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.
Over the next few weeks or months I'll be doing a fair amount of work on poverty, so expect that to influence the site pretty heavily. I've started some early research, though, and been thoroughly astonished to find that the argument over poverty was not, as I figured, how best do we solve it, but rather whether or not it exists endemically at all. The question, bizarrely, ends up being whether or not one can be poor with a color television. I'll let the quote above and the images out of New Orleans let you decide that one yourself.
Update: This bit from the book, I think, expresses it well:
being poor in a rich country may be more difficult to endure than being poor in a poor country, for the skills of surviving in poverty have largely been lost in America. Visit a slum in Hanoi and you will find children inventing games with bottles and sticks and the rusty rims of bike wheels. Go to a slum in Los Angeles and you will find children dependent on plastic toys and video games.
If you ever visit Brazil, Rio in particular, you'll notice a strange thing. Driving from the airport to the city you will, inevitably, pass rows and rows of favellas, shantytowns where the homes are plywood and the walls are tarps. But in these homes, atop the tarps and bits of cardboard that sustain them, are satellite dishes. Tons of them -- every few homes brings another metallic interloper. The effect is similar to seeing an elderly cancer patient awaken twice a day to run sprints. Does it mean they're not poor?
