Huh. When I was in the bottom 20%, I moved to a really terrible neighborhood and ate mostly rice and oatmeal. In my terrible neighborhood, I saw lots of people

Huh. When I was in the bottom 20%, I moved to a really terrible neighborhood and ate mostly rice and oatmeal. In my terrible neighborhood, I saw lots of people who wore much nicer clothes than me, but who, uh, didn't seem to have jobs. Lots of them had iPods -- some of them also had sound systems which they used well after midnight, perhaps in order to broadcast some sort of distress signal audible at the New York Times headquarters. I have a better job now; the average income, poverty rate, unemployment rate, incarceration rate, etc., of the neighborhood I left does not appear to have improved. I did not find it very hard to live on $700 a month when that's what I had to live on. And that was in one of the more expensive cities in the world. I think they can do better, and I do think it's their fault that they don't.