In Defense of Poverty Simulations

We've been writing a lot about make-believe games on this site recently, whether it's people pretending they can't afford shoes, rely on food stamps to eat or live on the street. At first I read the posts, agreed that such "games" are pretty ridiculous, and moved on. Yet the more articles I read on the topic, the more wishy-washy my objections become.

My fellow bloggers Charlotte Hill and Rachel Mulroy are hardly the only smart anti-poverty advocates to call B.S. on these experiments. Judging by the comments on their posts and other blogs I've read on the subject, the vast majority of people who know anything about the realities of poverty think walking around without shoes, pretending to be homeless and other assorted activities like that is a pretty silly (and condescending ... and paternalistic ... ) way to fight poverty. It's hard to disagree with that — sitting on the street in dirty clothes for an afternoon obviously can't give you a prayer of understanding what actual homelessness is like, and it's pretty patronizing toward people who do know that feeling.

And yet part of me thinks people should keep pretending to be homeless (or shoeless, or food stamp-dependent) for a day or two. Bizarrely, what started to change my mind was this article about high schoolers pretending to be homeless in San Jose, California, which includes plenty of absurd quotes from naïve upper-middle-class private school students. In fact, it was the absurd quotes that did it. My favorite from the article: "We were at the shelter, and HP Pavilion [stadium] was right down the street," a student named Sarah said. "I go to Sharks games all the time, and I realized that what we spend for a couple of hours at the game, the people there would spend on a whole month's worth of groceries."

The way that sentence sounds in my head, Sarah must have added "Like, OMG!" at the end before whipping out her iPhone — totally clueless, right? But it certainly sounds like she's less clueless than she was before, when it was apparently inconceivable that people couldn't afford NHL tickets when her family goes all the time. The exercise, inauthentic as it was, made her think about that for the first time ever.

And is it ridiculous for me to believe that because Sarah and her classmates thought about poverty for the first time, they might be motivated to do something about it? That maybe a handful of the 15 students who participated in the San Jose event will volunteer at a soup kitchen or redirect their allowance from buying a sundress to making a donation to a soup kitchen?

My point is not to make fun of Sarah, but rather to point out that some people have so awfully little understanding of poverty in America that even an inaccurate make-believe game may open their eyes to what's going on all around them. It's by no means sufficient as an education in poverty, but I'm inclined to celebrate even the baby step. Am I being hopelessly naïve too?

Photo credit: Alex E. Proimos