'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.

  • Ilandar@aussie.zone
    0·
    3 months ago

    Again, what is your point here? I was not “scorning the mother for wasting money on having kids”; I was mocking her inability to see her life choices as directly impacting her ability to obtain wealth. She claims “money is about luck, nothing else” but acknowledges herself that her decisions have affected her financial situation:

    I have seven children: two adults and five kids. We are a sole-income family. My children live with disability and my partner had to leave the workforce to provide full-time care for our kids. …because of my experience with poverty, having kids early, and with HECS debt, I’ve never had the opportunity to save.

    Whether incredibly wealthy people have multiple kids has no relevance to whether having any children, let alone 7, impacts your financial situation.

      • Ilandar@aussie.zone
        0·
        3 months ago

        You can’t have a disabled child without first choosing to have a child.

        No birth control is 100% effective.

        Are you really pretending this woman accidentally found herself pregnant on 7 occasions? And that on each occasion, she accidentally had the child without ever making a choice to keep it instead of pursuing an abortion? And that nowhere, throughout any of these 7 births, was she ever in control of her life to the extent that she could have made choices that led her down an entirely different path?