Hilzoy writes:
I've been broke at various points in my life, though it always made an enormous difference that while I was determined never to ask my family for help, I always knew that if I were run over by a bus, I could. The difference between me and genuine poverty was like the difference between fasting and starving. That said, the time I learned most from was my stint at the biker bar.[...]
I would have walked over hot coals to avoid hitting up my parents for help, and sometimes came pretty close to doing just that, but my assumption always was that if I ever really needed help for some reason that was genuinely not my fault -- if I were diagnosed with some awful disease and needed urgent medical care, or something -- there were people I could turn to. A lot of people, actually. And my co-workers at the biker bar had a lot of people they could turn to for emotional support, but no one who could help them if they needed money for some reason that was absolutely not their fault.
And the upshot of this was: not only did they have no margin of error, they also had no margin for bad luck.
This reminds me of a favorite quote from David Shipler's The Working Poor:
Breaking away and moving a comfortable distance from poverty seems to require a perfect lineup of favorable conditions. A set of skills, a good starting wage, and a job with the likelihood of promotion are prerequisites. But so are clarity of purpose, courageous self-esteem, a lack of substantial debt, the freedom from illness and addiction, a functional family, a network of upstanding friends, and the right help from governmental or private agencies. Any gap in that array is an entry point for trouble, because being poor means being unprotected. You might as well try playing quarterback with no helmet, no padding, no training, and no experience, behind a line of hundred-pound weaklings. With no cushion of money, no training in the ways of the wider world, and too little temptation against the threats and defenses of decaying communities, a poor man or woman gets sacked again and again -- buffeted and bruised and defeated. When an exception breaks this cycle of failure, it is called the fulfillment of the American Dream.
