Spoilers and thoughts for Knight Rider and Jericho (Reconstruction) below the cut.

More …

The Consumerist links to the story of Adam Shepard (The Consumerist doesn’t use the name, but the linked article does, as does this interview at Get Rich Slowly) the college grad who spent time living and working a lower class lifestyle as part of an experiment.

Starting with only $25, Shepard set out to see if he could meet his goals within a year. His goals? Find a job, get $2,500 in the bank, buy a car, and get an apartment. He succeeded and then some, and ended the experiment early due to an illness in his family.

I’d read J.D.’s interview with Shepard first, and commenters at Get Rich Slowly were fairly quick to point out that Shepard had other advantages:

J.G. Says:
February 18th, 2008 at 6:32 am
This is an excellent interview. Mr. Shepard makes some great points — I’ve always been a firm believer in the idea that we shape our world with our attitudes.

I do have one issue with this experiment — he may have been living poor, but he didn’t start out that way. Forgetting for a moment the advantages of being an attractive white male, he had the advantages of a middle-class upbringing and a complete education, things which, at the very least, did not prevent him from having a positive outlook in the first place. Having lived in poverty (on my own, with children), I know how hopeless it can make you feel. I can’t imagine having additional challenges besides that — being black or hispanic, having medical issues or relatives to care for.

I guess my objection to this (and it’s a minor one) is that this experiment gives the impression that it’s easy to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It /can/ be easy, but for people who haven’t been taught how to hope in the first place, for people who don’t know what it feels like to succeed at something, it can feel impossible.

All the same, I’m glad he did this and that he did so well. It’s very encouraging.

Emphasis mine. Even more interesting is the very next comment at Get Rich Slowly:

jayne Says:
February 18th, 2008 at 6:36 am

Someone who has an education, good health, and an “emergency” credit card is in no way starting “from scratch.” That’s starting from comfort. A man in his situation is willing to take risks the real poor might not because, if he failed, the stakes are a whole lot lower. He walks home, shamed. That’s a bit easier than living in poverty and illness for the rest of one’s life because you took a risks that didn’t pan out.

People are going to point to this experiment and say “if he can do it, anyone can!” That’s great motivation for some, but it’s also an excuse for dispassionate dismissal of the real plight of the working poor.

Adam Shepard, according to “Jayne”, was willing to take risks because failing, for him, wouldn’t hurt as bad as it would for other people in that situation. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

First, consider what’s being risked. Adam starts with $25 in a homeless shelter. If he fails, he looks stupid, and goes home. Now, imagine another person who is in that situation without Adam’s background. Our hypothetical poverty-stricken man (whom we’ll call “Steve” for simplicity) is not well educated and was raised in a working-class family, but, like Adam, does not have anyone else to support, and is in reasonably good shape. Suppose Steve starts taking the same risks that Adam did, and he fails. He ends up… back in the homeless shelter, where he already was, and while he may feel a little shamed at having failed, it’s probably no more significant than whatever shame he feels being there already. Steve’s risk is no greater than Adam’s.

Second, consider the potential benefit from the risk. Adam’s success earned him some attention and material for writing a book, but I believe that those advantages are only a minimal increase in his lifestyle from before the experiment began (where he was already pretty privileged). If Steve took the same risks and succeeded, the relative increase in his lifestyle is huge (unlike Adam, his pre-risk lifestyle was not so hot, as he was in a homeless shelter).

So, Steve’s risks are about the same as Adam’s, and his potential benefits are much greater, so why would Jayne believe the differences in risk would benefit Adam?

The post at the Consumerist takes another poke at the “anyone can do it” nature of Adam’s accomplishment, when the author writes, “The point of the story is supposed to be that people are poor because they have bad attitudes. Which is technically true, but maybe he should do an experiment to see what being born poor will do for your ‘positive outlook.’” Essentially, Ben Popken is saying that he believes that a positive attitude would help poor people get out of poverty, but that their poor attitudes are caused by poverty. With that sort of an outlook, Ben must believe that poverty is an inescapable trap for most people.

This sort of ties into my post about Michelle Obama a couple of evenings ago. Those who are criticizing Adam’s experiment are adamant that the advantages he had that enabled him to better his situation during this experiment are intangible. They believe that his middle-class upbringing gave him the advantage of a positive attitude, money management skills, and knowledge about how to handle himself when looking for and working at a job, and that those advantages are the reason he was able to help himself. Assuming these people are correct, why do we insist on throwing money at people in poverty? All that does is encourage the same behavior that got them into poverty in the first place^[a]. As I’ve seen it described before, all we get by subsidizing poverty is more poverty.

Instead of giving money, why don’t we help people by helping them meet their basic needs (actually giving them what they need, not giving them the money to buy it) and then educate them? Help them to realize that there is hope, that they can actually get out of this hole if they’ll just apply a little discipline and work at it. Provide money management courses, teach them how to present themselves at job interviews and on the job, and give them the intangible benefits that Adam apparently has. Maybe those individuals wouldn’t manage to pull themselves out of the lower class, but they almost certainly would be able to improve their lives considerably, and in so doing, they would learn valuable lessons and build some self respect that they could then pass on to their own children.

1. Yes, I know there are exceptions to this. Most of us have seen human interest stories about people who were on public assistance and managed to work their way up into a middle or upper class lifestyle. But those people have stories written about them because they are the exceptions. By and large, people on welfare and other public assistance are slow to get off of that assistance. [↩]