2.00 a Day, H. Luke Shaefer
2.00 a Day, H. Luke Shaefer
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$2.00 a Day
Living on Almost Nothing in America

Author: H. Luke Shaefer, Kathryn J. Edin

Narrator: Allyson Johnson

Unabridged: 7 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/01/2015


Synopsis

The story of a kind of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don't even think exists from a leading national poverty expert who defies convention (New York Times). Edin and Shaefer tell the stories of eight families who live on what is almost unimaginable—an income that falls below the World Bank definition of poverty in the developing world. Their stories need to be heard, especially as we head into our election year that will highlight the questions on income and inequality, and our commitment to making prosperity available to all. We have made great steps toward eliminating poverty around the world—extreme poverty has declined significantly and seems on track to continue to do so in the next decades.

Jim Yong Kim of the World Bank estimates that extreme poverty can be eliminated in seventeen years. This is clearly cause for celebration. However, this good news can make us oblivious to the fact that there are, in the United States, a significant and growing number of families who live on less than $2.00 per person, per day. That figure, the World Bank measure of poverty, is hard to imagine in this country most of us spend more than that before we get to work or school in the morning. In $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, Kathryn Edin and Luke Schaefer introduce us to people like Jessica Compton, who survives by donating plasma as often as ten times a month and spends hours with her young children in the public library so she can get access to an internet connection for job-hunting; and like Modonna Harris who lost the cashiers job she held for years, for the sake of $7.00 misplaced at the end of the day. They are the would-be working class, with hundreds of job applications submitted in recent months and thousands of work hours logged in past years. Twenty years after William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears, it's still all about the work. But as Edin and Shaefer illuminate through incisive analysis and indelible human stories, the combination of a government safety net built on the ability to work and a low-wage labor market increasingly designed not to deliver a living wage has delivered a vicious one-two punch to the would-be working poor.

More than a powerful expose of a troubling trend, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our central national debate on work, income inequality, and what to do about it.

Reviews

This is an excellent book about deep poverty in modern America. It covers a lot of big issues – employment, housing, public benefits – but also makes them personal, through the well-told stories of eight families struggling and often failing to make ends meet. In the U.S., we tend to think that our v......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on October 19, 2015

I'm not as enthusiastic as other readers of this book, though I do agree that it addresses an extremely important topic. I think the authors tailored the book for readers who are almost total newcomers to the question of policy and social policy in America. That may have been a wise choice, but if y......more

Goodreads review by Jessaka on September 25, 2023

I really do not wish to review this book. The poverty that the people experienced was far more serious than how I grew up. I leave you with a different kind of review.We were poor, I said. Sister. No, we weren't. We had food and never went hungry. Me. It is true that we Never went hungry, but most of......more

Goodreads review by Caren on April 07, 2016

This highly readable book is riveting and shocking. The authors, both professors of sociology, profile real families (changing only their names) to illustrate extreme poverty in the USA. After welfare reform in 1996, cash payments pretty much stopped, or became very temporary. Income help , instead,......more