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Lisa Dodson is the author of The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy. In her groundbreaking new book, Dodson details the lives of ordinary Americans who are forced to commit acts of economic disobedience in order to get by. But Dodson points out that low-income workers are not alone in subverting the unfair economy: many middle-income workers choose to break the rules to assist those who are working, but not surviving.
Lisa Dodson giving a book talk at Busboys and Poets.
In The Moral Underground, we see examples of ordinary Americans working together to subvert the unfair economy: A doctor chooses to treat a parent without insurance by writing a prescription for a non-existent “second child”; a supermarket supervisor siphons off food for his workers who cannot afford to buy the very food they stock; a principal mislabels her students “special needs” in order to free up resources for the education of her low-income students.
The question Dodson kept hearing was, ‘Which is the bigger wrong?’ Dodson said, “The issue here is that breaking rules are wrong, but there are much bigger wrongs. Sometimes there’s a situation in which it’s a greater wrong to ignore a hungry person or a sick mom than to break a rule.”