I don't know any particularly good articles/books on this subject, but Morgan Spurlock had a documentary tv series called "30 days" where he spends 30 days doing things like living on welfare, working for a minimum wage job, living in prison, etc. It's a fascinating show, and while he's the first to admit that even this level of exposure is not equivalent to what people in those situations actually feel (largely because he has a safety net, and his is only a temporary condition), it still dramatically shifts your view of what life really is like for people in very different circumstances.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_Days_%28TV_series%29

Ehrenrich did a book called Nickel and Dimed: http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/08...

If you're interested in the topic, read Sudhir Venkatesh's books, like his most recent _Gang_Leader_for_a_Day_.

It's about his experience of spending 8 years with impoverished residents of a Chicago project community, including gang members, drug users, and prostitutes, as part of his graduate studies in sociology.

http://www.sudhirvenkatesh.org/books/gang-leader-for-a-day

A possible title for such an article is a word I first read about when reading Isaiah Berlin and his students for some philosophy of mind work I was doing a few years back. The term they use is "Einfuhlung", which translates to a "feeling into" (empathy?) but one that is quite directly experienced. Thay claim that one cannot feel and be moved by the depth of woe (or any other emotion, for that matter) in a blues song, for instance, without having experienced it firsthand.

You might be interested in http://www.scratchbeginnings.com/

I was reading about this when I cranked out http://www.emptyfridge.org/

Yeah me too. Funny how the meaning of things changes in a different context and how the new speakers of these words neglect to check what the other meanings are.