A Comparison Of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed

Barbara Ehrenreich 's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and Adam W. Shepard’s Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dreams are vastly different accounts of the same situations. Each author designed their project very differently. Ehrenreich set out with a slightly upper hand to poverty standards - she began her project with a car and a significant amount of cash. She then tested to see what the living standards were like in various cities and to see if she could make ends meet. Shepard had a very different project; he began at the bottom and resolved to work his way up. He began in a strange city with almost nothing and proceeded to see if he could work his way to a comfortable lifestyle. Each author tried …show more content…
She did not jump to her conclusions; she researched and used that researched to strengthen her argument. Her statements do not stand alone, they are backed up by various other researchers and people who agree with Ehrenreich. When she cites the ‘disappearing poor,’ she does not rely on her own judgment. Rather, she cites journalist James Fallows and the New York Times, two reliable sources, to back up and strengthen her argument. Ehrenreich’s conclusion is very strong and hard to find fault in, and that is largely due to her ability to cite sources other than her own …show more content…
The poverty class is not one, definite type of worker who share the same toils and tribulations. Rather, the poverty class is constructed of people, and these people differ in attitudes, circumstance, and troubles just as much as any other economic class. While each author wrote about very different personal experiences of working with the lower class, each made wider conclusions about the same state of poverty in America. These conclusions found strength or weakness in their research, or lack thereof, in their use of generalization, or refusal to generalize, and how they played on the final emotions of the reader. Each author’s conclusions will reside in different readers in different ways. There are readers who will only agree with one author and not the other, and there are those who agree with some points from both works. There is one thing all parties can agree to - something needs to be done about the state of people in poverty. Whether you agree with Shepard and think that change needs to come from the middle class giving others a hand, or if you believe Ehrenreich and think the working poor needs to start demanding more, the final conclusion is that something needs to be done. People need to stop living in blissful ignorance of the suffering of their fellow Americans and start helping them to use all their