{"id":2147,"date":"2008-02-20T05:33:54","date_gmt":"2008-02-20T10:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2147"},"modified":"2008-02-20T09:56:29","modified_gmt":"2008-02-20T14:56:29","slug":"nickeled-and-deceived","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2147","title":{"rendered":"Nickeled And Deceived"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peg Kaplan read Nickeled and Dimed, <\/em>by Barbara Ehrenreich, too.\u00a0 And she liked it about as much as I did<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Part of her undercover stint took place in my hometown, Minneapolis.\u00a0 Thus, it was easy to see that the author didn’t really want<\/em> to be successful.\u00a0 She never tried to improve her positions, get superior housing, bargain for better anything at all.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Beyond that?\u00a0 My problem with Ehrenreich’s book was that while she may have had some minimum wage jobs, she actually lived <\/em>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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which, in addition to being a pretty risible approach to a serious issue, was kind of insulting.\u00a0 Early in my marriage, my wife-at-the-time and I got by on very <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

I bring this up because Peg points us to this piece in the Christian Science Monitor<\/a>, about a recent college grad who tried Ehrenreich’s experiment, in reverse:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing?\u00a0 Sure, why not?\u00a0<\/p>\n

(Via Peg at What If<\/a>?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peg Kaplan read Nickeled and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich, too.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Part of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}