$2.00 a Day Living on Almost Nothing in America

Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer

eBook - 2015

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 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." (The New York Times) Jessica Compton's family of four would have no income if she didn't donate 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 before—households surviving on virtually no cash 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, was one and a half million households, including about three million children. Where do these families live? How did they get so... more