Dave Munger is a writer living in Davidson, North Carolina. He is a columnist for SEEDMAGAZINE.COM and editor of ResearchBlogging.org. Dave co-founded ResearchBlogging.org, which collects blog posts about peer-reviewed research, in 2007. The site now has over 1,500 registered blogs and features over 16,000 posts in six languages. For five years, Dave and his wife Greta maintained the psychology blog Cognitive Daily, which was chosen three times to appear in the Open Laboratory, an annual anthology of the top science blog posts on the web. It has appeared on numerous top ten lists including ranking seventh on Nature’s 50 popular science blogs list. The site has had over 2.5 million visits. Dave is the author of several college textbooks. Email: [email protected]
By Dave Munger For nearly a year now, I've been writing here about poverty in America and what it's like to be in my brother's shoes: Like millions of Americans, Mark is a man who has worked hard for most of his life but is now unable to support himself. For a variety of reasons,…
by Dave Munger A typical conversation about money with my stepbrother goes something like this: I ask how things are going, then he tells me something that has gone wrong. His TV is broken. One of his teeth is disintegrating and he needs to go the the dentist, but it's not covered by Medicare. Mark's…
by Dave Munger One thing you can't see on a TV news report is the sound of a flood. It's a sort of muffled silence, like a windless forest the morning after a snowstorm. When you hear a dog barking in the distance, it's muted, like some hidden force is slowing its voice before it…
by Dave Munger It's 10:00 on a beautiful Sunday morning in California. To my left is some of the most spectacular coastline America has to offer. I'm walking along a road on Point Lobos that is ordinarily packed with cars on days like this, but today, thanks in part to my $135 entry fee, the…
by Dave Munger Whenever I call my stepbrother Mark, one of his persistent complaints is how prices are going up. “Everything costs more,” he tells me. Yet for the past two years, he's received no increase in his Social Security Disability check. His money, which never went very far, now barely seems to be enough…
by Dave Munger It's almost impossible to come up with a pithy statement summarizing the age-old struggle to define “art” and “artist.” Yet for my stepbrother Mark, for whom daily existence is a struggle, wrestling with these concepts takes on a new dimension. I can still remember scoffing in my Intro to Art class in…
When most people think of back problems they think of “slipped disks” or muscle pain. That's not what has caused my stepbrother Mark's troubles. His official diagnosis is degenerative disk disease. That means exactly what it sounds like—the disks between his vertebrae that are supposed to protect the nerves and bones are slowly deteriorating. The…
If you’re an American and you have a job, you’re supposed to get an annual statement from the Social Security Administration explaining how much money you stand to receive at retirement. It also reports what your dependents will get from the SSA if you die, and what you’ll get if you become disabled. For me, the statement is a stark reminder of how much I rely on my wife’s income to survive. As a writer, my income is sporadic, and if I couldn’t work, I’d have a difficult time living on my Social Security benefits alone. Many people see the Social Security program as a sort of charity, but fundamentally it is not: The more you put in, the more you get back from it. If a person hasn’t made much money, they won’t be able to collect enough benefits from Social Security to live on. But even when people do pay in, the system has made it nearly impossible for some people to receive the benefits they deserve. For physical laborers, the very work they do can end up causing disabilities that prevent them from working. My stepbrother Mark had always had a bad back, but he’d dealt with the problem by loading up on Advil and taking an occasional day off. He never visited a doctor about the problem because his jobs never provided health coverage. Often, before starting a job, his boss would pull him aside and remind him that he was not an employee; he was an “independent contractor,” which meant that the boss wasn’t responsible for any injuries or other problems that occurred on the job site. There was no health coverage, no unemployment insurance, no safety net at all, physical or financial. Once Mark was working on a makeshift bit of scaffolding in the cavernous great room of a partially-completed McMansion. He was 30 feet above the rough plywood floor, balancing on a narrow plank, attaching blocks to the rafters with a nail gun so heavy it was difficult for him to hold it over his head, weakened as he was by his deteriorating back. A nail got caught in the gun, causing it to backfire; the 15-pound piece of equipment glanced off the ceiling before crashing down on his face. The blow cracked a tooth and nearly knocked him unconscious. He’s still not sure how he managed to stay on that plank. If he had fallen—supposing he managed to survive—he would have had no way to pay his medical bills.