Making money off the poor

Making money off the poor
- September 17, 2013
- Research by Jacob Avery, sociology assistant professor, is featured in the New York Times September 17, 2013
From the New York Times:
It is not only the middle class and the wealthy who exploit the poor. There is plenty
of anecdotal evidence that at times the poor exploit one another. For his doctoral
research in 2008 and 2009, Jacob Avery, now a professor of sociology at the University
of California, Irvine, spent 17 months with homeless men in Atlantic City. What he
found was a hierarchy of exploitation. Avery describes the way that cabdrivers would
purchase SNAP food stamp cards – at half their face value – from homeless men desperate
for cash to buy liquor or drugs. Other homeless men, who qualify for a meager supplemental-security
stipend, took advantage of people with even less money, using their S.S.I. income
to buy cartons of cigarettes that they then sold to their fellow homeless men for
50 cents a cigarette.
For the full story, please visit http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/making-money-off-the-poo....
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