On Thursday, May 6, the students of the reading club for the SES High School Book Award interviewed sociologist Denis Colombi in videoconference before an audience made up of the entire first class (remotely because of sanitary measures).
Denis Colombi, sociologist, SES professor and author of the blog http://uneheuredepeine.blogspot.com/ agreed to tell us about his book Where The Money of the Poor goes, published by Payot last year, in which he deconstructs the current prejudices about poverty, its causes, and the supposed “bad” management of their money by the poor.
Denis Colombi lent himself with great kindness and clarity to our questions. Drawing on numerous authors and surveys, it shows that poverty is not the result of poor people mishandled their money, on the contrary, but simply that lack of money prevents people from getting out of poverty, regardless of their efforts. It accurately documents these efforts, which we are generally not aware of.
“Where the poor’s money goes” is a book I loved. It has completely changed my view of poverty and how a poor person manages his money. The stereotypes that one can have about the money of the poor are counter-argumentated and poverty turns out to be totally different from what one might think.
We learn in this book that we all believe that there are “good” and “bad” poor, the bad ones being those who play on the pity of people to earn a minimum of money and then spend it on cigarettes, alcohol, or worse, drugs. We all want to give our money to the good poor. However, it does not exseed different categories of the poor.
We just want to make ourselves aware that this money would have been badly spent. In short, this book breaks the stereotypes we have about the poor and about poverty in general. I highly recommend it. »
Pauline, 11th Grade ,member of the book club