Getting by

Have you read Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed"? In it, she goes undercover to work a variety of minimum wage jobs to see if it is possible to do so and break even (she concluded that it was not). At one point, she was concerned about being found out: surely, something would give her away; there had to be something about her that said, "I have a Ph.D; I don't fit in," but nothing did.

I could go off on a number of possible tangents here, and I'll just touch on a couple:

1. The employees behind the cash registers of Walmart, McDonald's, etc. are not infrequently highly educated immigrants whose levels of English, as well as other obstacles, preclude employment more commensurate with their education.

2. Over the last few months, I've been saddened to notice an increase in people who--for whatever this means--appear to be college-educated, working at grocery stores.

But it's an interesting issue, this education-income dissonance. So is the issue of what kind of lifestyle a given income will get you. Here are some thoughts on getting by in Manhattan and Washington.