David K. Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible In America

Poverty is a multifaceted issue, it is dependent on many factors and the ‘one size fits all’ approach does not work. Out of all the possible explanations as to why people are still living in poverty in the U.S., the structural view of poverty covers the most bases. The structural view of poverty explains that poverty can only ‘be understood and explained only with reference to political and economic characteristics of the society’ (Kerbo, p.266). With this in mind, this theory considers the position of the poor in the occupational structure. Since the poor have jobs that require low skill, which means anyone can learn how to do them, there is much more competition for such jobs. Those with jobs that require greater skills, such as doctors,

Everyone knows what the word poverty means. It means poor, unable to buy the necessities to survive in today's world. We do not realize how easy it is for a person to fall into poverty: A lost job, a sudden illness, a death in the family or the endless cycle of being born into poverty and not knowing how to overcome it. There are so many children in poverty and a family's structure can effect the outcome. Most of the people who are at the poverty level need some type of help to overcome the obstacles. There are mane issues that deal with poverty and many things that can be done to stop it.

In the article, “What’s So Bad about Being Poor” by Charles Murray, Murray states that “One of the great barriers to a discussion of poverty and social policy in the 1980s is that so few people who talk about poverty have ever been poor”. He discusses how, contrary to present day, in America up until the 1950s those in positions of influence and power included a sizable amount of people who had been raised “dirt-poor”. Murray states that, because of this, many Americans with their lack of exposure to such people, they develop a skewed perspective of what poverty is. On account of this, Murray challenges the reader with several thought experiments which he uses to help the reader come to certain conclusions that convey his message.

Barbara Ehrenreich 's showed that she didn't have the mind set or worries of a working class person by reminding us as readers the fine line between the kind of performance she is doing and the kind her fellow coworkers do every day on the job. Time and again she lets us sink into her new world of a low-wage worker, only to pull us back with a reminder of the act. 1 She does this experiment to determine whether or not she could both live off the money earned and have enough money at the end of the month to pay the next month's rent. Working class people depend on the money they make on these jobs to survive and provide for their families. She could drop all these jobs she experimented with and go back to her real life without a worry in the

In David K. Shipler’s book, The Working Poor Invisible in America the reader is provided a peek into the personal stories of the inner lives of eight families struggling inside the vicious cycle of poverty. Shipler’s method of interviews, narratives of personal stories and observation represents an innovative study investigating the working poor in an attempt to understand “how people in real communities devise collective responses to their problems (Segal, 2010).”

Regardless if we are aware of it or not, not many Americans live the supposed American Dream of having a nice car, big house, well paying job, and have a secure family. In the renowned novel The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler he captures those Americans who live invisible in America that work so hard to suffer from the psychological effects of poverty. Not only does Shipler do that but he also indirectly talks about the “American Myth” and the “American Anti Myth through the lives on these individuals.”

We create this society in which every individual starts off at different points in life due to these social categories based on race and ethnicity, which in turn affects education, social class and our overall lifestyle. After we create these categories and put people there unwillingly, we act as though it is there fault and not ours, so our society is reluctant to help; in this way it would be a “helping hand” rather than a dependency people often associate it with. “Education is a significant factor in poverty” (Wong, Chapter 6); like stated above, different individuals get different starting points in life, therefore affecting where one ends up in life. “A national survey conducted in 1975, found that those living in poverty attributed it to personal failures, such as having a poor work ethic, poor money management skills and low personal moral values” (Martin

Reading the last paragraph of Dreams, a chapter from The Working Poor by David Shipler, I came to the realization that all of the assigned readings were like many of Shakespeare's tragedies. Each one of the handouts and books wrote about a similar subject which is impoverished children in the educational system. For Example, in Ordinary Resurrections by Jonathan Kozol, he writes "Most of the children here, no matter how hard they may work and how well they may do in elementary school, will have no chance, or almost none, to win admission to the city's more selective high schools, which prepare their students for good universities and colleges." It is true that in Carger's book Of Borders and Dreams, Alejandro's struggle to succeed

In her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), Barbara Ehrenreich performs a social experiment in which she transplants herself from her comfortable middle-class life and immersing herself in the plight of the “millions of American’s (who) work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages” (Ehrenreich, 2001). Her goal was to explore the consequences of the welfare reform on the approximately four million women who would be subsequently forced into the labor market, expecting to make only $6 to $7 an hour. (2001 p.1) Her experiment eviscerated the idea that the American underclass was lazy, and the lie that American’s could live healthy, productive lives on minimum wage. On the contrary, she proved underclass

Nelson Mandela once said, “Poverty is not natural it 's man-made.” This quote states that a person can overcome poverty if one has the desire to live a better life. In a novel called Poor People written by William T. Vollmann, the author travels around different countries and places to learn about poor people and to get a global perspective view. While interviewing different kinds of people, Vollmann would ask them one question: why are you poor? Looking at people 's answers Vollmann noticed that some of the people gave quite interesting answers. Vollmann went through a lot of situations where he just couldn 't imagine what life would be if he was ever to live like that. Another novel that has a similar poverty situation is called Let The Water Hold Me Down, written by Michael Spurgeon. Hank, the main character of the novel, experiences a tragic moment in his life. Losing his wife and daughter while drowning, this tragedy left him feeling like it’s all due to his miscarrying about them. His life becomes full of sorrow, and the only way out it was to go to Mexico to his friend’s place and restart his life over. In a new country of Mexico, this story takes place. Even though he had money, a house, and friends’ support, he still experienced lots of pressure trying to survive in Mexico. Poverty has different meanings in everyone 's lives but by reading these two novels, there are three similarities that can be made about people living in poverty.

In the article “The Myth of the Culture of Poverty,” by Paul Gorski he explains and challenges all the myths surrounding poverty and the mentality of the poor. Gorski argues that “poor people do not have weaker work ethics or lower levels of motivation than wealthier people” (33). This way of thinking is called the culture of classism. A culture that leads us to have low expectations from people who have low-income or come from low-income families. Classism are what people who are financial stable use to define poor people and their characteristics. I choose this article because Gorski provides sufficient evidence on why we should not fall victim to myths that people use to depict poor people and their

In the documentary “Poverty in America: Born with a Wooden Spoon” we get an in depth look about what it is like to live in poverty in America. In the early moments of the documentary we are informed that the poor people of America are a diverse group of people. These people can be put into sub group and each of them has certain different characteristics. The first and most obvious group is the homeless or otherwise known as the urban poverty. These people are scattered around inner cities and it is very easy to see how hard their life is and what kind of struggle they are going through. The next group is the group of situational poverty. Situational poverty comes about when something abrupt occurs in someone’s life that causes him or her to be forced into poverty. Examples of this can be divorce, losing ones jobs, or sudden illness. Another different kind of poverty is the working class poverty. These are the people that have jobs but make so little that they cannot get themselves above the poverty line. Next are immigrants they provide cheap necessary labor for the country to flourish but yet they are still consider to be apart of poverty. They often do not even work for themselves, they leave their homelands and live on their own just so they can get jobs to send back money home to their families. The middle class can also have people in poverty. They try to cover it up by getting themselves into loads of credit card debt and eventually fall below the poverty line to the

Even though having the “poor class” is a necessary evil needed for society to function, most Americans, at some point in time, will experience what it is like to live in poverty or live below the poverty line. One main reason for having a high percentage of people living in poverty is because the U.S. policy makers have ignored the poor and have given tax breaks to those with a much higher income. Funding for welfare was slashed and extended unemployment benefits were ended. With little success with the economic reform the United States has been going through for the past five years, about 14.5 percent of Americans are still living under the poverty line.

Poor people is a collection of interviews with first-hand sources of those in poverty mixed with the authors, William T. Vollmann's, inner struggle and thought-process of what poverty is. Vollmann's position on poverty is stated early on in the book "For me, poverty is not mere deprivation; for people may possess fewer things than I and be Richer; Poverty is wretchedness."(Vollmann 36). Poverty to Vollman is wretchedness meaning " a condition of extreme affliction or distress, especially as outwardly apparent" (Wretched). He continues with, "It must then be an economic state. It, therefore, remains somewhat immeasurable ... I can best conceive of poverty as a series of perceptual categories." (Vollmann 36). These perceptual categories are the five categories in the book, self-definitions, phenomena, choices, hope, and placeholders.

The Working Poor: Invisible in America gives an accurate depiction of the social problems and social policies that are designed to keep the poor, poorer. Shipler uses a variety of stories to depict social welfare programs like the minimum wage act, immigration, Social Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability (SSD), healthcare act, Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), drug addiction, sexual abuse, Individual Education Plans (IEP), and the gender pay gap along with many others. The overarching theme throughout the book was that the working poor never make enough money to cover their expenses and the wage never goes up enough over the span of their lifetime.