What does being poor mean?
"It means living in a world whose institutions are not built for someone like you. Most of the poor do not have a salary, let alone a retirement plan that deducts automatically from it. [...] It means making decisions about things that come with a lot of small print when you cannot even properly read the large print. It means going to vote when your entire experience of the political system is a lot of promises, not delivered; and not having anywhere safe to keep your money, because what the bank manager can make from your little savings won't cover the cost of handling it. And so on."
On the other hand:
"We live in houses where clean water gets piped in - we do not need to remember to add Chlorin to the water supply every morning. The sewage goes away on its own - we do not actually know how. We can (mostly) trust our doctors to do the best they can and can trust the public health system to figure out what we should and should not do. We have no choice but to get out children immunized - public schools will not take them if they aren't - and even if we somehow manage to fail to do it, our children will probably be safe because everyone else is immunized. Our health insurers reward us for joining the gym, because they are concerned that we will not do it otherwise. And perhaps most important, most of us do not have to worry where our next meal will come from."
(quotes from Poor Economics)
