Megan Thurow, chapter 6, question 2

In this chapter of Naked Economics, I began to relate to the issue of people in poverty compared to those like Bill Gates, who have more money than I could even imagine. Don't get me wrong, my family is not in poverty. The reason I feel like I can relate to this is because of a project I'm currently working on in Capstone. The project has to do with suffering and my topic is poverty in the United States mainly among veterans. What really hit me was when Charles Wheelan talked about Alex Rodriguez and how he earns about 275 million dollars in ten years for playing baseball, which requires no college degree. I also found it interesting that when Wheelan asked the Nobel Prize winning economist how he felt about making less money than Rodger Clemens, he said it didn't bother him. Personally I would think that if I won the Nobel Prize I should be making more than a man that I don't even think went to college and if he did, probably didn't pay for it. I found this part of the chapter to be the most interesting because I relate well to baseball and also now to the problem of poverty. (And how crazy is it that 13 percent of Americans are poor?) This is one of the biggest things I've taken out of the book as a whole.