Nickel and Dimed
and one of the most talked about books of the year, Nickel and Dimed has already become a classic of undercover reportage.Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate strategies for survival. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way America perceives its working poor.
Stats for nerds
23recommend
46mentions
42people
2009–2025years
50% recommend41% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Basically, don't invest through investment companies. They'll chase the big profits because that's what they're paid to do. Even "green" or "sustainable" funds might invest in pharmaceutical companies that produce treatments instead of cures, or psuedo-science companies chasing net-energy loss concepts like clean coal or hydrogen, for example.
Instead, invest in specific technologies and goals:
Avoid:- Low-cost solar panels and windmills - Alternative chip designs like RISC-V and high-multicore (64+ cores) - Peer to peer communications systems, alternatives to cellular/5G - Robotic/hydroponic automated organic food production - Incubated/cloned meat and meat alternatives without side effects like FODMAP - mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, treatments for genetic disorders - Low-cost EVs, LiFePO4 batteries, high-kW inverters, axial flux motors - Heat pumps, thermal energy storage, concentrated trough solar - Labor-saving inventions and assistive devices for freight, construction, etc - Companies that openly support public education, single-payer healthcare, etc - Incubators like Y Combinator but that provide smaller $10,000-$100,000 VC - Open source projects/collaborations that distribute risk like Humble Bundle - Mass transit like electric busses/high-speed rail (boring but global demand) - Strike Debt and other loan forgiveness efforts that buy up loans in default - PACs, unions, environmental groups working to unseat incumbants - Foreign aid programs aimed at education, especially women and girls - Independent investigative journalists and media - Local bond efforts for better public schools, libraries, parks, etc - Stocks/groups working to legalize cannibis and end the war on drugs - Builders of tiny homes and alternative housing like yurts and earthships
People to emulate (these are merely breadcrumbs towards ways of thinking):- Crypto (untraceable exploitation, black markets, human trafficking, etc) - Mutual funds and index funds (same reason as investment companies) - FAANG/GAMMA (high profit, low innovation over market cap) - MLMs (often tied to fundamentalist religious organizations and lobbyists) - Foreign currencies (profits from exploitation and environmental degradation)
See also:- MacKenzie Scott - Bill McKibben - Michael Pollan - Derrick Jensen - Thom Hartmann - Howard Zinn (deceased) - Ed Abbey (deceased) - John Muir (deceased) - Frank Church (deceased) - Terence McKenna (deceased)
If I ever win the internet lottery, I'll work towards getting matching funds to tackle the biggest problems facing humanity:- Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty - The Jungle and other books by Upton Sinclair (deceased) - Nickel and Dimed and other books by Barbara Ehrenreich (deceased)1) That starts with liberating all peoples from forced labor, exploitation and subjugation so that they can self-actualize. Which looks like freeing capital from "black holes" of concentrated wealth, specifically moneyed interests and wealthy individuals who hoard resources and choose to do none of what I've stated above, at great expense to the rest of humanity. That's done not through competition or direct confrontation, but by getting everyone "off the grid" to disrupt the supply and demand curve which always results in the wealth inequality and late-stage capitalism we see today when there isn't regulation.
2) Then also improving quality of life universally, so working towards providing free treatments for all conditions/illnesses/injuries across borders.
3) Then also promoting kindess, mindfulness, and other cultural movements which move us away from othering and back towards reconnection to foster the common good. This looks like a rejection of reason for its own sake, and replacing that with the pursuit of meaning. So deciding collectively that using electronic devices in public is impolite, ending surveillance capitalism, tearing down the economic walls which separate us from our neighbors, etc. So that we can once again gather in small communities that provide mutual aid, childcare and tool/resource sharing so that we aren't forced to take on so much individually for our basic survival.
I think it may be possible to recruit AI to do all of this holistically and rapidly shift into the reality that we may have envisioned for the 21st century, a bit like the rapid technological growth we saw during COVID-19, when the first vacation that billions of people ever had resulted in 10-20 years of innovation in just 1-2 years. That's the key, that getting real work done requires escaping the menial labor that extracts profit from the working class.
So that's what I would do: use AI to examine thousands of stocks to find which ones trend similarly and which one correlate inversely, and come up with a plan to start moving profit the opposite direction from where it's moved traditionally. Then invest that cashflow into countless underemployed people whose talents, dignity and divinity haven't been recruited yet effectively because they've only been put to use in the service of capital.
- In the world of literature you will find much of what you're describing. Just to name a few: "Hard Times" by Dickens, "The Grapes of Wrath" by Steinbeck, "Germinal" by Émile Zola. "Christ in Concrete" by Donato is another one.
If you want non-fiction, I can recommend "Nickel and Dimed" by Ehrenreich or "Working" by Terkel.
- > What exactly is getting harder for people?
Having a job that doesn't pay enough to afford to pay rent & utilities, buy food, pay off college loans. I could go on. Just saying unemployment is low doesn't capture the nature of the working poor. Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed covers this well. People who work in software and make six figures tend not to be squeezed to afford the basics, except perhaps if they have to live in one of the highest COL cities in the US, but there are millions in the developed world that hold 2-3 jobs and still barely afford living.
- Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an excellent book, "Nickel and Dimed," on how exhausting and precarious the lives of poor (= minimum wage-earning) people are, based on her experience trying to live off minimum wage.
In my life, I have been dirt-poor (homeless) and pretty well-off ($200k/yr), and my experience agrees with her reporting. Financial predators seek out the poor because 1) there are lots of them; 2) they don't have a lot of effective defenses; and 3) society, and poor people themselves, tend to blame the poor for their poverty (as the parent comment mentions).
I have a running dad-joke with my kids that "I'm not smart enough to be poor." The truth is, I'm not hard-working enough either. Being poor sucks. The poor know it. Many of them are as smart and hard-working as the statistical "us" are. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a correlation between financial literacy and revolutionary attitudes about changes to the economic status quo.
- 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."
- 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.
