“Mo money, mo problems,” a philosopher once said. Or, to be more precise, moving up the socioeconomic ladder creates (or uncovers) problems that are more sophisticated.

I recently came across a relatively minor but telling example of this phenomenon. Towards the beginning of this year my wife began developing digestive complaints; after some doctor appointments and research, she decided to make some specific dietary changes. These included buying “sensitive recipe” pasta sauce made without onion or garlic, which can be hard on the small intestine.

One evening I was tasked with going to Schnucks* and picking up a couple jars of this sauce. There happen to be two Schnuckses in our general vicinity, which I’ll respectively call Working Class Schnucks (WCS) and Middle Class Schnucks (MCS) based on the following data pulled from the 2017 American Community Survey:

WCS zip code median household income: $32,851

MCS zip code median household income: $52,224

WCS is my default since it’s closer and I think the cashiers are funny. So without further reflection I went there only to find that they did not carry sensitive recipe pasta sauce (or organic potatoes for that matter, also on my shopping list). This necessitated a trip to the more distant MCS, which, sure enough, had a dozen or so jars stocked.

I think it highly unlikely that Schnucks is engaged in some nefarious ploy to keep poor people sick. Nor do I think that incidence of digestive problems in the poorer zip code is substantially lower than in the wealthier one. One obvious explanation is relative cost, but, as it happens, a jar of sensitive recipe sauce is only about sixty cents higher than its onion-and-garlicky counterpart. Even in poorer neighborhoods this not an especially high price to pay for less discomfort and/or increased gut health.

I think the real issue is that digestive complaints have to rank high enough on a person’s list of problems for him / her to actually do something about them. I happen to spend a lot of time in the neighborhoods around WCS, and I think it’s fair to say that the folks living there face a set of deprivations and problems that drive gut health pretty far down the priority list.

This minor example illustrates that poverty implies more than the inability to afford nice or even necessary things (e.g., health insurance). Poverty brings with it pressures making it difficult to even know about, much less care about, certain problems important to wealthier folks.

But it equally illustrates the opposite point: wealth uncovers, calls attention to or even creates a different set of problems. Of course the very fact that large numbers of people can worry about gut health, for instance, represents a significant achievement. Abject poverty has been the experience of most human beings for most of history, so that the vast majority of people who have ever existed have just had to put up with stuff like persistent digestive complaints. May it please God that ever increasing amounts of people will have the privilege to spend significant amounts of time and energy addressing bloating and discomfort rather than in, trying to get sufficient food to survive.**  Poverty as such is an unequivocal evil and should be eliminated. 

The point remains, however, that escaping a subsistence level of existence frees you up to pursue projects other than mere survival, but also requires you to deal with less deadly but more sophisticated problems. Suffering, of various kinds and intensities, seems woven into the fabric of human existence in a way that no amount of economic success can prevent.

The following post will look at baseball and Martin Luther in an effort to make some theological sense of why this is so.

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* For those of you reading in the American South, Schnucks is roughly the Saint Louis metro equivalent to Kroger.

** It’s entirely possible that many of our digestive complaints are created by the advent of modern, highly-processed foods. Which are cheap and plentiful and keep people from starving. This stuff has layers, man.