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    $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
    $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
    $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
    Audiobook7 hours

    $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

    Written by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer

    Narrated by Allyson Johnson

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    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateSep 1, 2015
    ISBN9781622319152
    Author

    Kathryn J. Edin

    KATHRYN J. EDIN is the William Church Osborne Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. The author of nine books, Edin is widely recognized for using both quantitative research and direct, in-depth observation to illuminate key mysteries about poverty: “In a field of poverty experts who rarely meet the poor, Edin usefully defies convention” (New York Times). 

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    Reviews for $2.00 a Day

    4/5

    138 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Eye opening. It brings the dilemma up close & personal, enabling the listener to empathize. Realization can temper judgement.
    • 4/5
      Based on a copy from NetGalley. Honestly, this is such a gut-wrenching read, but it is most certainly an important one.
    • 5/5
      This book is short but powerful. It focuses on the poorest of the poor--those with under $2/person/day income, living a virtually cash-free existence. Their ranks have grown since the 1996 welfare reform that virtually extinguished cash welfare.

      What's clear from the families interviewed is that most of them want to work. Even the disabled are putting in substantial effort. The reasons they are not working are largely structural: they face obstacles to getting and keeping jobs. It's hard for them to apply, they lack transportation, and employers demand complete availability that they do not have. Alternatively, as with residents of the Mississippi Delta (a devastating portrait of a virtually collapsed economy) there are no jobs to get, and their poverty is too deep for them to leave. The families wind up in a vicious circle of instability with little way to get themselves out. Unstable housing leads to job issues which leads to even more housing instability.

      Edin and Schaefer aren't as negative about welfare reform as many liberals, but the book, whether intentionally or not, points up its flaws. First, AFDC was effectively abolished. Instead of just limiting it, it was block granted and states were permitted to spend the money on other things. Their incentive was simply to get people off the rolls--not to help them. At this point many recipients believe welfare doesn't even exist. Some are even told it isn't available by state workers. In Mississippi, recipients have declined from 180,000 at AFDC's peak to only 17,000 in 2014, and this is America's poorest state. Families are forced to rely on a variety of strategies to supplement the cash income they lack, some more legal than others, and the availability of nongovernmental resources varies widely. Programs like SNAP and the EITC have helped the slightly less poor by topping up their incomes, but EITC does not help the unemployed. SNAP, while improving nutrition significantly, also presents problems since it is sometimes traded at a discounted rate by the cashless (the authors are careful to note that welfare fraud is rare and has declined, but the poorest may have no other option). One family receives $1600 in SNAP for 11 people, but with almost no cash income, $600 has to be traded in for cash to pay the electric bill, leaving kids hungry. If it were all cash, $300 would not be lost. On the other hand, for those with cash income, SNAP enables cash to be reallocated and results in an increase in the food budget.

      What this book makes clear is that the poor need more help. A lot of it. They need jobs that are stable, housing that is affordable and better quality, accessible childcare, and more. And yes--we need cash welfare to bridge the gap.

      I wouldn't call this revolutionary--if you're familiar with actual poor people and work on poverty, the basic outline should be familiar. But the fieldwork and statistics are excellent and worth reading.
    • 4/5
      Back in the 1980's Ronald Reagan popularized the myth of the welfare queen. In the 1990's, Bill Clinton "reformed" welfare, so that very few people would receive assistance in the form of cash. Now, most welfare assistance is received in the form of SNAP, aka food stamps. By 2011, the number of families living on $2.00 a day had doubled in 15 years. Even including the benefits of food stamps, the number of children living in $2.00 a day poverty has increased by 70%.In this book Edin mixes the personal stories of families living in poverty with political history and analysis. Some salient points are the difficulties that people who have no cash have in finding a job--from lacking a telephone to respond to job enquiries, to lacking decent clothes for a job interview, to lacking transportation to get to the job. The people finding themselves in this position use their ingenuity to raise the funds to pay the rent--they sell their blood, if they are healthy enough. If they have transportation and a storage place, they collect cans and bottles to sell for recycling. One woman in the Mississippi Delta who lives in a housing project in a remote country area pays a friend to bring her to a grocery once a month where she buys supplies to set up a "snack shop" in her living room, where she sells Kool Aid, chips and other snacks at a small profit to other residents of the project. And, it is true that some recipients of food stamps resort to selling all or part of them for cash. Edin finds this to be an unsurprising result of the move to remove cash from welfare benefits--while the food stamps provide a basic level of food for sustenance, there are other expenses, like rent, for which cash is necessary. The food stamp recipient takes a big risk in trading some of the benefits for cash (it's harder now that what the recipients actually receive is something akin to a debit card that can be used for food), and receives a low return--perhaps 50%-60% of the value of the goods purchased with the card, and a potential fine of $250,000 and 20 years in jail. (Note the punishment for voluntary manslaughter is usually around 9 years.)Together with Evicted, which I read earlier this year, this book is an eye-opening look at what it means to live in poverty in this day and age. Highly recommended.3 1/2 stars
    • 5/5
      Poverty in America is horrific. Greed from employers paying low wages and greed from landlords has made a never ending cycle of poverty. I found the book to be a excellent read that moves at a good pace.
    • 4/5
      Vignettes of various individuals and families struggling to pursue meaningful employment and basic comforts, living on very, very little money.
    • 5/5
      A short but vital work by one of the most important sociologists working today. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      I confess I've skimmed this book, as after the first few chapters it was just too painful. I may go back from time to time. I did read the conclusions, which were useful but not revolutionary.
    • 4/5
      I can't say very much about this book because it will fill me with rage and spike my blood pressure. But the number of families in the US with no cash income - none, zero, nada - is outrageous and heartbreaking. They basically subsist on SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) and selling SNAP when they need cash. This books follows several people living on less that $2.00 a day and contrary to political myth, they are not lazy or stupid or addicted to drugs or out to game the system. They are parents and spouses and grandmothers who have had not just the system, but the entire organization of society, rigged against them. This book made me mad and sad and left feeling dirty when I spend more than double these people's daily income on a routine trip to Starbucks.There was some discussion about housing insecurity in the book which made me want to read Evicted even more than I already did, but I am going to have to wait until I cool off a bit, I think.
    • 5/5
      This book is completely disheartening, and it doesn't even dwell on the politicians post-Bill Clinton's "welfare reform" who made even worse policy. The authors are astounded at how many American families live only on SNAP (food stamps), with no cash coming in at all. They also avoid reminding the reader how all Republicans and Libertarians despise the poor and re-victimize them by punishing them for selling SNAP so that they can buy diapers, school uniforms, and transportation. The usual culprits are in evidence: deteriorated housing, high rentals, lack of public transport, horrible exploitative employers, bad schools, lack of coordination of social services, poor decisions. The authors offer three remedies: higher wages and better jobs, some in the form of subsidized private-public job training; a change in the mortgage interest deduction to stop subsidizing wealthy homeowners who don't need it and fixing zoning exclusions; and reestablishing a cash safety net and taking block grants away from the states that use them for any other purpose other than for what they were intended. Add this to "Nickeled and Dimed" and "Evicted", for a vivid picture of the mountain of misery for what seems like half of the population at this point.
    • 4/5
      Twenty years after "welfare reform" abolished the cash safety net designed to protect the poorest Americans, sociologists Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer find through their fieldwork that 1.5 million families with children are caught in the trap of extreme poverty. All too often the "$2.00-a-day poor", as Edin and Shaefer call them, are invisible to mainstream Americans.As the authors reveal, most of today's extreme poor don't fit the old "welfare queen" stereotype. Rather, the men and women profiled in the book work hard every day, whether that means toiling at low-paying jobs for shady employers who routinely violate labor laws, or finding ways to generate small amounts of cash to lend dignity and freedom of choice to mostly cashless existences. Some sell their plasma, and others run "informal" (under the table) businesses. All dream of the day they can break out of the $2.00-a-day trap, but they have very limited means of doing so permanently.In their conclusion the authors suggest a number of ways the government could help the poorest of the poor, including restoring the cash safety net and offering subsidized work programs. In today's economic and political climates, however, these proposals seem unlikely to be adopted.$2.00 a Day is a quick, eye-opening read. I recommend it to all those who are concerned about the plight of the poorest Americans.
    • 5/5
      The poorest of the poor are considered to be those living on $2 per day or less. This book is a case study involving a number of individuals struggling to emerge from this crushing poverty, as well as a discourse on the history and current state of government aid programs, and how they simply aren't catching the people who need to be caught.Welfare in general is an incendiary topic. A majority of Americans disapprove of the concept of welfare, yet most Americans also think we aren't doing enough to help the very poor. The perception is a system filled with lazy welfare queens gaming the system at tax payer expense, but as in other discredited issues like voter fraud, the amount of abuse is negligible. Meanwhile we have people who's aspirations are nothing more than a meager job paying $12 per hour and enough hours to feed the kids and put a roof over their heads.Edin does a good job presenting her thesis and is more an advocate of government job programs than cash give-aways. I tend to agree this is perhaps the best way to deal with a growing problem in part created by a shifting economy that leaves people unemployed with urgent need of retraining to more useful skills. Everyone who wants to work should be able to do so.
    • 5/5
      This is a brutal book tracking several families, in urban and suburban settings, who go through periods of living on $2 or less in cash per person per day, often going hungry, sometimes homeless, almost always jobless despite the adults’ near desperation for work and willingness to do hard work. Some of the most awful moments for the adults are when their family ties hold them back instead of helping, like when a woman who’s been getting “Cashier of the Month” awards at Wal-Mart gets in her truck and finds out that her uncle has driven it dry, even though she gave him money for gas; when she calls Wal-Mart, they tell her not to bother coming in at all if she can’t come on time. The elimination of welfare, the authors argue, created incredibly deep poverty for a segment of Americans. Though many such people pass through periods of $2-a-day poverty, the effects last because the radical instability of those periods has effects on their health, their children, their relationships, and their general capacity to plan a future. The people the authors track are largely industrious and creative, but in ways devoted only to survival, like the woman who sells her plasma as often as she can and is therefore listless and anemic. There are other people in these stories who don’t work as hard, though with very few jobs available it’s relatively easy to see reasons why. And of course, there are children, loved and shielded as much as possible—which is not very much, as when one mother’s attempts to keep a roof over their heads leads them to stay with a family member who molests her daughter.
    • 4/5
      In October 2014, ACOSS released a new report revealing that poverty is growing in Australia with an estimated 2.5 million people or 13.9% of all people living below the internationally accepted poverty line. Of those, 603,000 or 17.7%, are children.And as politicians whine about the increasing costs of the welfare system (from the suite of their tax payer funded five star hotel room) and the media whips middle class society into a frenzy by highlighting the worst examples of the minority who abuse the system, the Australian government is considering implementing a program similar to America’s model of SnAP.What $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America shows is that the American welfare system, and specifically the reliance on the SnAP program, fails to provide for or protect its most vulnerable citizens. It looks generous on paper but in practice, but it leaves families without access to cash, vital for everyday life. Without cash they are unable to use public transport, pay bills, buy underwear, or school supplies, without having to resort to trading SnAP for half its worth on the dollar, selling blood, collecting cans, or illegal activities, such as prostitution, all for a few dollars.Statistics show that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children, and the authors introduce the reader to eight families who are struggling to survive on incomes of $2.00 per person, per day or less.The causes of such extreme poverty are complicated. ‘Get a job’ cries the middle classes, but with scarce unskilled work opportunities and exploitative employers, the answer is not that simple. Modonna worked as a cashier in one store for eight years but when her register came up $10 short after a shift she was fired, and even though the store later found the money, she received no apology nor an invitation to return to work. Unable to keep up with her rent she was evicted and she and her teenage daughter were forced into a homeless shelter, and despite applying for hundreds of jobs, Modonna remains unemployed.And what of the children? Tabitha is one of thirteen children. She grew up with one set of clothes, sharing a mattress with seven of her siblings in a three bedroom apartment. They often went without food especially when their mother found it necessary to trade some of the SnAP she received, at almost half its value, for cash in order to pay the electricity or water bill. In tenth grade a desperate Tabitha agreed to sleep with one of her teachers who offered her food in exchange in for regular sex. In her junior year she was forced to leave home when she intervened in a fight between her mother and her abusive partner and the man issued Tabitha’s mother an ultimatum. Now eighteen she is finishing high school and has a place to live thanks to a boarding school scholarship, but she will graduate in a matter of months and though she’d like to go to college, there is no money to do so.There are no easy solutions to the kind of poverty experienced by Modonna and her daughter, or Tabitha and her family, but its clear the current welfare system is failing. Without cash, many families have no hope of escaping the cycle of poverty, or surviving the experience without deep physical and emotional wounds. The authors argue for sensible reforms that would go some way to alleviating the plight of those living on $2.00 per person, per day.This is an eyeopening and important book that will challenge your preconceptions of poverty, welfare and the poor. It is much harder to blame or condemn the homeless or unemployed (or dole bludgers in the Australian vernacular) for their circumstances when you understand the challenges they face.“…the question we have to ask ourselves is, Whose side are we on? can our desire for, and sense of, community induce those of us with resources to come alongside the extremely poor among us in a more supportive, and ultimately more effective, way?”