Thanks @noodle for recommending this! I just finished eps 4 and 5 at lunch today and I think they were the best parts of the series.
I found the suggestion that people in poverty should be treated with about as much trust as the middle class to be a great point. That responsibility and irresponsibility, vice and virtue, etc are not correlated with wealth.
I thought it was interesting at the start of ep 4 that they mentioned 40% of people would experience at least 1 year of poverty. I was wondering how that is defined.
I grew up the child of an immigrant academic and a SAHM (mostly, due to visa issues). The budget was always tight. But as an adult I realized “in poverty” was a bad descriptor for it. My parents always had pretty high personal capital (skills, education, credentials) that wasn’t always being leveraged. We also had interpersonal capital (friends and family that would help to some reasonable extent). And as far as I know we at least started out with savings. Plus, grad school/post docs don’t pay great but it’s pretty stable and they do provide decent health insurance. I think poverty really hits when a lot of these additional resources (besides just income/money) are depleted.