Book Reveals Hidden Lives of Americans in Deep Poverty

After two decades of groundbreaking research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen before; households surviving on virtually no cash income. Edin teamed up with Luke Shaefer, an expert on surveys of the incomes of the poor. The two made a surprising discovery: the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to one and a half million American households, including about three million children. Edin and Shaefer traveled across the country to speak with families living in this extreme poverty. Through the book’s many profiles of people, startling answers emerge: a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America’s extreme poor. The  book$2 A Day, Living on Almost Nothing in America delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality. Mindy Todd hosts this interview on The Point. Click here for information on a talk by Edin that takes place at Falmouth Academy on January 20th.