Poor and Busy (translated Documentary)
About This Novel
In America, poverty is an original sin. Why do people get busier as they get poorer, and get poorer as they get busier? Education, medical care and housing, employment, taxes and benefits, and even gender, region and culture. Poverty is always a "system" problem. Pulitzer Prize winner, focusing on the "working poor" in the United States and seeing the "invisible America". This is the America that has been forgotten. The car washer has no car to drive, the bank clerk's account only has US$2.02, And the income of a female medical textbook editor in ten years cannot keep up with that of a dentist. This book tells the stories of some of them: their families, their dreams, their failures. And what failed more than them was their country. Although the United States is richer than ever before, and although the United States promotes the credo of "working to get rich," the problems of low-income people have made all this questionable. For most of the people I write about, anger is a luxury. They are struggling, exhausted and unable to find a way out. Their wages did not improve their lives and lift them out of poverty. On the contrary, they were burdened by life. People often use the word "working poor" to describe them, and the word itself is an oxymoron. In America, hard-working people should not be poor. The U. S. Economy has had its ups and downs, and the latest statistics show that the lives of poor people have remained basically unchanged, except that they have become more difficult. The gap in net worth between the richest and poorest households has widened, creating a polarization. The resource gap between wealthy school districts and other school districts has further widened. More children are missing school due to asthma, more people do not have access to health insurance, more people are hungry, more people are in jail, and more illegal immigrants are working at the bottom of the workforce. Americans generally do not understand the causes of poverty and, therefore, do not know how to solve it. They believe in the American Dream and believe that even people from the poorest backgrounds can live a happy life. But this also gives people an excuse to blame the poor: to some extent, low wages are the worker's fault, because low wages simply mean that the value of his labor is low. In the American context, poverty always carries the aura of original sin. Indeed, being poor in a rich country is much more difficult than being poor in a poor country.
What Readers Think
Rating
Community(0)
Official(4)Scraped 6d ago
"I have always believed that the best way to understand a country is to visit its prisons, hospitals and schools. In those institutions, a society's vision and morality are revealed against the backdrop of ideals."
It seems a bit unfair that the work requirements are high but the remuneration is very low. The rich get richer, while the poor remain poor. The widening gap between the rich and the poor makes it more difficult for the people at the bottom to live.
They suffer endless pain due to poverty, and there is no one to express this pain. Some people think that working can make them rich, but after working all their lives, they may still stay at the bottom and mediocrity.
It is indeed a sad thing to work hard for a long time in a rich country and still not be able to catch up with the salary of some people who do not need to do much work. The psychological gap will be quite big, right?
Rating
Community(0)
Official(4)Scraped 6d ago
"I have always believed that the best way to understand a country is to visit its prisons, hospitals and schools. In those institutions, a society's vision and morality are revealed against the backdrop of ideals."
It seems a bit unfair that the work requirements are high but the remuneration is very low. The rich get richer, while the poor remain poor. The widening gap between the rich and the poor makes it more difficult for the people at the bottom to live.
They suffer endless pain due to poverty, and there is no one to express this pain. Some people think that working can make them rich, but after working all their lives, they may still stay at the bottom and mediocrity.
It is indeed a sad thing to work hard for a long time in a rich country and still not be able to catch up with the salary of some people who do not need to do much work. The psychological gap will be quite big, right?
