Barbara Ehrenreich penned an influential and oft-cited 2001 book called Nickel and Dimed, in which she decides to shed some of the privileges of her middle class life (author, college professor, etc.) to see if it was really possible to live in the U.S. on the minimum wage. Her experiment went on for a year, and she found that while it wasn’t entirely impossible, it was extremely difficult— there were hidden start-up costs in poverty that people starting from poverty would be unlikely to be able to come up with. She concedes that she covered some of those start-up costs for the purpose of the experiment — like being able to get a car, which none of her fellow employees at Wal-Mart or the diner-type establishment in which she worked could afford to do.
Adam Shepard, a Merrimack College graduate, said he wasn’t particularly impressed with Ehrenreich’s book. So he decided to go out and do the same thing with some goals: to head out into the world and have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year. He wouldn’t use his previous contacts or mention his education. He also kept a credit card, in case of an emergency (but he said if he used his card, the experiment was over).
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…
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. [ABC]
He writes about his story in the book Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream.
Some quotes from the ABC interview:
Becoming a mover and living in a homeless shelter – that hadn’t been part of your life before. How much did your lifestyle actually change?
Shepard: It changed dramatically. There were simple luxuries that I didn’t afford myself. I had to make sacrifices to achieve the goals that I set out. One of those was eating out. I didn’t have a cellphone. Especially in this day and age, that was a dramatic change for me…. I was getting by on chicken and Rice-A-Roni dinner and was happy. That’s what I learned … we lived [simply], but still we were happy.
But surely your background – you’re privileged; you have an education and a family – made it much easier for you to achieve.
I didn’t use my college education, credit history, or contacts [while in South Carolina]. But in real life, I had these lessons that I had learned. I don’t think that played to my advantage. How much of a college education do you need to budget your money to a point that you’re not spending frivolously, but you’re instead putting your money in the bank?Do you need a college education?
I don’t think so. To be honest with you, I think I was disadvantaged, because my thinking was inside of a box. I have the way that I lived [in North Carolina] – and to enter into this totally new world and acclimate to a different lifestyle, that was the challenge for me.Still, there was that safety net. Were you ever tempted to tap your past work, education, or family networks?
I was never tempted. I had a credit card in my back pocket in case of an emergency. The rule was if I used the credit card then, “The project’s over, I’m going home.” …
Would your project have changed if you’d had child-care payments or been required to report to a probation officer? Wouldn’t that have made it much harder?
The question isn’t whether I would have been able to succeed. I think it’s the attitude that I take in: “I’ve got child care. I’ve got a probation officer. I’ve got all these bills. Now what am I going to do? Am I going to continue to go out to eat and put rims on my Cadillac? Or am I going to make some things happen in my life…?” One guy, who arrived [at the shelter] on a Tuesday had been hit by a car on [the previous] Friday by a drunk driver. He was in a wheelchair. He was totally out of it. He was at the shelter. And I said, “Dude, your life is completely changed.” And he said, “Yeah, you’re right, but I’m getting the heck out of here.” Then there was this other guy who could walk and everything was good in his life, but he was just kind of bumming around, begging on the street corner. To see the attitudes along the way, that is what my story is about.
In his interview with NPR he drops another winner.
So did it play to my advantage from the respect that I knew how to budget my money? Perhaps. But how much of an education do you need to make the decision that listen, if I’m buying beer and cigarettes and lottery tickets, then my money is going out the door.
And so on.
So…where to start? It’s clear from the video clip that he’d made up his mind about the way he was going to view his experiences from the jump. Shepard doesn’t use his contacts or his money from his “real” life, but that doesn’t mean he’s cast off the considerable privileges. He still spoke (English) like a college-educated person. He also went into this experiment unencumbered by debt, without a criminal record, and without child support payments. He was also presumably in good health, something that people who live in poverty for long-stretches generally are not (poor people die younger, disproportionately suffer from obesity-related illnesses, are less likely to have serious conditions treated early, etc.). He knew how to budget his money and save, which meant that he probably had a bank account — which is literally out of reach for many poor people as there aren’t banks in the poorest neighborhoods (though there are mad check cashing joints).
And here’s the biggie: he could check out at anytime, which is a huge psychological privilege that people who are actually poor don’t have. In short, his not growing up poor meant that he wasn’t also dealing with the net deficits of a life of poverty.
