Shipler Intro Response

What would Shipler's reason for writing a book about the working poor, the impoverished, and the indebted backbone of America be? I think his purpose is a pretty clear one. That of the fact that this country is not ran by the president, senators, legislators, or even czars at the moment. This country is ran by the people that work most hours of the day then spend the rest of the waking hours taking care of family and just making it by on their minimum wage. This countries foundation and infrastructure is based on the low wage hard working Americans such as the factory workers, clerks, law enforcement, and medical staff, among the many other jobs people don't even recognize in their lives, that without someone to do them we couldn't function. I think Shipler's reason for writing this book is to convey a message to the ignorance of people and their day to day lives. The message being that we need to respond and aid the people that make this country a success and we need to better understand poverty and what not so we can better solve the issues dragging the economy down.



A few things I learned from this introduction to David Shipler's "The Working Poor", would be first of all that we the people tend to forget all the people and jobs it takes to run a country and keep our fluent, non-chalant, easy going lives running smoothly. Perfect example would be stock clerks in grocery stores, without their hardwork and wage sacrifice how would we get our groceries. Another thing I learned from the introduction is that another thing we fear to address is the youngsters of the country and how poverty affects them. Whether it be a parent not being able to afford proper diet for the child leading to malnutrition, or not being able to afford supplies for school, or as in the book eye glasses to read; it all leads to a less prosperous country when a flock of children grow up from these hardships. One other thing I gathered from the reading is that there are several partitions to poverty. That being said they include financial disability, psychological avertedness, part societal, part personal, and part past and present. This all means that if you have a family with financial hardship, a person with low self-esteem, courage, or heart, a not so prosperous environment, and a difficult past, then the present time for the person or person's will most likely follow into poverty.