This preprint develops a distributional theory of stress that links poverty, markets, and health through a common, comparable unit. Rather than defining stress primarily as a psychological state, the paper conceptualizes stress as a deficit in feasible choice within everyday life. Given a visible choice set (Ω), constraints map part of that set into an infeasible set (U), generating stress as choice-set loss, including both discrete non-access and continuous underuse. The paper argues that such deficits are not randomly distributed. Instead, they are systematically generated through the interaction of economic indicator ranking, visibility, and multiple constraints, producing social gradients and boundary shifts when prices, institutions, or infrastructures change. In this way, fragmented literatures on material deprivation, fuel poverty, transport poverty, and related hardships are integrated into a single theoretical framework. Positioned as the fourth theoretical paper in the Material Culture Macroecology (MME) program, this study provides a middle layer linking constraint structures to distributional outcomes and offers a practical route for incorporating prices into MME as observable constraints. The paper also outlines an empirical research program for testing goods-type stress, service-type stress, and use-constraint stress within a common comparative framework.
Kazuya Imaizumi (Tue,) studied this question.