|[ Der Oberst hat niemand, der ihm schreibt ]|

ROCHESTER — Gail Evans and Marta Ramos have one thing in common: They have each cleaned offices for one of the most innovative, profitable and all-around successful companies in the United States.

For Ms. Evans, that meant being a janitor in Building 326 at Eastman Kodak’s campus in Rochester in the early 1980s. For Ms. Ramos, that means cleaning at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., in the present day.

In the 35 years between their jobs as janitors, corporations across America have flocked to a new management theory: Focus on core competence and outsource the rest. The approach has made companies more nimble and more productive, and delivered huge profits for shareholders. It has also fueled inequality and helps explain why many working-class Americans are struggling even in an ostensibly healthy economy.

The $16.60 per hour Ms. Ramos earns as a janitor at Apple works out to about the same in inflation-adjusted terms as what Ms. Evans earned 35 years ago. But that’s where the similarities end.

Ms. Evans was a full-time employee of Kodak. She received more than four weeks of paid vacation per year, reimbursement of some tuition costs to go to college part time, and a bonus payment every March. When the facility she cleaned was shut down, the company found another job for her: cutting film.

Ms. Ramos is an employee of a contractor that Apple uses to keep its facilities clean. She hasn’t taken a vacation in years, because she can’t afford the lost wages. Going back to school is similarly out of reach. There are certainly no bonuses, nor even a remote possibility of being transferred to some other role at Apple.

Yet the biggest difference between their two experiences is in the opportunities they created. A manager learned that Ms. Evans was taking computer classes while she was working as a janitor and asked her to teach some other employees how to use spreadsheet software to track inventory. When she eventually finished her college degree in 1987, she was promoted to a professional-track job in information technology.

Less than a decade later, Ms. Evans was chief technology officer of the whole company, and she has had a long career since as a senior executive at other top companies. Ms. Ramos sees the only advancement possibility as becoming a team leader keeping tabs on a few other janitors, which pays an extra 50 cents an hour.

They both spent a lot of time cleaning floors. The difference is, for Ms. Ramos, that work is also a ceiling.

These three digits are the real magic number.

More than four in 10 people (42%) say that knowing someone’s credit score could impact whether or not they went on a date with that person, according to a survey of 1000 adults released Wednesday by Bankrate.com. Of those, 13% say it could have a major impact, while 29% say it would have a more minor impact.

No doubt, some people reading this will think this is shallow: Just because a person isn’t so great with money doesn’t mean you shouldn’t date them, right? Well, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that credit scores are very important to a relationship.

For one, your credit score can predict your likelihood of divorce, according to a 2015 study of roughly 12 million consumers by researchers at the Federal Reserve Board, the Brookings Institution and UCLA. The higher your credit score, the less likely you’ll split from your partner, and vice versa. Indeed, for every 105-point uptick in a person’s credit score, there is a 32% drop in the likelihood of them divorcing. “Couples with the lowest initial average scores are two or three times more likely to separate than the couples with the highest average scores, and the likelihood of separation largely diminishes as scores increase,” the study found.

But how do you bring it up? First, “you can’t just blurt out” a question about credit score, says Terry Siman, the managing director at United Capital’s Philadelphia office; you need to watch their money behaviors to find the right time to talk about this. Etiquette and relationship expert April Masini says that you can broach the topic with a friendly question like “Have you had to work as hard as me to get your credit score up to snuff?” She says that “by naming it and associating it with a challenge, you’ve become a little more direct.” If that doesn’t work, it’s okay to be more direct. She recommends saying something like ““I really like you — I feel like we should talk about some serious stuff”, adding that this sets the tone for a no hold barred conversation about a variety of things, including finances.

Another reason you want to know a credit score: It can hint to you how trustworthy someone is. A 2011 study from researchers at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Dallas found that people with higher credit scores were more likely to return money to its owner than those with lower scores. And the 2015 study concluded a similar thing: “Credit scores matter for committed relationships because they reveal information about general trustworthiness,” the researchers write.

So when should you find out someone’s credit score? “It’s probably not a great idea to ask for someone’s financial history on the first date,” says Mike Cetera, credit card analyst at Bankrate.com. “However, it’s better to know if a potential partner has a history of bad financial decisions before the relationship goes too far, especially if you plan on making large purchases together or sharing bank accounts.”

n paper alone you would never guess that I grew up poor and hungry.

My most recent annual salary was over $700,000. I am a Truman National Security Fellow and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. My publisher has just released my latest book series on quantitative finance in worldwide distribution.

None of it feels like enough though. I feel as though I am wired for a permanent state of fight or flight, waiting for the other shoe to drop, or the metaphorical week when I don’t eat. I’ve chosen not to have children, partly because—despite any success—I still don’t feel I have a safety net. I have a huge minimum checking account balance in mind before I would ever consider having children. If you knew me personally, you might get glimpses of stress, self-doubt, anxiety, and depression. And you might hear about Tennessee.

Meet anyone from Tennessee and they will never say they are from “just” Tennessee. They’ll add a prefix: East, West, or Middle. My early life was in East Tennessee, in an Appalachian town called Rockwood. I was the eldest of four children with a household income that couldn’t support one. Every Pentecostal church in the surrounding hillbilly heroin country smelled the same: a sweaty mix of cheap cleaner and even cheaper anointing oil, with just a hint of forsaken hope. One of those forsaken churches was effectively my childhood home, and my school.

Class was a single room of 20 people running from kindergarten through twelfth grade, part of an unaccredited school practicing what’s called Accelerated Christian Education. We were given booklets to read to ourselves, by ourselves. We scored our own homework. There were no lectures, and I did not have a teacher. Once in a while the preacher’s wife would hand out a test. We weren’t allowed to do anything. There were no movies, and no music. Years would pass with no distinguishing features, no events. There was barely any socializing.

On top of it all, I spent a lot of my time pondering basic questions. Where will my next meal come from? Will I have electricity tomorrow? I became intimately acquainted with the embarrassment of my mom trying to hide our food stamps at the grocery store checkout. I remember panic setting in as early as age 8, at the prospect of a perpetual uncertainty about everything in life, from food to clothes to education. I knew that the life I was living couldn’t be normal. Something was wrong with the tiny microcosm I was born into. I just wasn’t sure what it was.

As an adult I thought I’d figured that out. I’d always thought my upbringing had made me wary and cautious, in a “lessons learned” kind of way. Over the past decades, though, that narrative has evolved. We’ve learned that the stresses associated with poverty have the potential to change our biology in ways we hadn’t imagined. It can reduce the surface area of your brain, shorten your telomeres and lifespan, increase your chances of obesity, and make you more likely to take outsized risks.