Jeff wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@h11g2000prf.googlegroups.com:
Hmmm. I'm not sure what institutional poverty is, but I do remember what poverty was. I wonder where I fit in to your control groups. I certainly wasn't a college graduate with a gym bag and twenty-five dollars although I could make as much as sixty to sixty-five dollars a week picking tobacco during the summer (actually I only made that much during the fifth and sixth picks which lasted about two weeks. The rest of the time I made twenty to thirty-five dollars a week). Pretty good pay for a high school kid. The rest of the year I made about twenty bucks a week after school. My pay always went to my mother to help support my brother and sister (my brother worked also, but my sister was too young). My father was a very unsuccessful burgler and we hadn't seen him since I was about six or seven. I wasn't addicted to anything except girls. So I guess I am/was brain damaged. I was asked to leave high school at sixteen. I was somewhat of an asshole at that time (probably still am), but a hardworking asshole. I got my first full time job, at one dollar and ten cents an hour, running drying machines at a diaper service. This was minimum wage plus ten percent. I decided during that period that I was not going to be poor and I'm not.