Speaking of Barbara Ehrenreich, her book Nickel and Dimed is a fascinating study on poverty in America. https://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0...

If you're curious, "Nickel and Dimed" is a great book that explores some of this.

There's also a book in a similar vein called "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" [1]. Fairly good read.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed

I admire what you're doing, but I just wanted to point out that there's a HUGE difference between denying yourself something because you can and denying yourself something because you can't afford it.

The $3 beer incident was poignant.

I found the book 'Nickel and Dimed' eye-opening.

Good job with your kid!

I highly recommend to everyone who is curious about this to read Nickel and Dimed. I read it for a college course and it opened my eyes a lot to the reality of life for people who our society does not allocate enough resources to, and who we are encouraged to consider lazy and to blame for their own predicament even when it's not true.

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich was first published in 2001 so presumably she worked at Walmart sometime before that.

So life at Wal-Mart may have changed since then. Also, he should have worked at the same Wal-Mart to help control for location.

Thanks for the recommendation - looks like a good read.

Its been a while since I've read Ehrenreich's book but am curious - which decisions of hers did you find irrational?

I will say that a fundamental flaw in Nickel and Dimed, (and most likely in Shepard's book as well) - is that she ultimately had a choice. Many people in these situations have no choice. Many of them have children. Many of them have no college education to fall back on. I count myself among the lucky.

Programming had much better pay and benefits than most jobs. There is plenty of people who work multiple jobs and still are in awful living conditions. You should check out the book "nickel and dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich

Also keep in mind that the author of the article is going to a boot camp. He is not getting paid, but paying. Once he is done he will likely earn ~$100k and can move into better conditions. It's very unfortunate that the author never was able to talk to the people he lived with who already had a job and find out why they still live there. Maybe they were just saving a ton of money. I knew someone who was earning a good tech salary, but chose to commute every day from Dublin for hours. That guy chose to safe the money and bought a gold coin every month.

Not necessarily. There have been numerous studies in the banking industry, for example, that show "poor people" bank accounts are more valuable than high-wealth bank accounts due to the overdraft fees, low-to-zero interest they can get away with, etc.

A lot of the biggest, easiest wealth made in America is derived from screwing over poor people at scale / en masse. I highly recommend Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich for some pretty good examples of this.

There's a good book on such jobs called "Nickel and Dimed"[1] by Barbara Ehrenreich, who went "undercover" and worked a bunch of such low-paid jobs.

A quote from the book:

"When someone works for less pay than she can live on ... she has made a great sacrifice for you ... The "working poor" ... are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed

For those who want to read an expose on the nomadic and way underpaid, I'd suggest checking out Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. (actually, anything she writes is phenomenal). This whole living in your car and being nomadic is hardly new to America. I saw it when I was traveling the USA from 2001 to 2007 or so.

As I tell anyone, the only reason Los Angeles can have so many gyms is because the working homeless needs to take a shower too.

On the one hand, I'm glad that this topic is getting more attention, but I'm uncomfortable with the thought that Amazon is the poster child for this, when they are one of the few companies that has low wage workers working full time, which is very rare in this day of required health care.

++1 for "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America". A fascinating read, it's the narrative of writer Barbara Ehrenreich as she goes undercover and participates in the minimum-wage economy in the US. It recounts not just her time on the clock, but equally the trials and trade-offs of simply surviving on such incomes.

I think everyone should read Nickel and Dimed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed) by Barbara Ehrenreich. She goes undercover and tries to survive working minimum wage jobs. I don't think I'm spoiling the book by revealing that she wasn't able to. After three months she were so deep in debt that she had to abort the experiment.

Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier" is his study of working class life. A modern version is "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America", by Barbara Page. That predates the "sharing" economy, on which the definitive book has not yet been written. "What's Yours Is Mine", by Tom Slee, may be helpful.

> as long as it made sense financially

This is not likely. Highly recommend the part about being a Walmart employee in the book "Nickel and Dimed". As another commenter wrote, these guys are just offloading benefits and depreciation and other capital costs on employees who are already living in poverty. These guys are most literally evil.

See for example Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Your view of people's buying patterns is not accurate. I own a home care agency with 500 employees that live on low income (the government sets the Medicaid reimbursement rate so we have no ability to raise wages). NO ONE is buying a new car, let alone every 36 months. Half our employees don't own a smart phone. We pay $10hr, in rural North Carolina, so lots of people live on even less. Please research this issue and go and meet people in this income bracket, you will see a different picture. I also encourage you to read Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich.

The truth is most American's wages have gone to Health Insurance, College, and Housing.

See https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/this-chart-i...

This is an excellent point: Unexpected and unavoidable costs are precisely the sort of problem that have repeatedly been shown to thwart the accumulation of wealth among the poor.

Ironically, the referenced book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings) was specifically written to rebut Barbara Ehrenreich's first person book on poverty, Nickel and Dimed. A major theme of that book is the debilitating impact of catastrophic costs, health care in particular, on the poor. "Without health insurance you risk a small cut becoming infected because you can afford neither a visit to the doctor nor antibiotics... [an] impacted wisdom tooth requir[ed] frantic calls to find a free dental clinic" was the NYTimes summary (http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/reviews/010513.13galla...)

So the book referenced by the grandparent comment was derailed exactly as predicted in the very book it was trying to rebut.

It is not only the poor who like "things that make life less boring." We all do, and I'd argue we all need these things for sanity. That's why I don't beat myself up too hard for occasionally wasting time doing things like, say, posting comments on Hackers News.

1. Read the sources outside of your view point.

2. Play devil's advocate with the information you get.

Personally, i think it's important to remember that the world is very complex and 2 views can be different and at the same time true.

Nickel and Dimed[0] is a book on low-wage jobs and how it is difficult to get by without support from some kind of social program.

Scratch beginnings[1] is the story of a guy that tried to live in a shelter and get by. In ten months he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved around $5,300.

Both these stories are opposing, in the logical sense. But they also real. Exploring different perspective helps dispel the notions that there is one "truth".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings

Read the following classic books (I'm sure there are others) to get a better perspective on why "working hard" itself may be a luxury. They helped me understand better. Good luck!

Everybody Loves a Good Drought: P. Sainath. There's a haunting picture there of an emaciated man who climbs trees to gather toddy. The most poignant thing about it was that he needs protein since he does hard physical labor. The solution is for him alone to eat a couple of tablespoons of fish everyday (no other member of his family gets to do so).

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich.

This book explains why some poor people have no savings. E.g., they have to live in relatively expensive pay-by-the-day motels instead of apartments since they literally don't have the $500 to put up a month's rent as deposit.

Being poor is very expensive, and I think a lot of people have no idea just how crazy and awful finance in small numbers is and what that does to people's lives.

_Nickel and Dimed_[1] is oldish, but still highly relevant, if you want to read a depressing book.

[1] http://barbaraehrenreich.com/nickel-and-dimed-by-barbara-ehr...
https://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0...

Besides checking being poor by yourself (which will come easy for a lot of people in the current economy), and/or hanging around poor neighborhoods and making friends, I recommend "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed

A small road trip in South Dakota, Mississippi, Alabama et al would also be insightful.

Ehrenrich did a book called Nickel and Dimed: http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/08...

The reason for the US definition of poverty, founded as it is in the "War on Poverty", is precisely because it is absolute. Quoting again from that Wikipedia article: "Since [the Orshansky Poverty Thresholds] measure was absolute (i.e., did not depend on other events), it made it possible to objectively answer whether the U.S. government was "winning" this war."

Your argument about "one true objective definition of poverty" is pointless. What you're arguing is that since we're materially better off than the Middle Ages, no one is poor anymore. You want to throw the word "poor" out the window, while I want to say that the word has real meaning, and that meaning is "lacking the resources to meet the basic needs for healthy living; having insufficient income to provide the food, shelter and clothing needed to preserve health."

Your disdain for the government is clear, but without justification since any statement you make can be rejected with an equally disdainful comment on its originator. Better would be to point out how most families of four, making under $22,350 a year really have no problems meeting those basic needs. Books like "Nickel And Dimed" suggest otherwise. I look forward to your large scale research which clearly refutes such anecdotal evidence.

It's interesting to take a view that contrasts with Sivers' article and most of us on HN -- that of someone on the edge of homelessness. I remember reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and thinking about cooking and baking. When she was living in a motel room rented by the week, it was hard to cook healthy food because she didn't have the budget to buy a pan, a pot, a spatula, some silverware, a mixing bowl, etc. Besides the budget, there was the problem of storing them in a precarious living situation. They're annoying to schlep.

To start off my minimalist college years, my mother brought me to the local Goodwill where I bought one fork, one knife, one spoon, one bowl, etc. Had to add chopsticks to get a really complete eating set, but these got me off to a good start. Even this minimalist set (chopsticks, knife, spoon, bowl, wooden mixing spoon, pot) require space, and they don't allow you to bake cookies (need a baking sheet!). I was nowhere near homeless though I could fit all my belongings into one room as wide as the length of a twin bed.

Sivers knows that if he wants to make pastries, he can buy or borrow pastry-making equipment -- just as I can. So he doesn't need to keep it around. Those with little by necessity rather than choice don't have that confidence.

Not wanting stuff is for people who have access the stuff they need.

I advised a friend to ditch the JS-powered pop-out social media icons which were hovering almost out of sight over on the right. They said quite flatly, "nope, that's staying". That was probably ten years ago. There is a school of public opinion that everyone seems to be attending. The things they learn there are not always logical or justifiable but I get the impression that they all want to secure their piece of the pie and that means meeting everyone's expectations, so they are all doing it to each other, together. Google is "merely" running classes in that school, it seems... and of course helping the school keep running by supplying tons of tech.

I was mildly disgusted when required reading for freshman orientation at Akron U included a book called Nickel and Dimed. The gist was something like "get your education or you're screwed". But people made it that way in the first place! Everyone supposedly needing formal higher education in order to have any decent future isn't something that just happens, it's something the human race is doing to itself. Leave it to a higher education institution to push the idea that "this is just the way it is, do the right thing if you know what's good for you".

edit: obvs I didn't read the book, it's not exactly like I said. I think I bought the book but dropped that "class" anyway

In a similar way, stupid "trends" like social media buttons and Like buttons are just examples of how everyone is ruining the web together. These days it's the aforementioned massive JS frameworks and SPAs and of course the obsession with "analytics." In a way it's nice for me and my workstation because it helps drive up the current average affordable densities of RAM and storage, but ...it's slavery. And Google seems to be less and less bashful about it.

"you are slaves of whatever you submit to by obeying" --that guy

I wonder if over-qualification in resumes plays a role. In the book Nickel and Dimed[1], the author explicitly hid the fact she had higher education even from colleagues. And whereas she complained a lot about working conditions, finding a job per se wasn't a challenge at all (to the point she could even decide between two options at one point), even being restricted to non-intensive labor jobs due to health reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed

"Nickel and Dimed" was mentioned in one of the fact-bubbles. I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to learn more about the decisions people face when in situations like this. I was spent for a time (about 10 months) being unemployed and lived on about $40 per week, skirting my rent, not having phone/internet, and getting my power cut (twice). Even though I ended up taking a job I didn't like, it payed well and I pulled myself out of that situation. Never Again.

I had the same problem with "Nickel and Dimed" that I had with this game. She made a series of completely irrational decisions which resulted in expenses larger than they needed to be.

As a counter to this, I highly recommend Scratch Beginnings by Adam Shepard.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061714275/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

The summary, from Amazon:

Adam Shepard graduated from college feeling disillusioned by the apathy around him and was then incensed after reading Barbara Ehrenreich's famous work Nickel and Dimed—a book that gave him a feeling of hopelessness about the working class in America. He set out to disprove Ehrenreich's theory—the notion that those who start at the bottom stay at the bottom—by making something out of nothing to achieve the American Dream.

Shepard's plan was simple. With a sleeping bag, the clothes on his back, and $25 in cash, and restricted from using his contacts or college education, he headed out for Charleston, South Carolina, a randomly selected city with one objective: to work his way out of homelessness and into a life that would give him the opportunity for success. His goal was to have, after one year, $2,500, a working automobile, and a furnished apartment.