$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Seventeen dollars per person, per day. That’s the United States government’s official definition of poverty, if you’re living in a family of four. Then there’s deep poverty, a classification for those with just half that amount. As a reference point, the average American spends about $22 a day on food alone.
The groundbreaking sociologist Kathryn J. Edin has studied the daily lives and strategies of people scraping by at these meager levels for decades. In 2010, she returned to the field and was shocked to find signs that an extreme level of poverty—deeper than deep, we might call it—was growing across America. Further research backed up her impression: In 2011, 1.5 million households with children were surviving on no more than $2 per person, per day, an amount so low that no one had ever thought to study it.
[For more of this story, written by Peter C. Baker, go to http://www.psmag.com/books-and...making-it-in-america]
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