A revelatory account of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don’t think it exists

Jessica Compton’s family of four would have no cash income unless she donated plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna in Chicago often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends.

After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen since the mid-1990s — households surviving on virtually no income. Edin teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on calculating incomes of the poor, to discover 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.

Where do these families live? How did they get so desperately poor? Edin has “turned sociology upside down” (Mother Jones) with her procurement of rich — and truthful — interviews. Through the book’s many compelling profiles, moving and startling answers emerge.

The authors illuminate a troubling trend: 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. More than a powerful exposé, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality.

- See more at: http://www.hmhco.com/shop/books/200-a-Day/9780544303188#productInfo

Kathryn Edin

BLOOMBERG DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR, Johns Hopkins University

am the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology, Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health, Bloomberg School of Public Health. I received my Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University in 1991 and I have also taught at Rutgers University, Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and, most recently, Harvard University as a Professor of Public Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School and chair of their Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy. I am a Trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation and on the Department of Health and Human Services advisory committee for the poverty research centers at Michigan, Wisconsin, and Stanford. I am a founding member of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Network on Housing and Families with Young Children and a past member of the MacArthur Network on the Family and the Economy. In 2014 I became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.

H. Luke Shaefer

Associate Professor of Social Work and Associate Professor of Public Policy

Luke Shaefer's research focuses on the effectiveness of the United States’ social safety net in serving low-wage workers and economically disadvantaged families.

His recent work explores rising levels of extreme poverty in the United States, the impact of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program on material hardships, barriers to unemployment insurance faced by vulnerable workers, and strategies for increasing access to oral health care in the United States.

Shaefer is further interested in non-profit management, particularly the economics of social service administration. He has significant non-profit program management experience and has served as board president for a public foundation and an education nonprofit.