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We have made great steps toward reducing poverty throughout the world - extreme poverty has declined significantly and seems on track to continue to take action within the next decades. Jim Yong Kim of the World Lender estimates that extreme poverty can be eliminated in 17 years. That is clearly cause for celebration. However, this very good news can make us oblivious to the actual fact that there are, in the United States, a substantial and growing amount of families who go on significantly less than $2.00 per person, per day. That figure, the World Bank way of measuring poverty, is hard to imagine in this country - most of us spend more than that before we reach work or class in the morning. In $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, Kathryn Edin and Luke Schaefer create us to people like Jessica Compton, who survives by donating plasma as often as 10 times per month and spends time with her young children in the public library so she can access an Internet connection for job-hunting; and like Modonna Harris who lost the cashier's job she experienced held for a long time, for the sake of $7.00 misplaced by the end of your day. They are the would-be working school, with a huge selection of job applications submitted lately and thousands of work time logged in earlier years. Twenty years after William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears, it's still all about the task. But as Edin and Shaefer light up through incisive analysis and indelible real human story, the blend of a federal government safety net built on the ability to work and a low-wage labor market ever more designed never to deliver a full time income wage has delivered a vicious one-two punch to the would-be working poor. More than a powerful expose of any troubling tendency, $2.00 a Day offers new research and new suggestions to our central nationwide argument on work, income inequality, and how to proceed about it.
