Peg Kaplan read Nickeled and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich, too. And she liked it about as much as I did:
While I would never argue that people who earn hourly wages at Wal-Mart, fill orders at Wendy’s or clean rooms at Hampton Inn don’t have serious struggles, Ms. Ehrenreich’s book was a joke. Part of her undercover stint took place in my hometown, Minneapolis. Thus, it was easy to see that the author didn’t really want to be successful. She never tried to improve her positions, get superior housing, bargain for better anything at all. She was surly and rude to most with whom she met – be it co-workers, superiors or clerks where she was trying to find decent but inexpensive housing.
Beyond that? My problem with Ehrenreich’s book was that while she may have had some minimum wage jobs, she actually lived like an upper-middle-class person who’d put on a “poor” costume and was acting, as Peg noted, like a cartoon of a disadvantaged person. Her conclusions were already set; there was never any doubt about the outcome of her experiment, and if there HAD been, her cartoonish, central-casting “poor person” behavior pretty well scuppered it.
Which, in addition to being a pretty risible approach to a serious issue, was kind of insulting. Early in my marriage, my wife-at-the-time and I got by on very little money, scrimped and pinched pennies and, eventually, found the opportunity to get ahead; the notion that a pampered foof like Ehrenreich thought her cartoonish experiences emblematic was nauseating.
I bring this up because Peg points us to this piece in the Christian Science Monitor, about a recent college grad who tried Ehrenreich’s experiment, in reverse:
Shortly after graduating from Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., [Adam Shepard] intentionally left his parents’ home to test the vivacity of the American Dream. His goal: to have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year.
To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education.
During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.
Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.
The effort, he says, was inspired after reading “Nickel and Dimed,” in which author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on a series of low-paying jobs. Unlike Ms. Ehrenreich, who chronicled the difficulty of advancing beyond the ranks of the working poor, Shepard found he was able to successfully climb out of his self-imposed poverty.
He tells his story in “Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream.” The book, he says, is a testament to what ordinary Americans can achieve.
Read the whole thing? Sure, why not?
(Via Peg at What If?)
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