I’ve been unemployed for just one month, and already I’ve sent my only child to school crying because other kids make fun of him for being on the free lunch program, driven away from a fender bender with a parked car because I didn’t have the money to pay for the accident (luckily no one was around), been fired from my temp job for talking to a union organizer, put my kid’s dog to sleep because we couldn’t afford its medical care, and applied for food stamps — which won’t arrive until next month.
I’m not proud of myself, but this is what it takes to survive as a poor person in America — and now I know, because I played the game Spent, designed by Jenny Nicholson, herself once a child who grew up in poverty.
This is Christopher Mims discussing the game interactive presentation Spent in a post over at Technology Review. You can play Spent for free by clicking here. You might even be surprised at the very difficult choices poor Americans have to make every month.
The game is sponsored by the Urban Ministries of Durham, which provide food, clothing, and shelter to Durhamites in need.
(HT: Raul Pacheco-Vega.)
It’s not really a game as much as a “We’re going to hit you with statistics and anecdotes from “Nickel and Dimed” presentation. It does a good job at making the difficulties of poor in American seem insurmountable, even after making wise decisions – but then again it treats them as purely exogenous shocks (a lot like http://aidthoughts.org/?tag=third-world-farmer), when there is really tons of path-dependence here.
I hate the term `personal responsibility’ – it’s a Republican catchall term for eschewing any sort of social safety net – but projects like this take the other extreme.
Thanks for your comment, Matt. I agree about the exogeneity of those shocks, and I also suspected that there was a distinct lack of path dependence here. Still, I learned something new from the game/presentation, maybe because I did not read Nickel and Dimed. If anything, the game/presentation emphasizes the point made by Banerjee and Duflo (or, in third-world terms, by Scott in The Moral Economy of the Peasant) about how there is little scope for error when one lives so close to the margin. I am always surprised how few people have ever stopped to think about that.
Good point. I might have thought more carefully about some of the choices in the game than I even need to in real life (although I am still a student). If that was my world, it become overwhelming pretty quickly.