'I have shop-lifted to feed my family': Dr Liz Allen on the shame of poverty, and the life lessons it has taught her
www.abc.net.au
For Pay Day, demographer and social researcher Dr Liz Allen shares the shame that comes with living in poverty, the secrets of survival, and how this experience "grants perspective that can never be bought".

This bit resonated.

It makes me so terribly sad that in a society such as ours the wealthy keep creating new means to harm the less lucky.

That aside, Alan Kholer has also opined in the past that our economics policy is based on disdain.

I know many will read my financial experiences and see failure. I haven’t failed; I succeeded when the odds were totally stacked against me. I made good what life threw at me. I survived … with my values intact.

I can only agree.

  • wscholermann@aussie.zone
    61·
    5 months ago

    Luck does have a part to play, but so do the choices you make.

    If you are not already wealthy, every time to you choose to have a child you erode your financial standing to some degree, that’s just a fact. Do this seven times and you are going to have some issues.

    To compound matters, one or more of her kids have some kind of disability, and disabilities are not a cheap thing to manage in this country. I don’t know if it’s the first child or the last child, but unless it was the last I definitely would have stopped after that knowing the enormous amount of resources it would require to support the child.

    To put her entire situation down to luck only really comes across as denying personal responsibility.

    Whatever your starting point in life, every choice you make will move you closer to your goals or further away from them. The article no doubt is missing a lot of information, since the journalist failed to analyze the situation critically, but it really does seem a lot of choices were made that would have compounded financial problems.