Are there any scholars or doctrinal schools that address the conspicuous dearth of needy people in Jesus' sayings and stories? I'm doing a research project that has involved a lot of different types of survey of the Gospels. Having noticed a surprising number of rich people in Jesus' sayings, I  surveyed for verses with elements that pertain to socioeconomic status. That is, verses where Jesus uses examples or stories that involve having something (food, clothes, a home, a job, cash, storerooms, livestock, farms, storehouses, real estate, investment property, servants, slaves, hired hands, etc.) or not having anything (for example, being a beggar). I found such elements in about 28% of his 1300-ish speaking verses.

Rather glaringly, after a handful of comments on the needy (about 30 verses) and a handful of warnings to the rich (about 30 verses again), Jesus speaks some 300 verses of unrelated parables and examples full of detailed descriptions of people who have something--often very, very rich people. (Note that I allowed for narrative overlap among the four Gospels in arriving at these figures.) I tried googling around for explanations, but I can't find anyone who talks about the preponderance of haves as opposed to the precisely one have-not in his teachings. (And to clarify, I mean the only have-not who gets to be the protagonist. Jesus does tell a few stories about slaves, but he makes them the villains, in the end having them tortured for an unfathomably long time or summarily and brutally executed for their wickedness, so you can see why I didn't count them).

So here I am, naively asking: why does Jesus spend 60-ish verses promoting charity and warning the rich, and 300-ish verses on unrelated sayings and stories with detailed descriptions of people who have something--often the very rich? Or another way of asking the question: it seems to me that any of the points he makes in these 300 verses could be made with stories about beggars and seriously needy people, but he never uses them, preferring the rich instead.

Have any scholars, Church fathers, prominent theologians, or even obscure pundits noticed and commented on this?

Edit:
You guys, I am deeply sorry to have offended anyone. I did not realize this would be inflammatory. All I did was read the Gospels, and I was just asking a question that I thought would have an obvious answer. I am very sorry.

I am confused about the complaint that I have misused the word "rich". I must point out that no matter where you draw the line between rich and poor in Jesus' words, the needy are always the furthest away from it and on the wrong side. I just figured someone would have written a book about the stark contrast between the popular, modern conception of Jesus and the character actually presented in the Gospels.
The question as posed contains an implicit assumption that needs to be challenged -- or at least teased out into the open. It is this: that numerical represention of character types in Jesus' parables ought to reflect the proportion of attention Jesus gave to them outside the parables.

This is important for the the particular case of "wealthy vs. poor" characters in the parables, since parables "about" the wealthy typically warn against wealth, and so fall into line with what one sees elsewhere in the gospels concerning Jesus and poverty. In other words, it is not sufficient to do the counts/tabulations: one must take into account the intention of the parable itself. This point grows out of a relevant study by Stephen Wright, "Parables on Poverty and Riches", in The Challenge of Jesus' Parables, ed. by R.N. Longenecker (Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 217-239.

It should further be noted that with one solitary exception (as far as I know), the characters in Jesus parables do not appear as "individuals", but as representative types: this kind of farmer, that kind of despot, Joe Samaritan, etc. Again, this has signficance for OP's interests. W.R. Herzog makes this observation and draws out some of its significance in his Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Westminster/John Knox, 1994):


  To make sense of the parts, one must have some conception of the systematic whole. It does little good to recreate life in a peasant village unless one understands how the peasant village fit [sic] into the larger social, political, and economic scheme of things. ... These encounters [between peasants in the parables] are interpreted through "typificatory schemes"... Because the parables are full of typifications, their seemingly unique scenes and individual characters actually imply a social construction of reality in which people interact in typical ways. Even the characters found in the parables are not individuals but socially recognizable types who stand for larger social groups. (pp. 53-54)


The chapter that follows in Herzog's book explores and develops that wider social network.

In addition, assessing the balance of wealthy/poor characters in Jesus' parables should also take into account these two factors:


Of the thirty-seven parables in the gospels, I reckon about a third, maybe more, involve characters that are poor, maybe a slightly higher proportion if those "parables" that involve no human protagonists are excluded. So at least they're not absent. Here, too, as Herzog's observation suggests, recognition of characters embedded within the whole social scale is to be expected, not the isolation of any particular group. Thus we have both employers (wealthy) and day workers (poor) (Matthew 20:1-16), a rich man and a beggar (Luke 16:19-31 -- which is the case of the one "named" character in the parables), etc.
In many rural parts of the majority world today, subsistence farming is a way of life, much as it would have been for many of Jesus' listeners. What we sometimes fail to appreciate is that there are degrees of destitution. Some of the figures in the parables are hard to classify in these gradations of poverty. Given this social setting, Jesus' hearers from a broad range along the poverty/wealth scale of the time would have been able to recognize themselves in his stories -- even though they themselves might not have been "wealthy" by any measure we would recognize.




This all fits into the wider biblical witness. A certain distrust of wealth on the one hand, and God's "option for the poor"1 on the other, runs through the Christian Bible -- Old and New Testaments alike. The challenging presence of the theme inspired the early monastic movement, with its embrace of "poverty, chastity, obedience", so it is no new idea for the Christian church.

For that broader context, an Old Testament perspective is provided by a recent book by David Baker, Tight Fists Or Open Hands?: Wealth and Poverty in Old Testament Law (Eerdmans, 2009). The study by Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (IVP, 1977; later edition Nelson, 2005) has had prolonged influence, and brings the story into the New Testament.2

But the literature on this is, in fact, vast, and runs pretty much throughout the two millennia of the church's existence.3



Notes


As it has come to be known in some circles, associated especially with liberation theology and Gustavo Gutiérrez, although used much more widely now.
Original sub-title: "A Biblical Study", but in the latest edition: "Moving from Affluence to Generosity".
See also the literature cited in the Q&amp;A on poverty in Luke's gospel.