Why do we have to "Work so Hard" to make a living?

[BrendaBrick]

131. To SOME EXTENT, it might depend on where you live in the US

Now, first off (as a bit of a disclaimer) - this is by no means and *end all, be all* by any stretch of the imagination, rather this thread and some of the ensuing posts remind me of a series from PBS back in Nov & Dec 2009 in which Ray Suarez aired five segments entitled: "Patchwork Nation":

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2009/12/a-closer-look-at-our-patchwork-nation.html

Closer Look at Our Patchwork Nation

By: Ray Suarez

An old Bob Marley song includes the lyric, "Remember that when the rain falls, it don't fall on one man's house." The worst recession since the Great Depression has hit millions of Americans in expected and unexpected ways. The pain is widespread, but not evenly spread.

The PBS NewsHour's Patchwork Nation project took a look at American communities and tried to understand what attributes places have in common and what separates them, and we found different places were hit by the recession in very different ways.

Over the past month I traveled with the Patchwork Nation team to five counties across the country to see what the recession has meant to them. It was a fascinating set of trips that took me from the foot of East Coast skyscrapers to the tops of Iowa grain elevators, from the ovens of a popular bakery in Michigan to a glassblower's furnace just steps from the breaking waves of the Pacific in Oregon.

<60 second video>

The five counties reinforced the idea that America really is a patchwork. Aggregated statistics of whole states, whole regions, or the nation as a whole can't catch the subtleties of what happened to individual Americans at recession's ground zero. The speculators and flippers of Eagle, CO wouldn't have found banks to play along in conservative Sioux Center, Iowa, where excess debt is discouraged. Ann Arbor, MI is spinning new businesses from its concentration of highly educated workers in a small city that can't be matched in Philadelphia... though Philly is chock-full of colleges, the city is so large the university presence can't lift a city of a million and a half all on its own.

I urge you to visit the extensive video, audio, and written features accompanying the Patchwork Nation project by the project director Dante Chinni, the NewsHour's Anna Shoup and Joanne Elgart Jennings online and reports by me on the broadcast. Happy hunting.

Tune in next week, starting on Dec. 7, to see these five communities come to life as the PBS NewsHour takes a new approach to the serious journalism you've trusted on air and online.
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Sorry, I couldn't find one link which showed the entire project, but I was able to run across these individually:

Philadelphia: (about 9 minutes) http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec09/patchwork_12-07.html

Ann Arbor, MI (about 8 minutes) http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec09/patchwork_12-08.html

Sioux Center, Iowa (about 8 minutes) http://www.newslook.com/videos/172896-in-iowa-farmers-squeezed-by-belt-tightening?autoplay=true

Lincoln City, OR (about 11 minutes) http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec09/patchwork_12-11.html

Eagle, CO (about 8 minutes) http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec09/patchwork_12-10.html
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FYI: The link for http://www.patchworknation.org/content/about-patchwork-nation
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Circumstances might in fact have changed since this was first aired late 2009 (and actually, may not be a bad idea for a follow-up from Suarez over 2 years later just to see what has transpired since then.) I thought the project was interesting enough to illustrate and post here, that while the US is a vast country via square miles (compared with other countries) it is also important to note the unique differences via particular and specific regions and/or subsets and that it does tend to get a bit more complicated when someone responds based on their local economy as opposed to the entire nation at large. Which is not to say or discount the many common variables and a factual, decidedly lower *standard of living* all of us seem to be facing across the board - I thought it informative to point out this particular project as a mere reference point(s) for consideration.