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

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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. [↩]

I found a link to Consumerist.com the other day, and I’ve been reading through some of the posts there when I have a few minutes. The stories they share are entertaining, and it gives consumers a decent idea of what sorts of things we might want to look out for when doing business with large corporations — and how to deal with those corporations when we are slighted.

I can’t say I agree with everything that’s said there, though. This is from an op-ed a couple of weeks back:

But we can’t wait for Congress, or the next President, to feel like reviving the emaciated agencies of the FCC, FTC, and CPSC. It’s up to you to protect your consumer rights. Do your research. Ask questions. Knowing who to and how to complain when things go wrong. Get informed. Vote with your dollar. Your new policy? “It’s company policy,” is not a valid explanation for ripping you off.

While the advice here is good, there are no such things as consumer rights. The government is not obligated to protect you from your own stupidity. Read the contracts you sign, and only sign the contract if you’re absolutely certain that you understand it. If you don’t do this, and end up owing money for a fee you didn’t realize you would be charged, that’s a “stupid tax,” as Dave Ramsey would call it. Pay it, and learn your lesson. Don’t go whining about how Big Brother should have stopped the mean corporation from making you sign something without reading it (unless, of course, they actually did make you sign it by threatening you with a gun or something).

This is what annoys me about the freeze on ARM interest rates. Many people are yelling about unfair mortgage practices, but I haven’t heard anything that I really thought sounded unfair. I haven’t heard anyone say that the mortgage company forced them to take a loan they couldn’t afford; I’ve heard them say that the mortgage company allowed them to take a loan they couldn’t afford. In other words, they signed the loan contract willingly, and now that they’re being forced to live up to the terms of the contract, they want Big Brother to come help them out.

I sympathize with these people, really. I’ve paid more than my share of stupid tax already in my life, and I am sure that I will pay even more of it as time goes on. When I have to pay a stupid tax, though, I own up to it. I know this bill is my fault, and while I think it sucks that I have to pay it, I acknowlege that the reason I have to pay it is not because XYZ Financial loaned me more money than I could afford, it’s because I borrowed more than I could afford.

Are there times when corporations are actually committing fraud and tossing in truly hidden fees that weren’t in the contract at all, or advertising one thing while giving another? Sure there are, and in those cases, the government should be involved if they won’t make it right. As long as they’re being honest, though, there’s nothing wrong with companies trying to make a profit, and until they’re actually crossing the line into fraud, consumers should fight back by taking their dollars elsewhere and encouraging everyone who will listen to do the same, not by asking the government to intervene. There’s too much government involvement in the market already. Why would anyone want more?

I never pay any attention to the candidate’s spouses, but apparently, maybe I should. Rachel Lucas takes on some stupid things that were said by Michelle Obama, and does it quite well.

I’m going to stand up with Rachel and say that I, too, have debt, and not a single penny of my debt has anything to do with health care. Every bit of my debt has to do with my being financially irresponsible in the past, and I do not believe that I am unusual in this regard.

Rachel quotes this tidbit from Michelle Obama, too:

We have lost the understanding that in a democracy, we have a mutual obligation to one another — that we cannot measure the greatness of our society by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to measure our greatness by the least of these. That we have to compromise and sacrifice for one another in order to get things done. That is why I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person in this who understands that. That before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.

I believe we do have an obligation to one another, but I believe our obligation should be moral, not legal, and having this sort of thing in a campaign speech (even the campaign speech of a potential First Lady) is disturbing, because I suspect she is saying that her husband wants to turn our moral obligation into a legal one.

Also, I don’t believe we measure our society’s greatness by the least of our citizens. I believe that we measure our society by how we treat those individuals. Simply throwing money at these people is (with rare exceptions) the worst way to help them^[a], because it gives them absolutely no motivation to do anything to improve their own lot in life, and can slowly erode their sense of self-worth. Giving money to people whose problem is that they cannot force themselves to live within their means is nothing more than enabling them, and even if done with the best of intentions, it is not the right thing to do. Giving them government money, as I’m quite certain Barack and Michelle Obama would advocate^[b], is even worse, because you’re enabling them with other people’s money!

1. You might say I’m being a hypocrite here, because, as I admitted above, I have been bad about not living within my means in the past, particularly when I was in college, but to a lesser extent since then as well. The difference is that I am working to change my ways (though I can’t deny that I still feel the temptation to overspend), and that I readily admit that whatever financial stresses I have are 100 percent my own fault. [↩]
2. She may be using spiritual terms, but I am quite certain she’s thinking in legal ones [↩]

My local bank, City National Bank of West Virginia, has been pretty good to me over the last few years, but I’m a little frustrated over their internet banking.

I’ve always had some problems with it. For example, the search transactions feature is pretty wonky. When I needed to see all of the checks that had come out for the last six months for exactly the amount of my rent (I thought I had a rent check out floating in the ether, but my landlord said I was paid up, so there was a possibility I had a few hundred extra bucks in my account), the search turned up a lot of random debit card purchases that were NOTHING like the amount of my rent. I thought maybe it had pulled just the time frame I was looking at, but it wasn’t showing everything; the purchases that it displayed appeared to be random.

Over the last weekend, they made some major upgrades. The site came back up on Monday, and while I was able to get logged in, I noticed that the usual disclaimers and terms of service weren’t displaying properly. I didn’t think much of that until today, when the disclaimers were back… but the buttons to allow me to log in were gone. 20 seconds of investigation revealed that they had opened a <TEXTAREA> tag and not closed it. All the HTML for the buttons was displaying as text in the textarea. I looked for a link to an e-mail address where I could report this issue, but there isn’t one.

There was a phone number displayed, but it’s the 24 hour automated account access number. Still, I thought I could probably get a live person through that, so I called. Sure enough, there’s an option that says, “Press zero for a customer service representative.” I pressed zero. “To talk to a customer service representative, please contact your local branch.”

ARGH! From past experience, I knew that the only way to handle lockouts and dormant accounts on the City National “Future Banker” system was to go into the branch and talk to a teller, but my experience with that was not pleasant. The tellers themselves, while always very nice, don’t handle the unlocking themselves. They just put the customer’s information in a queue and tell you that your password will be reset to a standard password (SSN or birthdate or something; I’ve forgotten by now) at some point in the next 48 hours. Because none of the tellers I was dealing with seemed to know that a dormant account (I hadn’t been on their internet banking system for quite some time) can’t be unlocked, it took three trips into the branch to get a password reset.

Sure enough, I walked over to the branch nearest me and attempted to explain the problem.

Me: “Your internet banking system is not accessible. There’s a prob-”
Teller: “Yes, sir. It has been down since Thursday for an upgrade.”
Me: “Um, no… it was down Thursday through Sunday for the upgrade, and came back up yesterday. Now, it’s unavailable again, because the HTML is invalid.”
Teller: [blank look]
Me: “The text area where the terms of use and such are displayed isn’t closed properly. The code for the log in buttons…”
Teller: [blanker look]
Me: “I’m sorry. Everything on the website and automated phone service says to report issues to the tellers at the local branch, so here I am, because there’s not an e-mail address available for anyone in the entire corporation. I assume there’s someone you would pass this stuff along to. Could you just let them know that users can’t log into the website, and that the problem is invalid HTML?”
Teller: “Um… yes… I can… see what they can do.”

I’m not blaming the teller by any means, and I will admit that a customer walking into the branch office to tell them that their website has invalid HTML is not something that most bank tellers expect to face^[a]. This sort of thing could be easily avoided, though, if customers were simply given a method for reporting these sorts of problems — an e-mail address or a phone number that actually connects us to someone who can actually help with technical issues would be wonderful.

[Update: They've since fixed the error I describe here, but the lack of contact information is still a problem.]

1. Heck, I’ll even admit that my walking to the branch office to try to explain this was a bit over the top, especially since I wanted to explain that the problem was very simple to fix. [↩]