4 ms·

I'm always kind of amazed that stories about how much it sucks to be poor are "news" and not common knowledge. I remember when Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed ca

I'm always kind of amazed that stories about how much it sucks to be poor are "news" and not common knowledge. I remember when Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed came out and it got all this press. I was dumbfounded. People needed a book to let them know that it is hard to survive on a minimum wage job?

pavel_lishin 9y ago
I forget the name of the book, but after reading Ehrenreich's book, I read one by a college-aged kid who went from literally having no money to having some sort of relatively good job. It wasn't particularly well written, but it got a fair amount of press - because it reaffirmed people's "gumption and bootstraps" American philosophy, where hard work is the solution to everything, regardless of context or circumstance. Of course a white 20 year old can get hired. Of course he has the time to walk an hour to his job and work there for 12 hours since he has no children or elderly relatives to take care of. Of course he can move furniture, since he's young and healthy. Of course he can get a job without a criminal record.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  >Of course a white 20 year old can get hired. Of course he has the time to walk an hour to his job and work there for 12 hours since he has no children or elderly relatives to take care of. Of course he can move furniture, since he's young and healthy. Of course he can get a job without a criminal record. Is it unreasonable to expect this level of effort out of any 20yo who's options are "be poor" or do this? Not being white and having a criminal record aren't going to stop you from making ends meet. They just make it harder to proceed upward after that point.
  - Retric 9y ago
    The starting point is not a collage degree. The starting point is 14 when many people drop out of school, get sick, get pregnant, etc. If you make it to 20 without anything bad happening including a clean record and good credit then sure the next 12 months is not hard.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    > Is it unreasonable to expect this level of effort out of any 20yo who's options are "be poor" or do this? It's totally not, but the book presented him as a ambitious go-getter who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. I wish I remembered the damn book's name.
lazerpants 9y ago
Income mobility in the United States is not that high. Most people stay in the income class that they are born into, so most people who are not impoverished do not know what poverty is like. Also, the level of poverty covered in the article is pretty extreme. I grew up in a low income area but it was not difficult to find some way to make 15-20k a year. My neighbors were no where near as poor as the woman highlighted in the article.
- michaelchisari 9y ago
  For some stats to back this up, the Brookings Institute report shows that mobility is much higher in Canada and the Scandinavian social democracies than it is in the U.S. or the U.K. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_economic_mobility_sawhill_ch3.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ... Many other reports corroborate these findings.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

I forget the name of the book, but after reading Ehrenreich's book, I read one by a college-aged kid who went from literally having no money to having some sort of relatively good job. It wasn't particularly well written, but it got a fair amount of press - because it reaffirmed people's "gumption and bootstraps" American philosophy, where hard work is the solution to everything, regardless of context or circumstance. Of course a white 20 year old can get hired. Of course he has the time to walk an hour to his job and work there for 12 hours since he has no children or elderly relatives to take care of. Of course he can move furniture, since he's young and healthy. Of course he can get a job without a criminal record.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>Of course a white 20 year old can get hired. Of course he has the time to walk an hour to his job and work there for 12 hours since he has no children or elderly relatives to take care of. Of course he can move furniture, since he's young and healthy. Of course he can get a job without a criminal record. Is it unreasonable to expect this level of effort out of any 20yo who's options are "be poor" or do this? Not being white and having a criminal record aren't going to stop you from making ends meet. They just make it harder to proceed upward after that point.
- Retric 9y ago
  The starting point is not a collage degree. The starting point is 14 when many people drop out of school, get sick, get pregnant, etc. If you make it to 20 without anything bad happening including a clean record and good credit then sure the next 12 months is not hard.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > Is it unreasonable to expect this level of effort out of any 20yo who's options are "be poor" or do this? It's totally not, but the book presented him as a ambitious go-getter who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. I wish I remembered the damn book's name.

lazerpants 9y ago

Income mobility in the United States is not that high. Most people stay in the income class that they are born into, so most people who are not impoverished do not know what poverty is like. Also, the level of poverty covered in the article is pretty extreme. I grew up in a low income area but it was not difficult to find some way to make 15-20k a year. My neighbors were no where near as poor as the woman highlighted in the article.

michaelchisari 9y ago
For some stats to back this up, the Brookings Institute report shows that mobility is much higher in Canada and the Scandinavian social democracies than it is in the U.S. or the U.K. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_economic_mobility_sawhill_ch3.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ... Many other reports corroborate these findings.