Identifying the problem

I’ve gotten a few comments on my post about Adam Shepard, and hopefully those readers will be back, because I have a couple of questions I would like to ask them. I am genuinely looking for answers because I want to understand the other side — I am not looking to humiliate anyone or to prove a point with these questions.

This will be a three-part series of questions, but to avoid muddying the answers (and to make my little calendar over on the right look like I’ve been posting regularly), I will be posting them in separate posts on separate days.

I believe that there is a significant subset of the “working poor” whose situation is more-or-less reflected by the starting point of Adam Shepard’s experiment. I believe that, for that subset of the population, Adam Shepard’s experiment is meaningful, because it shows that the ability for these people to improve their lifestyles is not dependent on having more physical stuff, but on intangibles.

I believe that Adam was able to do what he did because he believed that it could be done, which gave him both hope and confidence. He also had discipline, a basic education on how to handle money because of his upbringing, goals he set for himself. I think that these things that could be taught or conveyed without throwing a lot of money at the problem (indeed, many of these things are often undermined by throwing money at the problem).

Others disagree with me, obviously. If you are one of those people, please answer the following question:

What set Adam apart from these individuals? Do you believe that the difference is in something tangible, or do you believe that it’s something intangible that we can’t give to the working poor?