Surrounded by Treasures: warning: politics. RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!

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Sunday, November 04, 2007

warning: politics. RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!

In response to yesterday's post, Karen (hi Karen! nice to meet you) asked me the following question:

Maybe you've addressed this before and I've forgotten, but what is it about those two books that's annoying you so much? I've read the second one, and I'm curious to hear what you're thinking.

The books, to save you going back and clicking on the links, are The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David Shipler and Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by Barbara Ehrenreich. They annoyed me for mostly different reasons, although some of the overarching Big Deal reasons were the same.

Karen specifically mentioned Nickel and Dimed, which details the results of an experiment the author conducted wherein she shed her upper-class lifestyle for three separate one-month periods to see if she could make ends meet at the minimum wage. She treated this as if it was a Giant And Very Important Journalistic Endeavor. (Think Nelly Bly doing Ten Days In A Madhouse, only with more angst and less creativity.) The main problem I have with the book, aside from the author's obvious political slant (not as obvious as Shipler's in The Working Poor, though) was the fact that there is absolutely no way she could learn anything significant about the lives of the working poor in ninety-divided-by-three days spent pretending she was one of them.

Also, the little she did learn, she managed to learn in spite of the fact that while she had resources most poor people lack (namely, start-up costs), she didn't take advantage of the resources that they do have. Most working poor people have friends and families and significant others, or at least churches or social workers, or, for crying out loud, roommates to help them; she did not even attempt to take advantage of any such assistance, and so her results were skewed. In virtually any field of endeavour, there's room to move up from the entry level for those who make enough of an effort at it; of course this could not be a factor in such a brief experiment. The poor have loves and grumbles and joys and sorrows just like she does in her upscale condominium in Key West; she wrote about the poor in a manner that claimed to be empowering (see! they are real live people! They have real needs and wants!), and which might have been so on the surface, but which in actual fact was almost unbearably condescending (how can they possibly think they are happy living like this? omg, look at me aspiring to be trailer trash!). In doing her Dian-Fossey-among-the-gorillas bit, she learned about the habits and activities of minimum-wage earners, to an extent, but there is no way she learned what it is like to actually be poor any more than Fossey learned what it was like to actually be a gorilla, or Nelly Bly learned what it was like to be insane. Ehrenreich admits this, but then she spends the rest of the book acting like she's telling us what it's like to actually be poor. Ehrenreich purported to tell people about life at the minimum wage, but as a person who has lived the lifestyle at which she was only pretending, I can authoritatively state that she had only the very faintest idea what she was talking about.

So why even bother? Well, I will admit that maybe to other people like herself -- people who have maybe never considered that the person who waits on their tables or cleans their houses has actual feelings -- this book has value. Also, I have to confess that the woman can write well and she's very, very funny when she wants to be. Still and all, the Economist's Bible it's not, and you can perhaps see why it made me a wee bit angry.

As for the Shipler book, in some ways it was much better than Ehrenreich's; in others it was much worse. His research was far and away more complete and compelling than hers; while she was playing waitress and dashing back to her trailer to taptaptap away about it on her laptop, he was interviewing dozens of "the working poor" (I am so, so tired of this phrase), some of whom had succeeded in moving beyond minimum wage, and some of whom had not. The result was actually quite interesting to read overall, although there were more than a few times when I wanted to throw the book against the wall. For much of the book (with some substantial exceptions), his obvious socialist slant was restrained to some purposeful decision-making in the way the research was presented, and pepperings of commentary here and there; there were times when I would actually have deemed it politically balanced.

However, he opens and closes with two of the most thinly veiled socialist rants I have seen since my own writings as a soulful, oh-so-compassionate, completely misguided teenager. His solutions to the problem of working poverty are: raise the minimum wage really high (of course), pay higher-paid employees less to compensate (that'd do wonders for people's motivation to excel, no?), "restructure the hierarchy of wealth to alleviate the hardship down below" (p. 286), socialize healthcare (another of course), subsidize housing, mobilize poor voters (because, of course, the point of voting is to help better your own situation, as everyone knows), and, oh yeah, develop job-skills training and vocational education (the only two of his solutions with which I agree). To many people, obviously, this list presents no problem at all (after all, look who's running away with the Democratic presidential race). To me, however -- well, you asked why I found the book annoying, and that's the answer. I just don't agree with the guy's solutions, or his priorities, or his conception of the role of government in American life contrasted with the importance of individual responsibility, or even his overall values as far as I can tell. And yet I have had to eat, sleep, and breathe his book (me exaggerate?) for weeks on end. Picture your average Prius-driving, Clinton-voting neohippie in a class built around the essays of George Will.

And now that I've alienated/bored/shocked you all with my utter and complete lack of soulful compassion, I'm going to bed to read. This much-beloved time change is working its usual unreasonable havoc on my sense of time, and I feel like it must be at least 1:00 AM by now.

Posted by Rachel on November 4, 2007 09:56 PM in politics | the hard-working coed

Comments

You have my sympathy. Seriously. I mean, no, it's not the end of the world, having to read that stuff (and eat, sleep, and breathe it ;o)), but I know that when you're immersed in and repeatedly confronted by something that irritates you (and boy, do those books sound irritating!), it does create a few raw spots.

I'm reminded of what was probably the most leftist class I ever had to take-- Multicultural Education. And no, folks, I have no problem with multicultural people, but... Well, don't get me started here in poor Rachel's comments section. (g)

I hope next semester's classes will give you a break from this kind of thing.

Posted by: Michael at November 5, 2007 04:33 AM

The "solutions" offered by David Shipler, and Barbara Ehrenreich remind me of the tender, compassionate homeless advocates who back in the late 80's in Sacramento, CA who were raising funds to buy the homeless their own shopping carts, so that they would not suffer the humiliation of having their mobility lost when a store reclaimed their carts from them. Another of their soft-hearted (and soft-headed) campaigns was to place "flags" on the corners of public dumpsters. The garbage collector would upon seeing the flag raised, by-pass the dumpster having been warned that someone was "home". (There was a tragic incident in which a homeless person was crushed after having been unknowingly collected with the garbage) Rather than helping them to not be homeless, some "advocates" sought to make them more comfortable in their deplorable situation.

The fact that the poor can ascend economically in our system is undeniable, though it has never been easy, it becomes impossible when a person buys in to the warped perspective offered by folks like these authors who have a pronounced interest in bringing about a great socialist utopia for us all.

Posted by: T. at November 5, 2007 09:01 AM

Just for the record, although I disagree with you on some political things, I am neither alienated nor shocked. (Oh, not bored either, in case that was unclear. :) ) I haven't read either of those books, but I agree about Ehrenreich's "experiment" not really being very valid. Sigh. Although, I suppose, yes, if its bestseller status made some people think about things they might not otherwise register, then that's something....

Posted by: Kat with a K at November 5, 2007 03:47 PM

T -- are you kidding about the shopping cart thing? I am speechless.

I sympathize with you. Truly. Especially the socialism part. Like Michael, I won't rant on your comments section, but I feel for you.

Posted by: mary at November 6, 2007 09:43 AM

T: Actually the flags seem like a reasonable idea to me, purely because flags are cheap and sticking one on a dumpster is easy. There's nothing wrong with a quick and dirty fix addressing an immediate problem while you work on a structural solution to the big issue. It's a bit useless to provide vocational training after someone is crushed to death. (I agree with you that buying shopping carts is stupid, because I suspect buying and distributing those uses up a lot of time, effort and money that could be much better applied to helping people improve their lives in a real way.)

I probably am a bit of a bleeding heart, but in this case I'm looking at problem-solving from a purely engineering perspective. If an airplane part breaks that will put passengers at risk, first you replace the part. Only then do you start doing the in-depth examination of *why* the part failed and whether a new design, material, or manufacturing process is needed.

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