$2.00 a Day

Living on Almost Nothing in America

By: Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer

Narrated by: Allyson Johnson

We have made great steps toward eliminating poverty around the world - extreme poverty has declined significantly and seems on track to continue to do so in the next decades. Jim Yong Kim of the World Bank estimates that extreme poverty can be eliminated in 17 years. This is clearly cause for celebration.

However, this good news can make us oblivious to the fact that there are, in the United States, a significant and growing number of families who live on less than $2.00 per person, per day. That figure, the World Bank measure of poverty, is hard to imagine in this country - most of us spend more than that before we get to work or school in the morning.

In $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, Kathryn Edin and Luke Schaefer introduce us to people like Jessica Compton, who survives by donating plasma as often as 10 times a month and spends hours with her young children in the public library so she can get access to an Internet connection for job-hunting; and like Modonna Harris who lost the cashier's job she had held for years, for the sake of $7.00 misplaced at the end of the day.

They are the would-be working class, with hundreds of job applications submitted in recent months and thousands of work hours logged in past years. Twenty years after William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears, it's still all about the work. But as Edin and Shaefer illuminate through incisive analysis and indelible human story, the combination of a government safety net built on the ability to work and a low-wage labor market increasingly designed not to deliver a living wage has delivered a vicious one-two punch to the would-be working poor.

More than a powerful expose of a troubling trend, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our central national debate on work, income inequality, and what to do about it.

©2015 Kathryn J. Edin (P)2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Critic reviews

"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". ( New York Times)

An eye-opener simply for every one to read

The awareness has to start somewhere, and this book is a good start. It tells the stories of couple of families that struggle with extreme poverty.
Some reviewer suggested that the book lacks deep political analysis and did not provide well-thought solutions, so, it is worth pointing out that this book is meant to be small in size and content, so the reader won't get overwhelmed. Basically the target audience of his book is simply: everyone!

[Person Note]
It is worth mentioning that there are lots of factors that effect the (family) which is the core component of any society, and finance is just one factor. Poverty is a side effect of much deeper problems. The core problem lays in the moral philosophy. Take political corruption for example, why does most politicians get corrupt when they get to power?

Did you notice that broken homes (usually) yield broken homes? And even if one manages to survive a broken home and get successful, he carries a psychic scar all his life!

There are rich broken homes, poverty is just one of the factors.
We need more social studies to find out the reasons behind the decline of moral compass, and come up with radical solutions, not just get rid of the side effects.

My two cents.

sad but accurate ethnography

great presentation with nice blend of storytelling and policy. characters were real and inspirational people

Must Read

This is a great book. It provides good insight into how the most oppressed and vulnerable individuals in our society try to survive. This book gives an account of how government systems continue to make laws that oppress the poor and how messages of ignorance continue to stigmatize those most in need.

learned so much

eyeopening. fantastic written. AS an european I've learned alot about American economi and the poor. I'm wishing for a brigher furture and more openhearted people like om the book

this makes me so sad

I wish our country did more for the people who desperately need the help. I do what I can. I wish more prone did too

A Solid Case Study of an Extremely Important Issue

Very well-written, with a nice balance between the narratives of the people being interviewed and background on the problems and struggles being addressed.

Heart warming & heart wrenching at the same time

The ethnographic representation of the lived experiences of the families highlighted in this book made real what living on less than $2 a day looks like in America. This book is a call of action!!! I appreciated the quantitative data that rounded out the qualitative narratives.

Sobering and startling

Pulls no punches. All Americans should read this book and wonder what sort of nation we are willing to be. Do we have the courage to live up to our national ideals?

Siri would have done a better job reading it!

I like the book, the content and writing. The narrator is terrible! Sounds robotic, I actually had to check if maybe I accidentally asked Alexa or Siri to read it, but no. Please find someone else to read it.

Solid but not a page turner

It’s an important topic and he book is well later out overall. I probably rated lower than it should be because it was required for a class and isn’t the sort of thing I generally listen to for fun. Solid book just not a page turner