Joanna wrote: > It is incredibly expensive to be poor. The whole game is set up so that if you > do not have the money up front, you will wind up paying twice, three times > the original cost.
There's a (small) literature about the fact that "The Poor Pay More," named after an old book by David Caplovitz (1967). In a recent study, Matt Fellowes (2006) concluded that: >> In general, lower income families tend to pay more for the exact same >> consumer product than families with higher incomes.… Together, these extra >> costs add up to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars unnecessarily >> spent by lower income families every year. [_From Poverty, Opportunity: >> Putting the Market to Work for Lower Income Families_ >> (http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/20060718_PovOp.htm)] << He's probably under-measuring the costs of being poor but of course Chicago types at the Department of Agriculture categorically disagree. Kaufman et al (1997) suggest that the poor "may realize lower costs by selecting more economical foods and lower quality items." (Shades of Boskin!) [Kaufman, Phillip R., James M. MacDonald, Steve M. Lutz, and David M. Smallwood , Agricultural Economics Report No. 759, December 1997 at http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/aer759/.] The two sides address different questions. Kaufman et al. examine how people respond to higher prices, how they "roll with the punches." But we should care about the nature of the "punches," i.e., the objective constraints people face. > The only way to beat the game is to gang up -- lots of roommates, private > network > of savings, etc. Asian immigrants play this trump card. But Americans are so > brainwashed about individualism and so paranoid, they try to go it alone.... > ....sure recipie for disaster. My crude economic theory of why poor people are often more collective-minded than middle-class and rich folks is because of this pooling of resources. Of course, culture plays a role, too. (My crude theory of why poor people do a lot of dancing, etc., is because it's cheap or even free.) It's interesting that when people get into the middle class, they tend to become more individualistic -- which is an unhealthy thing to do. It's self-destructive. [Hey, maybe the on-coming depression is a good thing! ;-) ] -- Jim Devine / "Nobody told me there'd be days like these / Strange days indeed -- most peculiar, mama." -- JL. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
