ABSTRACT
The first time a 9-year-old child explained to me that poor people were poor because they did not have any money to buy a job with, the answer went almost unnoticed. Occasionally more subjects repeated the idea using identical words, others mentioned the idea en passé, and a few subjects were more explicit and explained that to get a job one must pay at the beginning and later one gets paid. This is not the usual practice in our societies. Generally one does not have to pay to get a job, except for a few professions. Due to this reason we were not expecting these answers, which were frequently given by children from different social classes as an explanation of why poor people were poor, and we found them very surprising.
