 27 percent. Concurrently, it turns out that the town’s residents were much wealthier than they thought they were–each one of them actually had a check for $1 million sitting in their pockets. We might say it’s pretty clear what’s happened here. These folks are wealthier than they thought they were so they raised their reserve wage. But then suppose it turns out the checks were fraudulent and they all bounce. The reserve wage should fall and joblessness should decline. That it seems to me is the supply-side story about the relationship between wealth and employment.

Only this morning, though, did I realize that Matt’s point is far more general.  Consider the following claim:

We can’t blame X on poverty because poverty is a reason to avoid X.

This claim makes perfect sense if X=unemployment.  If you’re poor you need money, and working is a good way to get money.  But the claim is equally sensible if X= any of the following:

  • drug addiction: Like alcohol, but more expensive, and likely to eventually lead to legal troubles you’re too poor to buy your way out of.
  • non-remunerative crime: Drunk driving and bar fights don’t pay.  In fact, they have high expected medical and legal expenses.  The rich might be able to afford these costs.  The poor can’t.


Hardly.  Few claims are more obvious than “Being poor is a reason to save money, work hard, and control your impulses.”  The right lesson to draw, rather, is that social scientists need to search for factors that cause both poverty and irresponsible behavior.  Such as?  Low IQ, low conscientiousness, low patience, and plain irrationality.

Isn’t this just “blaming the victim”?  No, it’s something more radical: disputing the poor’s presumptive status as “victims.”

Trailer: This is just one of the many topics I’ll be exploring in the book I plan to write after I finish The Case Against Education.  Working title: Poverty: Who To Blame.