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Kathryn Edin reveals the lives of people who live on $2 a day

Credit: Mark Smith

By Dale Keiger

Kathryn Edin has been an itinerant scholar of the poor for more than 20 years. She is a sociologist who works like an anthropologist, melding numbers and narrative to examine in illuminating detail the lives of poor people all over the United States. She has worked in Austin, Texas; Baltimore; Boston; Charleston, South Carolina; Camden, New Jersey; Chicago; Cleveland; Dallas; Milwaukee; New York; Philadelphia; and San Antonio; as well as Appalachian Tennessee and the Mississippi Delta. Her book titles signal where she has focused her effort: Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work ; Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City ; and Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage .

Image caption:

Image credit : Matt Roth

In the summer of 2010, Edin was in the seventh year of a long-term study of children born in public housing in the early 1990s. At Latrobe Homes, a 700-unit housing project in East Baltimore, she encountered the 19-year-old woman she calls Ashley. "She had a two-week-old baby," Edin recalls. "When we walked into the house, the first thing I noticed was that as she was rocking her baby, she wasn't adequately supporting the head, and as a mother you know something's wrong. She just looked depressed, no expression on her face. She was visibly unkempt." Edin was sitting on the kitchen floor while she interviewed Ashley—there was only one chair—and she could look up and see there was no food in any of the cabinets. Despite six people living in the unit—Ashley, her baby, her mother, her brother, an elderly uncle, and a young cousin—there was almost no furniture. Edin noted a table with three legs that wouldn't stay upright unless propped against a wall, a filthy mattress with a Bugs Bunny fitted sheet, and a couch. The elderly uncle was on the couch nodding over in a heroin daze. Edin had witnessed plenty of poverty in her career, but not this bad. She knew from Ashley that no one in the household had a job, nor was anyone receiving public cash assistance. This was a family with no income. Edin recalls: "My first thought was that we'd found a whole new kind of poverty that we didn't think existed, and I wondered what was going on."

Since 2014, Edin has been a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the Krieger and Bloomberg schools, and recently she became director of the 21st Century Cities Initiative, one of the signature initiatives of the Johns Hopkins Rising to the Challenge capital campaign. But when she came across Ashley, Edin was on the faculty of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. A young visiting professor named Luke Shaefer had recently arrived at Harvard, and he was expert at mining a government data set that social scientists refer to as "the SIPP," the Survey of Income and Program Participation compiled by the United States Census Bureau. The SIPP captured more of the income of the poor than any other representative survey. "I told him about Ashley," she says, "and I said, 'Let's work out something together. Let's figure out if this is a thing.'"

It was a thing. The SIPP polls about 40,000 households all over the United States regarding any source of cash income they have had in the previous four months, including government assistance. The data indicated to Shaefer and Edin that in any given month, 1.5 million families, including 3 million children, were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person per day. More than a third of these families were headed by a married couple. Nearly half were poor whites. Shaefer says, "I can picture in my head that very first readout of the data. I was sitting in the main Harvard library reading room. I hadn't really known what to make of what Kathy said she was seeing, and then out pops this output. I was just wowed by it. I said a couple of words I'm pretty sure cannot appear in your magazine."

For comparison, the official U.S. government poverty line for a family of three in 2015 is $20,090 in income per year; that works out to a bit more than $18 a day per person. About half of the 1.5 million families in Shaefer's data were receiving food assistance by way of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the equivalent of what used to be called food stamps. Many had lived for a time in shelters or various precarious arrangements with kin, friends, or acquaintances, and had found other forms of help including public health insurance for their children. So they were not solely dependent on $2 a day for survival. But the United States has a cash economy. You cannot buy shoes for your children or pay the electric bill or take a bus to a job interview without money. How on earth were more than 4 million people living on no income? "In Ghana, where 80 percent of the economy is barter and noncash, it's one thing to live on $2 in cash per person per day," Edin says. "What does it mean to live cashless in the world's most advanced capitalist country?"

Shaefer and Edin were so startled by the numbers that they first tried to refute them. "One thing I don't think outsiders recognize about scientists is how hard we work to prove ourselves wrong," Edin says. They dug into other data sets, like public school reports on the number of homeless children in classrooms and the annual rolls of government food assistance, which record how many families report no cash income. They were looking for results at odds with what Shaefer had found in the SIPP. But everywhere they looked they found only corroboration. "The Census Bureau didn't believe us and chose to rerun our numbers," Edin says. "They got the exact same results."

So Edin and Shaefer crunched economic data to find 18 statistically representative families who had recently experienced at least three months of cashless poverty. Then, in 2012, Edin and a team of research assistants began documenting the daily lives of those families, to understand how they survived on so little and what their lives were like. The results were published in $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). The volume includes enough history of welfare in the United States to explain how the country got to this point, plus some policy suggestions for going forward. But the heart of the book is the narrative material that vividly conveys what it means to find yourself so disconnected from the economic system.

Politicians and commentators who favor restricting welfare benefits often portray poor people as a segment of the population that has fallen into poverty through a lack of initiative or personal responsibility, or who prefer public handouts to working for a living. To the contrary, the people Edin studied embody what Americans like to think are the cardinal virtues of upstanding citizens. They are resourceful, inventive, thrifty, and not just willing to work but eager to work. They seize every opportunity for employment and want nothing as badly as they want stable, full-time jobs. But they have fallen out of the 21st-century U.S. economy at a time when there is little in the way of a net to catch them, and they face overwhelming obstacles to clawing their way back up. And there aren't a handful of them. There are millions.

For $2.00 a Day , Edin studied families in four locales that Shaefer's quantitative research told her would be representative of the larger picture. For a typical, prosperous major American city, she picked Chicago. For a once booming city now enduring a long downturn, she selected Cleveland. Analysis of the SIPP data turned up clusters of extreme poverty in Appalachia and the Deep South, which sent her team to families in Johnson City, Tennessee, which had experienced something of a resurgence, and the rural Mississippi Delta, which had been impoverished for decades. "Our initial analysis raised more questions than answers," she says. "Who are these people? How did they get into this situation? What were they actually doing to survive? Obviously, they couldn't really be living on just $2 a day."

Edin found that life in this kind of deprivation is complex, unstable, physically and psychologically punishing, and contingent upon small day-to-day events that could put someone out of work, out of shelter, and out of luck in the space of a week. Start with finding work. To interview for a job requires a clean, decent set of clothes and the opportunity to bathe; both can be problematic for anyone living in a shelter or in a relative's apartment with six other people. Unless the job seeker has the luck to be close enough to walk to the interview, he'll need access to a car or money for the bus. Few businesses hire anyone on the spot, so the applicant will also need a $30 refurbished, pay-as-you-go cellphone for callbacks. (Sociologists often note that it's expensive to be poor.)

If the person does get a job, it will probably be in the service sector for minimum or sub-minimum wage. Many employers, like big-box stores, chain restaurants, and coffee shops, have adopted computerized systems that allow them to adjust their workforces day by day in response to changes in customer flow, the effects of sales events, seasonal fluctuations in business, even changes in the weather. So anyone holding down an entry-level job with one of these businesses is unlikely to have a dependable, steady, 40-hour-a-week work schedule that allows him to plan for all the other quotidian stuff that demands time and attention. He may be called in for 12-hour shifts over three straight days, or a couple of 16-hour open-to-close shifts at a coffee shop, then work only 10 hours all the next week. He may find his hours zeroed out, which means he is still technically employed but will have no income for that week. If he can't be flexible enough to accommodate the employer, he will lose the job because there is no shortage of people desperate for work who will take his place. If a parent needs time off because her child is sick or she needs to meet with the child's teacher or the car has broken down, forget it. In these jobs no one gets sick days or personal days or vacation.

The instability of work will be matched by instability in every other aspect of life for the poor. They may qualify for subsidized housing but are unlikely to get it since the wait list in many places is tens of thousands of people long and frequently closed. They may have enough money for a ramshackle apartment, but that will require regular income for rent, as well as for the electric and water bills. Losing a job or even a week's worth of hours can mean losing the apartment and having to resort to a shelter or a room in someone's house, and the people who take them in might well live in precarious situations of their own, not to mention three bus lines and two hours from that precious job. Children might have to spend six months in a house with relatives or strangers who have drug problems or are physically abusive. To be this poor means being vulnerable to every sort of predator.

In $2.00 a Day , the reader meets several people who live like this. Jennifer Hernandez (to respect their privacy rights and abide by institutional review board rules for the research, Edin created pseudonyms for everyone in the book) and her two children moved from one homeless shelter to another in Chicago. In the two and a half months spent at the third of those shelters, she applied for more than 100 jobs before landing one with a custodial company that cleaned foreclosed houses, many of which had been broken into and trashed by squatters and junkies. Working in filthy, unheated rooms during a Chicago winter, she kept coming down with respiratory problems and viral infections that she took home to her children, which led to missed work when they were home sick, which resulted in her hours being cut back so much she had to look for another job. But even at the worst times, she would not register for welfare benefits. Welfare was a handout and she would have none of that.

Modonna Harris, also in Chicago, had a high school diploma, two years of college, and a child from a broken marriage. For eight years, she held a full-time, $9-an-hour job at a music store but was summarily fired one day when her cash drawer came up $10 short. She then fell behind in her rent, was evicted, and had to move in with a succession of relatives who would shelter her and her daughter, Brianna, for only a few months at a time before turning them back out. Brianna still managed to make her school's honor roll one term. When food was in short supply, Modonna would turn a cup of coffee into "breakfast" by dumping in as much cream and sugar as the mug would hold.

There was Rae McCormick in Cleveland, whose mother abandoned her soon after her father died. At age 12, she lived for a time on her own, sheltered by a sympathetic landlord who let her stay in an apartment rent-free. By 21 she had a daughter to support and the deteriorating health of a much older person. Nevertheless, she managed to secure a full-time job with Walmart and in her first six months was named "cashier of the month" twice and encouraged to apply for promotion. Then one day she could not drive to work because the family friend whose truck she borrowed had run it out of gas and she had no cash to buy more. Her boss told her not to bother coming in anymore. Soon she spiraled down to $2-a-day poverty.

There's Paul in Cleveland who lost his house and savings when his chain of pizza parlors went bust. Martha in Mississippi who sold Kool-Aid pops and, on special occasions, a homemade delicacy, Kool-Aid Pickles, out of her living room for 50 cents apiece. Jessica Compton, a skinny, worried 21-year-old in Johnson City who sold her plasma twice a week because she had two kids and Red Lobster and McDonald's had zeroed out her and her husband's work hours when the seasonal economy slowed. They were three months behind in their rent and expected to be evicted any day, and she lived in terror that her iron levels would be too low for her to donate and receive the desperately needed $30 she collected for each plasma donation.

When the people Edin studied saw no other way, they sometimes broke the law to obtain cash. A woman might have "a friend" who would pay the electric bill one month in exchange for sex. The food assistance program, SNAP, is an in-kind benefit, a debit card that can be used only to purchase food. So the extremely poor sometimes traded $100 of SNAP groceries to a neighbor or family member for $60 in cash. This was risky; under federal sentencing guidelines, penalties for food stamp fraud are more severe than for voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault with a firearm, or sexual contact with a child under 12. One woman studied by Edin in the Mississippi Delta sold her three children's Social Security numbers for $500 each to family members, who then claimed the children as dependents so they could collect tax refunds.

The researchers were meticulous about documenting their subjects' lives and corroborating what they reported. Nearly every interview was transcribed (they had to rely on fact-checked field notes once when the recorder malfunctioned) and every transcript coded. Whenever they could, the researchers found multiple sources to confirm what their subjects reported about their communities and work environments and schools. "We have a saying, 'Hearsay is not evidence,'" Edin says. "We get as close to the source as we can. You can never be sure—someone can always be lying to you. But for every claim that was made in this study, there were multiple verifications. The best fact-checking we do is staying with people for a long time."

Edin's exposure to poor people came early. She grew up in northern Minnesota on the boundary of two economically depressed counties. Her father ran the local technical college, so her family was middle class, but the poor were all around her and a routine part of her childhood. Her mother held a degree in parish work and did church-based social work on behalf of the small Evangelical Covenant church the family belonged to, driving all over in a van with Edin in the back. "She was the youth leader, and man, there was no youth that didn't get a knock on the door," Edin says. "I spent a lot of time hanging out with kids at the very bottom of the income distribution. I thought it was fascinating, and I thought it was normal to have your mother running around the county treating everyone like they mattered."

After earning an undergraduate degree at tiny North Park College (now North Park University) in Chicago, Edin enrolled at Northwestern University for graduate study in sociology. "You went to Northwestern to do one of two things. You either went to study with the great quantitative mastermind Christopher Jencks, or you went and studied with the qualitative guru Howard Becker." She cultivated both as mentors and absorbed their different methodologies. "Howie's approach was to go out to a place where you could find a lot of the people you were studying and just hang out with them. Jencks was concerned with things like sampling and gathering numbers. Howie would have me out at laundromats meeting welfare moms. But Jencks got me to systematically sample across Chicago so that I had no more than three respondents from any given social network and could claim some level of representativeness."

While she was at Northwestern, she taught in a church basement as part of a North Park program that brought college courses to poor people. "After class, we would just sit around and talk," she says. "I would relay things that I was learning in Jencks' poverty class and then these women would say, 'Oh, girl, that's not how it works at all. This is how it really works.' So one day we started talking about welfare, and they said, 'Girl, don't you know that everybody has to cheat to survive? Welfare doesn't pay enough.'" This was the seed for Edin's first book, Making Ends Meet , written with anthropologist Laura Lein. "We showed, after six years in four cities and multiple interviews with 400 low-income single mothers, that you couldn't live on welfare alone anywhere in the country. You actually had to work under the table to survive." Most people without work did not have sufficient welfare benefits to get by, but when they had work and reported the income, they lost benefits. Either way they came up short. The only solution was to earn money by whatever means but not tell the government about it.

Edin developed what became her signature approach to sociology: rigorous data mining to determine subjects for her to study in the manner of an anthropologist doing field work. For one project, she and colleague Paula England followed 75 couples for four years, amassing 75,000 pages of transcripts. The research for Making Ends Meet began with a study of census data to select cities that represented the range of labor markets and welfare systems around the country. Edin then spent six years interviewing welfare mothers and reporting the narratives that recorded the texture of their lives. The study's firm foundation in data was exemplified by the back of the book, which included 27 regression analyses, a technique for examining statistical variables and their relationships. The quantitative work applied social science rigor to the research so that it produced something more than a collection of vivid narratives, something scientifically meaningful that could also drive social policy. The narratives revealed the lives within the data. Her Johns Hopkins colleague, sociologist Andrew Cherlin, observes, "Kathy thinks like a sociologist and talks like an anthropologist."

One chapter of $2.00 a Day explicates the changes in welfare that did benefit many people but sent millions more spiraling into extreme poverty. In 1996, Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which was promoted as sweeping welfare reform aimed at getting people off cash assistance and into jobs. It replaced open-ended cash assistance with a severely time-limited cash program and the requirement that all able-bodied recipients had to work. Those fortunate enough to have work qualified for the Earned Income Tax Credit. The EITC was cash assistance but in the form of an annual tax credit for people employed in low-income jobs. The more money they earned, up to a point, the bigger the credit, and the annual supplement could be upward of $5,000, a major boost to poor families. But if you didn't have a job, you didn't qualify. So under the new law, people who arguably needed cash the most—the unemployed, who had to pay for shelter and utilities and clothes and transportation and other necessities but had zero income—no longer qualified to receive any cash once they had run out their brief eligibility.

The legislation was popular with voters because it encouraged work and all but did away with what they regarded as handouts. Opinion polls consistently indicate that the majority of Americans approve of helping the poor, but not if that help comes in the form of a welfare check. Peter Edelman is a law professor at Georgetown University and faculty director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality there; he resigned from the Clinton administration in protest when the president signed the 1996 law. He says, "If you ask the public, 'Do you favor education for low-income children?' they say yes. 'Do you think there ought to be help for low-income people for better health?' Yes. 'Help with hunger?' Yes. 'Housing?' Yes. But when you suggest just giving the poor money, the public has a different attitude. They regard that as giving something for nothing." Says Edin, "In America, work is about citizenship. You can't be a citizen if you're not a worker."

The reform worked for some people. In 1993, only 58 percent of low-income mothers were employed; by 2000, that figure had risen to nearly 75 percent. Child poverty rates fell four straight years after passage of the law. The EITC tax credits meant a great deal to those able to find and keep jobs. "The more you worked, the more you got, and that made them feel a great deal of pride," Edin says, "whereas welfare had the opposite effect, making them feel shamed and stigmatized. This citizenship-enhancing feature of the EITC is like policy magic. This is probably the best policy we've ever invented for poor people. Except it leaves out our people"—the people in $2.00 a Day —"because they don't have enough work to claim anything. They are working when they can, but they're at the ragged edge of the labor market. It's like hanging on to a rope that's dissolving in your hands."

The 1996 law, Edin points out, was based on the assumption that hundreds of thousands of people dropped from the old welfare rolls could find stable, full-time employment that paid living wages. And when the legislation was enacted, the economy was booming. What was not well-enough understood was that too many of the jobs provided by the labor market, especially for the uneducated and unskilled, were low-wage and unstable, and there were not enough of them to meet demand. The recession that began in 2008 further reduced the number of available jobs. In her book, Edin describes this as the "toxic alchemy" that pushed so many people into the deepest poverty. By the mid-2000s, one in five single mothers had become what sociologists call "disconnected"—neither working nor receiving welfare. During her research, Edin was struck by how many people had not even bothered to apply for benefits they were qualified to receive. They assumed, or had been told, that the system offered them nothing and they were on their own. And some simply refused to seek public assistance. "The key thing about these people is they see themselves as workers, not dependents," Edin stresses. "We know from the SIPP that only 10 percent of these families get a dime from cash benefits."

All the people she studied during the course of her research repeatedly sought work and took it whenever they could. Recall Ashley, the 19-year-old Baltimorean with the 2-week-old baby who first got Edin wondering about the poorest of the poor. As part of the protocol for the study that had brought her and Edin together, Edin paid Ashley $50 for the interview. The next day, Edin found pretext to go back and see her again because she was so worried by what she'd seen of how Ashley was interacting with her baby. When the young woman answered the door this time, Edin says she was transformed. She had placed the baby with her mother for the day, had used some of the $50 to get her hair permed and buy a pants suit at Goodwill to make herself presentable for job interviews, and was on her way out the door to look for work. Edin remembers her as utterly changed by the mere possibility of finding a job.

With Cherlin and fellow Johns Hopkins sociologist Stephanie De Luca, economist Robert Moffitt, and researchers from the schools of Medicine and Public Health, Edin has embarked on a yearlong project to plan a major multi­disciplinary study of the extreme poor, a project that will be the first of its kind. She has kept in touch with most of the 18 families she studied for $2.00 a Day . "None of our families are doing appreciably better than when we first met them," she says. "Our hypothesis, that remains to be tested, is that once you find yourself in one of these spells, the work of survival becomes so all-consuming, and the wear of physically living in this condition becomes so acute, you can't really get out of it."

There seems to be little public support for a retooling of the welfare system sufficient to help the extreme poor. Part of the problem may be that to most of the American public, they are invisible. Before the work by Edin, Shaefer, and the rest of their team, these 4 million people were invisible even to sociologists. Says Cherlin, "In retrospect, I should have known—we all should have known—that the constriction of the welfare program would create families like this. But we didn't." In $2.00 a Day , Edin says, Here they are. These are their lives. And the question for Americans, she says, is this: "Does this look like the America you want to live in?"

In 1996, when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York argued against the welfare reform legislation, he predicted the changes to the country's social safety net would produce a million children sleeping on heating grates. "What we found is that over the course of a year, 3.4 million children are experiencing at least three months of extreme poverty," Edin says. "They aren't as visible as Moynihan thought they would be. But they are three and a half times more numerous."

Dale Keiger, A&S '11 (MLA), is the magazine's editor.

Posted in Politics+Society

Tagged sociology , kathryn edin

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‘$2.00 a Day,’ by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer

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By William Julius Wilson

• Sept. 2, 2015

From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, a number of developments turned out to have profound effects on destitute families in the United States, which Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer’s “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America” brings into sharp relief. Critics of welfare repeatedly argued that the increase of unwed mothers was mainly due to rising rates of welfare payments through Aid to Families With Dependent Children (A.F.D.C.). Even though the ­scientific ­evidence offered little support for this claim, the public’s outrage against the program, fueled by the “welfare queen” stereotype that Ronald Reagan peddled in stump speeches during his 1976 run for the presidency, led to calls for a major revamping of the welfare system.

In 1993, Bill Clinton and his advisers began a discussion of welfare reform that was designed to “make work pay,” a phrase coined by the Harvard economist David Ellwood in his 1988 book “Poor Support.” Ellwood, one of Clinton’s advisers, argued that to ease the transition from welfare to work, it would be necessary to provide training and job placement assistance; to help local government create public-sector jobs when private-sector jobs were lacking; and to develop child care programs for working parents. President Clinton’s early welfare-reform proposal included these features, as well as ­another component that Ellwood submitted — time limits on the receipt of welfare once these provisions were in place.

Republicans, however, seizing control of Congress in 1994, devised a bill that ­reflected their own vision of welfare ­reform. Designed as a block grant, giving states considerably more latitude in how they spent government money for welfare than A.F.D.C. permitted, the Republican bill also included a five-year lifetime limit on benefits based on federal funds. States were allowed to impose even shorter time limits. Although the bill increased child care subsidies for recipients who found jobs, the all-important public-­sector jobs for those unable to find employment in the private sector were missing. Moreover, there wasn’t enough budgeted for education and training. Much to the chagrin of the bill’s critics — including Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who predicted in 1995 that the proposed ­legislation would lead to poor children “sleeping on grates” — President Clinton signed the bill, called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), on Aug. 22, 1996, two days after his signing into law the first increase in the federal minimum wage in five years.

In the immediate years following the passing of welfare reform, supporters of TANF argued that Moynihan and other critics were proved wrong. The number of single mothers who exited welfare and found work exceeded all expectations; child poverty rates fell; the expansion of the earned-income tax credit, a wage subsidy for the working poor, combined with the 1996 increase in the minimum wage and the additional availability of dollars for child care (as long as the parents were employed), boosted government provisions for working-poor families.

Timing, though, had something to do with the apparent success of welfare reform. The tight labor market during the economic boom of the late 1990s significantly lowered unemployment at the very time that TANF was being implemented. Besides, despite improvements for the working poor, studies revealed that the number of “disconnected” single mothers — neither working nor on welfare — had grown substantially since the passage of TANF, rising to one in five single mothers during the mid-2000s. This is the group featured in “$2.00 a Day,” a remarkable book that could very well change the way we think about extreme poverty in the United States.

When Edin returned to the field in the summer of 2010 to update her earlier work on poor mothers, she was surprised to find a number of families struggling “with no visible means of cash income from any source.” To ascertain whether her observations reflected a greater reality, Edin turned to Shaefer, a University of Michigan expert on the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, who was visiting Harvard for a semester while she was a faculty member. (Edin and I served on three dissertation committees together; she is now a professor at Johns Hopkins.) Shaefer analyzed the census data, which is based on annual interviews with tens of thousands of American households, to determine the growth of the virtually cashless poor since welfare reform. His results were shocking: Since the passage of TANF in 1996, the number of families living in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled, reaching 1.5 million households in early 2011. Edin and Shaefer found additional evidence for the rise of such poverty in reports from the nation’s food banks and government data on families receiving food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and in accounts from the nation’s schools on the rising numbers of homeless children.

In the summer of 2012, the authors also began ethnographic studies in sites across the country: Chicago, Cleveland, a midsize city in the Appalachian region and small rural villages in the ­Mississippi ­Delta. In each of these areas it did not prove difficult to find families surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day during certain periods of the year.

Edin and Shaefer’s field research provides plausible reasons for the sharp rise in destitute families. The first has to do with the “perilous world of low-wage work.” The mechanization of ­agriculture has wiped out a lot of jobs in the Mississippi Delta, and even in cities like Chicago, the number of applicants for entry-level work in the service and retail industries far exceeds the number of available positions: “Companies such as Walmart might have hundreds of ­applicants to choose from” for any one position. ­Moreover, work schedules are often unpredictable, with abrupt ups and downs in the number of hours a worker gets. Responding to decreasing demand, “employers keep employees on the payroll but reduce their scheduled hours, sometimes even to zero.”

Furthermore, given the glut of applicants, an employer can quickly move to the next person on the list if a job seeker can’t be reached by telephone immediately, which is a real problem for those who live in homeless shelters and lack cellphones. Finally, many applicants who are eligible for TANF aren’t even aware that it is available. The authors meet people who “thought they just weren’t giving it out anymore.”

There are various strategies that the $2-a-day poor use to survive — from taking advantage of public libraries, food pantries and homeless shelters to collecting aluminum cans and donating plasma for cash. Still, in small Delta towns “the nearest food pantry is often miles away, despite the sky-high poverty.” SNAP constitutes the only real safety net program available to the truly destitute — but it cannot be used to pay the rent. “While SNAP may stave off some hardship,” the authors write, “it doesn’t help families exit the trap of extreme destitution like cash might.”

All of the $2-a-day families highlighted by Edin and Shaefer have had to double up with kin and friends at various times because their earnings were insufficient to maintain their own home. Some had to endure verbal, physical and sexual abuse in these dwellings, and the ensuing trauma sometimes precipitated a family’s fall into severe poverty.

This essential book is a call to action, and one hopes it will accomplish what ­Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” achieved in the 1960s — arousing both the nation’s consciousness and conscience about the plight of a growing number of invisible citizens. The rise of such absolute poverty since the passage of welfare reform belies all the categorical talk about opportunity and the American dream.

$2.00 A DAY

Living on almost nothing in america.

By Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer

210 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.

William Julius Wilson, a professor of ­sociology and social policy at Harvard, is the author of “More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City.”

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Living on less than $2 a day.

Johns Hopkins sociologist recounts how 'death of welfare' led to rise in extreme poverty

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Kathryn Edin recounts the day-to-day struggles of the extreme poor, who live on less than $2 a day.

It was opening a refrigerator in a bare, rundown apartment and seeing nothing but a milk carton that provided the inspiration for the cover of Kathryn Edin 's latest book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America .

That lone milk carton became symbolic of everything the book was about, said Edin, a Johns Hopkins sociologist and Northwestern alumna (PhD, ’91), in her February 18 IPR Distinguished Public Policy Lecture at Northwestern University.

“Could it be that in the aftermath of welfare reform, a whole new kind of poverty had arisen in the United States—a poverty so deep, we hadn’t even thought to look for it?” she said as she dove into her study of the more than 1.6 million Americans who now live in extreme poverty in “the world’s most advanced capitalistic society.”

Edin recounted the day-to-day struggles of those who live on less than $2 a day—of getting fired because your roommate used all the gas in the car tank so you had no way to get to work, of standing in line to sell your blood plasma twice a week to generate much-needed cash, and of being so hungry that it made you feel “like you want to be dead,” as 18-year-old Tabitha told her, “because it’s peaceful being dead.” 

She zeroed in on this extreme poverty in America after spending a summer in Baltimore conducting a study on young people born in public housing. What she saw led her to the larger question of how does one end up in this kind of extreme poverty—and what do you do to survive? 

Edin spent part of her early career at Northwestern University, where she was an IPR fellow from 2000–04.

“Her foundation for research was born at both Northwestern and IPR,” said IPR Director David Figlio, an education economist, in introducing her to the 90-plus attendees. “It’s difficult to think of a more important research question than the line of work that Kathy does.” 

The 'Death of Welfare'

The book dissects the national data on the larger trend, with statistics from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, but it also recounts what she and her research team, including her co-author H. Luke Shaefer of the University of Michigan, found when they went to Chicago; Cleveland; Johnson City, Tennessee; and two small towns along the Mississippi Delta, seeking out people in extreme poverty and listening to their stories. 

The people they met are part of a larger trend: Data shows extreme poverty in the U.S. has increased since the passage of welfare reform in 1996. About 600,000 families with children lived on less than $2 per person per day in 1996, growing to more than 1.6 million families in 2011. Meanwhile, food bank usage has increased and the number of homeless students has risen. The United States has also become the world’s leading supplier of blood plasma, with the donations the only source of cash income for some of the country’s poorest citizens.

Edin pinpoints the “death of welfare” as one cause behind the increase, explaining that welfare has become “a shadow of its former self” since reform.

In 1994, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program served 14.2 million people. Today, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which replaced the AFDC, serves about 4.1 million people, a drop of 71 percent. The enactment of welfare time limits has contributed to the drop: The 1996 welfare law prohibits states from using federal TANF funds to aid most families for more than 60 months.

The death of welfare may have led more people into poverty, but there are also factors keeping them there, including unsafe work conditions, insufficient work hours, wage theft, and labor law violations. 

Edin told the story of a woman who found a job cleaning foreclosed homes in the winter in Chicago. The mold in these homes and the chemicals used for cleaning weakened her immune system, leading to a cycle of illness and missed work. Her employer then branded her unreliable and cut her hours. The woman ended up quitting to find more stable work, but she couldn’t find a new job and ended up homeless.

Those living on less than $2 a day also have to worry about unsafe conditions at home, dealing with housing instability and sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. One woman was “doubling up” with family because she couldn’t afford a place on her own, and she came home from work to find her uncle molesting her 9-year-old daughter.

Pinpointing Potential Solutions

With such a variety of factors contributing to extreme poverty and keeping people from breaking free of its cycle, what can policymakers do? 

Edin suggests that there needs to be a cash safety net, because “we can’t completely rely on a work-based safety net.”

“We really do need something to catch people when they fall,” Edin said. “The help for the working poor only applies to them when they are working. When they lose those jobs, they have nothing.”

She highlighted possible solutions such as reviving the welfare system, offering a guaranteed child allowance, or expanding the childcare tax credit. Edin also argued everyone deserves the opportunity to work. Everyone she spoke to said they wanted more work, “Nobody said they wanted more handouts,” she noted. 

Most importantly, Edin proposed a litmus test for any proposed reform: “Does it integrate the poor, does it weave them back into society, does it give them honor and dignity? Or does it separate them, shame them, stigmatize them?”

“When we integrate the poor and give them dignity, we have a better chance of getting them out of poverty,” Edin concluded.

Kathryn Edin is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Sociology and of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins University.

Watch Edin's lecture.

Published: March 29, 2017.

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$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

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.

essica 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#sthash.U75TC8CS....

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. 

Review: What is it like to live on ‘$2.00 a Day’? New book examines deep poverty in the U.S.

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For “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage,” Kathryn J. Edin, with coauthor Maria Kefalas, immersed herself in the lives of Philadelphia-area unwed mothers, exploding myths about their choices. She found that many of these women sought children as a source of love and meaning while disdaining marriage to men unable to provide economic stability.

In her latest book, “$2.00 a Day,” she applies the same analytical skills to a harrowing examination of deep poverty in the United States. This time, Edin, professor of sociology and public health at Johns Hopkins University, teams with H. Luke Shaefer, associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, to report on both historically destitute regions and those suffering more recent economic decline.

Their research, backed by income data, takes them into the homes of severely cash-deprived families in Chicago, Cleveland, the Mississippi Delta and Johnson City, Tenn. We meet a mother bouncing with her daughter from one homeless shelter to the next, desperate for a minimum-wage job; chronically hungry children who live in cramped, fetid houses often lacking heat, electricity or running water; a woman who sells her blood plasma twice a week to pay the bills; and a 10th-grader who opts to trade sex with a gym teacher for food.

They are the soul of this important and heart-rending book, in the tradition of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” and Alex Kotlowitz’s “There Are No Children Here.” Their skillfully told stories are meant both to inspire empathy and change policy.

Even after the ebbing of the Great Recession, Edin and Shaefer discover that households subsisting virtually without cash income are disconcertingly easy to find. Writing with clear-eyed compassion for these men, women and especially children at society’s margins, they emphasize the extent to which the adults embrace the prototypical American values of hard work and individual responsibility. There is, of course, considerable tragic irony in their subjects’ adherence to American ideals: The labor market and political system have both failed them, and even their distinctly modest versions of the American Dream remain out of reach.

These $2-a-day poor have “had their share of bad luck; they’ve made their share of bad moves; they have other personal liabilities…; and their kin pull them down as often as they lift them up,” the authors write. “Yet,” they add, “jobs in the low-wage labor market can be exceedingly unforgiving,” offering no benefits, irregular schedules, limited hours and little security.

The book’s essential argument is that, in a recession-plagued, post-industrial economy, even low-skill, low-wage jobs can be hard to find and even harder to keep. As a result, policies aimed at ending welfare dependence and helping the working poor, though effective on their face, have been disastrous for many.

While those with consistent work histories have benefited from the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and other programs, the less fortunate have fallen through the proverbial safety net. Instead, they turn to everything from selling sex and food stamps to running off-the-books businesses to eke out survival.

For Edin and Shaefer, the original sin that precipitated the current crisis was the end of what President Clinton called “welfare as we know it.” That politically potent rallying cry led to the elimination in 1996 of a program aimed largely at nonworking single mothers, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC. Together with food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing, it made subsistence possible. But for some, it also transformed low-wage labor, which entailed child care and other expenses and led to curtailed benefits, into a bad economic choice. The “reform” that replaced it made welfare payments temporary and imposed lifetime limits and work requirements. In the process, it flooded the low-wage labor market and gave employers the whip hand.

Edin and Shaefer don’t want a return to the past — but rather major public works programs, a higher minimum wage and other marketplace fixes. But history and analysis aside, what will likely remain with readers of “$2.00 a Day” are its indelible pseudonymous portraits of families struggling to survive.

It will be hard to forget Jennifer Hernandez, an asthmatic who excels at her janitorial job until she is forced to clean Chicago’s cold and moldy foreclosed houses, sickens from the dank air and gets her hours drastically reduced. Or Cleveland’s Rae McCormick, an ace cashier who is fired after her housemates use all her gas and she is unable to drive to work. Or the Delta’s Tabitha Hicks, who tries to protect her mother from a violent thug who beats her bloody — and is evicted when her mother chooses the thug over her.

Finally, there is college-educated Paul Heckewelder, once a middle-class businessman who owned a chain of pizza parlors that employed many family members. A casualty of the recession, he ends up losing it all and sheltering 22 people in a small house without running water. All are trying to live on his single disability check and the proceeds of his scrap metal recycling.

The diabetic Heckewelder and his hard-luck brood serve as a reminder that economic crisis and need can hit almost anyone, and that these families are not “other” — they are potentially us.

Klein is a cultural reporter and critic and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review.  

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

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$2.00 a day

Living on almost nothing in america, by kathryn edin and h. luke shaefer.

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"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 expose, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality. "--

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$2.00 a Day

Living on Almost Nothing in America

by Kathryn J. Edin

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Published Sep 2015 240 pages Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion Publication Information

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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. 

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"Starred Review. This slim, searing look at extreme poverty deftly mixes policy research and heartrending narratives from a swath of the 1.5 million American households eking out an existence on cash incomes of $2 per person per day." - Publishers Weekly "An eye-opening account of the lives ensnared in the new poverty cycle." - Kirkus "Affluent Americans often cherish the belief that poverty in America is far more comfortable than poverty in the rest of the world. Edin and Shaefer's devastating account of life at $2 or less a day blows that myth out of the water. This is world class poverty at a level that should mobilize not only national alarm, but international attention." - Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickeled and Dimed "In $2.00 A Day, Kathy Edin and Luke Shaefer reveal a shameful truth about our prosperous nation: many - far too many - get by on what many of us spend on coffee each day. It's a chilling book, and should be essential reading for all of us." - Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here "Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer deliver an incisive pocket history of 1990s welfare reform - and then blow the lid off what has happened in the decades afterward. Edin's and Shaefer's portraits of people in Chicago, Mississippi, Tennessee, Baltimore, and more forced into underground, damaging survival strategies, here in first-world America, are truly chilling. This is income inequality in America at its most stark and most hidden." - Michael Eric Dyson, author of Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster

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Kathryn j. edin.

Kathryn J. Edin is one of the nation's leading poverty researchers, recognized for using both quantitative research and direct, in-depth observation to illuminate key mysteries about people living in poverty:  "In a field of poverty experts who rarely meet the poor, Edin usefully defies convention" ( New York Times ).  Her books include  Promises I Can't Keep:  Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage and Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City.  Edin is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. 

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Book Summary – $ 2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer.

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 , has skyrocketed to one and a half million households, including about three million children.

The authors argue that in-kind benefits like SNAP (food stamps) are important—even vital. Yet in 21st Century America, they are not enough—cash is critical. The book is about what happens when a government safety net that is built on the assumption of full-time, stable employment at a living wage combines with a low-wage labor market that fails to deliver on any of the above. It is this toxic alchemy, the authors argue, that is spurring the increasing numbers of $2-a-day poor in America.

A hidden but growing landscape of survival strategies among those who experience this level of destitution has been the result. At the community level, these strategies can pull families into a web of exploitation and illegality that turns conventional morality upside down.

Favorite Takeaways -$ 2.00 a Day

Two dollars is less than the cost of a gallon of gas, roughly equivalent to that of a half gallon of milk. Many Americans have spent more than that before they get to work or school in the morning. Yet in 2011, more than 4 percent of all households with children in the world’s wealthiest nation were living in a poverty so deep that most Americans don’t believe it even exists in this country.

US Government Welfare Programs

  Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program  ( SNAP )

In the United States, the  Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program  ( SNAP ), formerly known as the  Food Stamp Program , is a federal program that provides food-purchasing assistance for low- and no-income people.

SNAP benefits supplied roughly 40 million Americans in 2018, at an expenditure of $57.1 billion SNAP benefits cost  a total of $85.6B in the  2020  fiscal year amid heightened US poverty and unemployment.

Aid to Families with Dependent Children  ( AFDC )

Aid to Families with Dependent Children  ( AFDC ) was a federal assistance program in the United States in effect from 1935 to 1997. Administered by the United States Department of Health and Human Services that provided financial assistance to children whose families had low or no income.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families  ( TANF )

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families  ( TANF ) is a federal assistance program of the United States. It began on July 1, 1997, and succeeded the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, providing cash assistance to indigent American families through the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP)

The SIPP, administered by the U.S. Census Bureau, is based on survey interviews with tens of thousands of American households each year. Census Bureau employees ask detailed questions about every possible source of income, including gifts from family and friends and cash from odd jobs. A key goal of the survey is to get the most accurate accounting possible of the incomes of the poor and the degree to which they participate in government programs.

America’s cash welfare program

America’s cash welfare program—the main government program that caught people when they fell—was not merely replaced with the 1996 welfare reform; it was very nearly destroyed. In its place arose a different kind of safety net, one that provides a powerful hand up to some—the working poor—but offers much less to others, those who can’t manage to find or keep a job.

 The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)

  The EITC is refundable, which means that if the amount for which low-income workers are eligible is more than they owe in taxes, they will get a refund for the difference. Low-income working parents often get tax refunds that are far greater than the income taxes withheld from their paychecks during the year.

Section 8. – housing choice voucher program

Section 8 of the Housing Act of 1937  (42 U.S.C.), often called  Section 8 , as repeatedly amended, authorizes the payment of rental housing assistance to private landlords on behalf of low-income households in the United States.

Of the 5.2 million American Households that received rental assistance in 2018, approximately 2.2 million of those households received a Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher. 68% of total rental assistance in the United States goes to seniors, children, and those with disabilities .

Supplemental Security Income (SSI)

Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is a means-tested program that provides cash payments to disabled children, disabled adults, and individuals aged 65 or older who are citizens or nationals of the United States.

Welfare is Dead

At the old welfare program’s height in 1994, it served more than 14.2 million people—4.6 million adults and 9.6 million children. In 2012, there were only 4.4 million people left on the rolls—1.1 million adults (about a quarter of whom were working) and 3.3 million kids. That’s a 69 percent decline. By fall 2014, the TANF caseload had fallen to 3.8 million.

Before 1996, welfare was putting a sizable dent in the number of families living below the $2-a-day threshold. As of early 1996, the program was lifting more than a million households with children out of $2-a-day poverty every month. Whatever else could be said for or against welfare, it provided a safety net for the poorest of the poor. In the late 1990s, as welfare reform was gradually implemented across the states, its impact in reducing $2-a-day poverty began to decline precipitously. By mid-2011, TANF was lifting only about 300,000 households with children above the $2-a-day mark.

We waged a war on poverty, and poverty won. – Ronald Reagan

Welfare Queen

In 1960, only about 5 percent of births were to unmarried women, consistent with the two previous decades. But then the percentage began to rise at an astonishing pace, doubling by the early 1970s and nearly doubling again over the next decade. A cascade of criticism blamed welfare for this trend. According to this narrative, supporting unwed mothers with public dollars made them more likely to trade in a husband for the dole.

 In a speech in January 1976, Reagan announced that she “[has] used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans benefits for four nonexistent, deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.

“By 1988, there were 10.9 million recipients on AFDC, about the same number as when he took office. Four years later, when Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, left office, the welfare caseloads reached 13.8 million—4.5 million adults and their 9.3 million dependent children.”

Growing Poverty

According to Feeding America, an antihunger organization and national network of food banks that conducts the nation’s largest study of charitable food distribution in the United States every few years, pantries and other emergency food programs nationwide served roughly 21.4 million Americans in 1997. By 2005, that number was higher by 3.9 million, and it ballooned even further during the Great Recession, to 37 million Americans in 2009.

Beginning in 2004, public schools were mandated to count the number of homeless children in their classrooms. (This is the number of children whose parents or guardians could not afford permanent housing but were still attending school.) In 2004–2005, there were 656,000 such children. This number spiked temporarily in 2005–2006 because of Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma, but then gradually increased over time, reaching 795,000 in 2007–2008 and 1.3 million in 2012–2013.

“For the $2-a-day poor, whose home lives are often incredibly stressed, work can even offer an escape of sorts. ”

Manufacturing, which once accounted for more than 30 percent of all jobs in the United States, now provides less than 10 percent of jobs. The country had roughly 12 million manufacturing jobs as of 2012, 7 million fewer than at the sector’s peak in the late 1970s. In contrast, there were about 15 million jobs in the retail sector and almost 14 million in leisure and hospitality.

Housing Cost

Housing costs have reached a crisis point for low-income families, eating up far more of their incomes than they can possibly afford. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) deems a family that is spending more than 30 percent of its income on housing to be “cost burdened,” at risk of having too little money for food, clothing, and other essential expenses.

“Today there is no state in the Union in which a family that is supported by a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent without being cost burdened, according to HUD.”

Housing instability is a hallmark of life among the $2-a-day poor. Children experiencing $2-a-day poverty are far more likely to move over the course of a year than other kids—even than children living in less extreme poverty. Much of this instability is fueled by perilous double-ups, which mark—and often speed—the descent of those who are already suffering from the fallout from nonsustaining work into the ranks of the desperately poor.

Toxic Stress,

Toxic Stress defined as “strong, frequent, or prolonged activation of the body’s stress response systems in the absence of the buffering protection of a supportive, adult relationship.

Exposure to toxic stress affects people mentally and even physically. It can impair “executive functions, such as decision-making, working memory, behavioral self-regulation, and mood and impulse control.” It “may result in anatomic changes and/or physiologic dysregulations that are the precursors of later impairments in learning and behavior as well as the roots of chronic, stress-related physical and mental illness.” Toxic stress can literally wear you down and, in the end, kill you.

Survival Strategies

The panoply of survival strategies used by today’s $2-a-day poor are variations on the same tactics poor families used a generation ago to get by: private charity, a variety of small-time under-the-table income-generating schemes, and plain old scrimping.

Survival strategies come in three forms :

Public Spaces and Private Charities – Free Events and Resources

The first is taking advantage of public spaces and private charities—the nation’s libraries, food pantries, homeless shelters, and so on.

Income-Generation Strategies – Cash

Then come a variety of income-generation strategies, such as donating plasma—means for gleaning at least some of that all-important resource that families seem unable to survive without: cash.

Finally, there’s the art—often finely honed through years of hardship—of finding ways to stretch your resources and make do with less.

private charities

Beyond these vital public spaces, there are many private charities across Chicago like La Casa that serve the poor day in and day out, operating shelters, food pantries and soup kitchens, free health clinics, job training programs, and educational programs for children and youth.

Most of this aid comes not in the form of cash, but rather through in-kind assistance targeting basic needs (such as shelter and food) or direct services (such as health exams and mental health counseling). The forms this aid takes are not just determined by what families seeking help need. Rather, the nonprofits must be conscious of the values of the broader community and of the requirements placed on them by the government agencies, private foundations, and donors who fund the work. Sometimes what is offered fits what a family needs well. Sometimes it doesn’t.

The Art of Making Do with Less

Even accounting for what’s made available by the nation’s private charities and for the little amounts of cash that can be generated from the various strategies discussed previously, none of these resources can in and of themselves allow a family in $2-a-day poverty to survive.

Survival takes more. It requires a stubborn optimism in the face of very tough circumstances. It requires a spirit of determination that can propel someone forward in his or her effort to make do on next to nothing. So beyond private charity and public spaces, beyond selling SNAP, scrap, blood plasma, and even one’s body, the primary way the $2-a-day poor cope is to find inventive ways to make do with less. Some have spent years, even decades, in and out of poverty, with multiple spells of living on virtually nothing. For these Americans, the entrepreneurial skills that have been honed by the school of hard knocks are impressive indeed.

The authors approach to ending $2-a-day poverty is guided by three principles:

(1) all deserve the opportunity to work; (2) parents should be able to raise their children in a place of their own; and (3) not every parent will be able to work or work all of the time, but parents’ well-being, and the well-being of their children, should nonetheless be ensured.

All the Best in your quest to get Better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.

Lifelong Learner | Entrepreneur | Digital Strategist at Reputiva LLC | Marathoner | Bibliophile [email protected] | [email protected]

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$2.00 A DAY

Living on almost nothing in america.

by Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2015

An eye-opening account of the lives ensnared in the new poverty cycle.

An analysis of the growing portion of American poor who live on an average of $2 per day.

Welfare in the United States has always been a divisive issue. Most Americans agree that the poor deserve government assistance, but those same people also respond with vitriol at the idea of welfare as a system that encourages entitlement, promotes laziness, and creates a class of “takers.” Government assistance programs date back as far as the post–Civil War era, but only recently has the public’s outrage over government spending on welfare become so controversial. Following the wildly exaggerated myths of figures like Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” and the influential though dubious analysis of Charles Murray’s  Losing Ground  (1984), policy was reshaped in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton, changing the nature of government assistance to the poor. Edin (Sociology and Public Health/Johns Hopkins Univ.; co-author:  Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage , 2005) and Shaefer (Social Work/Univ. of Michigan) argue that this shift created a new class of poor in America that fights to survive on barely $2 per person per day because they cannot qualify for the new government aid programs or the assistance they receive is simply not enough to supplement their low-paying jobs. By 2011, more than 4 percent of households with children in the U.S. fell into this category, doubling in the decade and a half since welfare was reformed in the 1990s. Curious as to how this new class of poor survives, Edin and Shaefer traveled to some of the most depressed areas of the country, including Chicago, Appalachia, and the Mississippi Delta. The authors share deeply human stories of the regular people trapped in poverty, typically through no fault of their own. Some are victims of abuse, others are forced to quit their low-paying jobs due to health concerns, and some simply cannot catch a break despite playing by the rules.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-544-30318-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES

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by Kathryn J. Edin , H. Luke Shaefer & Timothy J. Nelson

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty , 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BUSINESS | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | PUBLIC POLICY | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | ECONOMICS

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Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer - $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

The authors Kathy Edin and Luke Shaefer, of the book "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America," discuss the major themes of their revelatory research on income inequality and extreme poverty in the United States. October, 2015.

Transcript:

>> Hello everybody. Good afternoon. And welcome. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean here at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And I couldn't be more delighted to see all of you here with us this afternoon. Today's event would not have been possible without generous support from the National Poverty Center and its interim chair, Sandy Danziger. I also want to thank the School Social Work for cosponsoring today's event. I know that many students from social work are here with us, very welcome. We're delighted that you're here with us, too. We're pleased to be joined by some senior members of the university administration, Tim Lynch, who is the university's general counsel. And Lisa Rudgers who's Vice President for Global Communications. We're delighted that both of you are here with us as well. Well, thank you for coming here to join us, to learn from the School of Social Work and the Ford School's own Professor Luke Shaefer and coauthor Kathy Edin. They presented their work which you were about to hear about in Washington DC, to multiple audiences of policymakers. And I know that they are going to explore some of the really important policy issues and implications of the research that they have been doing with us here today. Luke and Kathy's book, "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing" in America, has been featured in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune, and I could go and on. It has received considerable very well deserved attention.

[ Applause ]

So all of the press and policymaker attention is really noteworthy but most importantly it really amplifies a crucial finding in Luke and Kathy's book. And that is that there are 1.5 million American households living in poverty and extreme poverty, and that that number is increasing. That's really a striking number and something that should really garner a lot of our attention. During years of on-the-ground research throughout the country, Luke and Kathy have documented families who are struggling under these extreme conditions, connecting a very real face to that shocking data. Luke and Kathy will delve further into the research methods and findings during their talk. But first, I wanted to tell you a little bit more about them. Luke's research focuses on the effectiveness of the US social safety net in serving low-wage workers and economically disadvantaged families. Luke has pursued policy advocacy at both the state and the national levels. And prior to coming to Ann Arbor, he participated in Chicago's anti-poverty policy initiative successfully helping to raise the Illinois minimum wage and expand access to health care, access to health care to low income families. With Kathy, he recently presented their poverty research to the President's Council of Economic Advisers. He is an associate professor at the School of Social Work and he very recently joined the Ford School faculty this year, we're delighted to have him on board. Kathy Edin is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, where she specializes in study of people living on welfare. Over the years, Kathy's books have tackled very tough and important social challenges, including making ends meet, how single mothers survived on welfare, and low-wage work with current dean of the School of Social Work, Laura Lein. And doing the best I can fathering in the intercity with Timothy Nelson. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation, among others have founded-- have funded her poverty research. She's a trusty of the Russell Sage Foundation, and she serves on the Department of Health and Human Services advisory committee for poverty to search, for poverty research centers at several universities, including here at Michigan. Last year when she became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences as well. So Kathy, thank you much for traveling and joining us here today to share your work with Luke with our community. Just a quick note about today's format, Luke and Kathy will make their presentation and then welcome questions from the audience. Beginning at about 4:40 p.m., members of the Ford School staff will walk up and down the aisles to collect your questions. You should have received a card when you came in. Please white your questions on that card. If you are watching us online, please twit your questions into us using #policythoughts. So, after the program, "$2.00 A Day", will be available for purchase and signing in the Great Hall. And I hope you will stay with us to continue the conversation and also to have your books signed by Luke and Kathy. And so, with no further ado, I'm delighted to welcome Luke and Kathy to the floor.

>> Thanks Dean Collins for such a warm and personal introduction. I'm going to start with a story because a story is how we got here. Sometimes graduate students want to know how you come up with ideas for research. My failproof recipe is to spend a lot of time with folks out in the field and this was very much a story of how just immersing yourselves in your daily life with lots of poor people, allows you to see something new. So, as Dean Collins mentioned, at the beginning of my career, I spent six years running around the country interviewing low-income single mothers about their budgets with the dean in School of Social Work, Laura Lein. And because of that experience, I kind of have a mental calculator in my head. If we go at a dinner tonight, I might look at you and suddenly say, "So how do you make ends meet?" That kind of became a habit over those early years. I had gone on after welfare reform that was published in 1997. I just studied the family and study the working poor. But in 2010, I came to Baltimore to study the lives of a group of people, my colleagues and I had been following since the mid-1990s. These were young people who had been zero to seven in the mid-'90s all born in public housing and we've been following their lives over the years to see how they would turn out. And so, in 2010, as they were reaching adulthood, I came to Baltimore. And I-- you know, I started hanging out in the neighborhood and of course several and many of these young people were in fairly disadvantaged circumstances. But one day I went and visited the home of Ashley. Ashley lived in the Latrobe Homes with her mother, her brother, elderly uncle and sometimes a cousin. And she had just a baby. The baby was two weeks old. When we arrived at the house, Ashley was visibly [inaudible]. She looked depressed. She was, you know, holding her baby over her shoulder but she was having a hard time adequately supporting her baby's head. Of course, there's only-- there's hardly any furniture in the house and so Ashley sat out on the only chair in the kitchen and I sat on the floor and she just gave me the perfect purview into the kitchen. This is an old trick I learned from Dean Lein, you know, she was always looking in the kitchen cabinets to see what was in there. And I quickly notice there was no food in the house, nor was there any baby formula. When I began asking Ashley, of course, how she made ends meet, what I quickly learned is that there was not cash coming to the household. Nobody had a job. Nobody was getting anything from [inaudible]. In fact, nobody in the family was even getting food stamps. What they did have was housing subsidy. So I started wondering, you know, is this is thing? Are there a group of people who might claim something from the in kind safety net but have no cash? So I kind of tucked that thought in the back-- in my back pocket. And in the next day, we kind of invented a [inaudible] to revisit Ashley because we were concerned about her and the child. We said, you know, Ashley, we need to ask you few more questions. Can we come back tomorrow? And she said yes. So, we gave her the $50 upon leaving, that we gave respond at the end of an interview. And the next day when we returned, we met her at the door. She was on her way out. She's forgotten we were coming. She had gotten home perm. She looked terrific. She no longer looked depressed. She had kind of spring in her step. She had gone down to the local Goodwell, which is just down Broadway Avenue from the Latrobe Homes and bought a new pantsuit. And in fact, she was on her way to search for work. It was her-- her confidence had been restored, you know, $50, isn't that much money. But for Ashley, it seems to be the difference between really being despondent and sort of unable to function and to get that kind of confidence encouraged about and search for work. So, this prompted a second thought which-- and this by the way, ended up being the arc of the book. What was it about cash that was so special? She had a house in subsidy. But something about cash, just a little bit of cash seems to be transformative. And if it was true, there were a whole group of people living with virtually no cash in America, you know, since the advent of welfare reform. And we did-- you know, we did learn that this story was linked to welfare reform that we're living on virtually cash in America's most advanced industrial country or in the world's most advanced industrial country. What does that look like? And what were the implications for the well-being of families and children? So, it just so happen-- and this was pure serendipity that I visited the School of Social Work and given a talk a year before. And Luke and I had cooked up a plan for him to come to Harvard as a visiting professor. So that fall-- I think it was an 8 o'clock, one morning in Cambridge, I was teaching at Harvard at the time. Luke came to my office. I told him the story of Ashley. I said I want to know if this is thing. I knew enough about Luke to know that he was one of the nation's experts on [inaudible] data set called the Survey of Income and Program Participation, which was in fact the best data set to really answer the question of whether, there been a rise in a form of destitution in America that was so deep, we didn't even think it existed and had actually never even looked to see if it was there. And Luke can take the story from here.

>> Well, I think of that first date, an 8 a.m. meeting, it's unclear if Kathy actually remembered I was coming.

[ Laughter ]

But we had a terrific time. And she said, gee, I just wish, you know, I was visiting all of these homes and I wish there were some data set where we could see, was there some sort of trend over the past 15 or 20 years of more families surviving on virtually no cash income. Now, the SIPP is a large scale nationally representative data set conducted by the US [inaudible]. They go out and they interviewed tens of thousands of households and they asked lots of very specific questions about different income sources. So it does the best of any source that we have at capturing the income of the poor. And all of these surveys have the challenge of sort of missing some income, underreporting of income, people might not want to tell you about sources. But we know that to SIPP is the absolute best choice, and so we thought it was the right place to start. And so Kathy likes to say that within a day, I was back, I think it was about a week, where-- and we started to sort of search around for some benchmark of virtually no cash income, how do we operationalize that. And as all my students know as I would say, if you have to find an arbitrary line, use somebody else's. So, we use the world bank's metric of $2 per person per day and we wanted to see, could you see a trend among household with children and we're going to include all the cash coming in through odd jobs, though work, we're going to include gifts from families and friends, all that that's reported. And we're going to see if there's a trend over the last 15 years or so and more families experiencing this. And then we're going to include SNAP. Food stamps now called the SNAP. And we're going to say, what if you treated food stamps as a dollar-- SNAP as a dollar of cash. And we're going to tell you why we actually think you can't do that for this specific population as we go on but we'd at least get a sense for what kind of impact of the safety net if we have it today, was happening. So in about a week, we had this trend line to deal with, and I think it was maybe a little more dramatic. Then we are initially expecting. So, there's branch in line is households with children who are reporting cash incomes of no more than $2 per person per day in any given month. And you can see it goes from about 636,000 as of mid through 1996, that's just before the1996 welfare reform was implemented, to about 1.5 million households with three million children as of 2011. So that's more than a doubling. Perhaps, even a larger increase than we were necessarily expecting. If you add in food stamps and you count a dollar food stamps as a dollar of cash, that's the blue line. And you can see right there the incredible impact that this program is having at a very the bottom, at the very bottom. It's virtually the only safety net that we have left and-- but even so, you can see-- even if you count food stamps, that blue line only looks good relative to the top line. We're still talking about an 80% increase even when you count SNAP as cash over this period of time. So, we actually release the Sheldon Danziger here at the Ford School. Told us to go ahead and release something, so it was a five-page policy, probably the shortest thing you ever written. And it ended up getting some attention but it really raises a lot of more questions and we had answers, right? What does it look like to live on $2 per person per day? Is this really just maybe noise in the data, you know? Our people-- is it just underreporting of income or something screwy going on with [inaudible]. So, we started to do two things. The first was we wanted to look for other sources, large scale data that might say, you know, is this a trend that we can see in the population as a whole? Can we externally validate what we see in the set with these other sources of data? And the second thing was to start to try find families, thinking that the proof is really you know, right there. Could we find families that look like that? And if we could, what do their lives look like? You know, how did they get into these circumstances, and what did they do to survive? So, starting just with the large scale data, one thing is that the SIPP is a longitudinal survey so we could look overtime and we wanted to know where these spells families living on $2 per person per day. Were they short spells of family, sort of experiencing a month or two months at a time, or was it really a story about longer spells? And what we could see when we look longitudinally is actually the biggest increase was among these longer spells that we call chronic spells, families who are living for at least 7 in as much as 12 months under this low threshold over the course of the year. And it's more than a tripling, right? So, it outpaces the growth in the monthly estimate. We knew SNAP was a big part of the picture, right? It's this buffer that we have. And we looked in the SNAP administrative records. So if you to go down to the technical appendix of the annual reports that they release, you can actually tally the number of households with children who are reporting that they have no other cash income except SNAP, right? So no actual cash coming into the house. So we plotted that. That's the dash line against the boxes from our most recent estimates and you can see we lined up really well in 1996 and 2005 and across this whole spectrum. And actually, when I saw these first two lines, I took the rest of the day off. Because you virtually never see two sources of, you know, entirely different data line up that closely. And then the SNAP, they'd actually starts to outpace us, so you see that it's going up to an even a greater extent than our comparable $2 a day estimate. As we started to get into the qualitative work, we saw that housing instability with a major piece of this. And so, we knew that the nation's public schools in about the mid-2000s, started recording of the number of homeless children, these are children without a permanent place to live. Across the schools, we would assume that this is an undercount. So, here I sort of plotted the same-- this trend line for you and some of you can probably figure out in 2005, 2006 what accounts for that spike, it's a Hurricane Katrina, and everything that went on there. But you can see a very similar sort of trajectory, right, of increasing numbers of the children at sort of a similar pace and extreme poverty, I'm sorry, without permanent place to live. And then, if you go to Feeding America, they have reports that they list every few years that captures a number of unduplicated Americans who have benefited from private emergency food programs. Now, again, this is not a directly comparable number but we thought if what we are seeing in extreme $2 a day poverty was actually something that was happening on the ground, we would probably see an increase here too in a number of families seeking emergency food assistance. And you can see at 2009, it goes up dramatically, right? And that's the effect of the great recession. But again, that sort of dwarfs actually a fairly sizable increase as of 2005. Between 1997 and 2005, this goes up by about four million American, more Americans seeking emergency food assistance. So, across a series of indicators, right, using both nationally representative survey data and the administrative records and reports from our charitable organizations, we can see a consistent story of deteriorating circumstances among poorest of the poor families in the United States.

>> So what do this mean? We decided, in order to continue our collaboration, we needed to actually go back to households like Ashley's. And in order to understand four pivotal questions, who falls into extreme poverty, what's it like, you know, what's the texture of daily life like, how do you survive, and what are really the implications for families and children of a level of poverty this deep? So, we were inspired I think both as young people by the work of Michael Harrington. And as you know, he kind of went on the road and exposed poverty in various places across the United States. Our site selection was actually driven by the SIPP. So, we show-- we chose sort of what we feel as the quintessential American Central city. I apologize to Detroit and Ann Arbor, but we felt that was Chicago. And so we began our exploration there, kind of a typical American city if there is such a thing as a typical American city. We also wanted to find a town that had been really a boom town in Harrington's time. But he had since hit the skids and we landed in Cleveland, Ohio where I lived for three summers and kind of fell in love with the city. I actually have a T-shirt that says, "Cleveland is my Paris" that I wear proudly, and bumper sticker. But we also saw in the SIPP that there was this clustering, the slight clustering of the $2 a day poor in the region [inaudible] called the south east. This is of course Appalachia and the Deep South. So, we choose a site in Appalachia, the Johnson City, Tennessee area of Eastern Tennessee. What was interesting about this site is it even deeply poor in Harrington's time. But had since seen a bit of a rebound but still had deep pockets of poverty. And finally, we went to what one rider has called the poorest place on earth, the Mississippi Delta. Is Bethany Patton here? Can you stand up? Bethany Patton brought us the Mississippi Delta, so thank you Bethany.

Through her experience as a TFA, she was able to make amazing connections for us so that we can do in-depth work in the poorest place on earth. As you can imagine, this was quite an adventure. But, I want to take a step back for a second and talk about the fact that we make the claim, that what we see in the growth of $2 a day poverty, is intimately connected to welfare reform. Now, at its peak in 1994, AFDC, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, the precursor of TANF, right, served about 14 million people about 10 million adults, 5 million children, OK? But currently, that number is dramatically lower. So today we only have about four million people on the rules, under three million children, just about one million adults by latest count, OK? So, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities constructs a measure of the TANF to poverty ratio to give a sense of how many eligibles are actually able to access TANF. And of course TANF is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program. It's the program that replaced welfare when welfare is reformed. So that number was at about 68% percent in 1996. And I just heard an update from Donna Pavetti [assumed spelling] that the current number is 23% percent today, OK? Now, when I say there are million adults left on the rules, what's really crucial to understand over and above that is that half of those are adults are in only two states. These are the states with the most vibrant welfare systems, although those systems have also atrophied dramatically. And these are the states of New York and California. So once we take out those adults, we only have a half million adults on the welfare rules across the rest of the country. So, if you didn't need that as evidence, that TANF is essentially in receivership in the United States or to use the title of our chapter, "Welfare is dead", you need to come with us to Chicago where we met Madonna Harris. And Madonna was living with her daughter Brianna, kind of moving across a group of homeless shelters and truly desperate straights. One weekend, while I was hanging out with Madonna and Brianna, there's absolutely no food in the house. The shelter wasn't just serving any kind of meals. All they had was a half a gallon of spoiled milk in the refrigerator, the inspiration for the cover of the book. And I said to Madonna, "Why don't you just go to TANF?" She said, "Oh, haven't you heard? They aren't giving that out anymore." And we heard this again and again and again. The notion, that welfare was dead, OK? So, we then went to Johnson City, Tennessee where we met a young couple, Jessica and Travis Compton. And if you read the [inaudible] in the Atlantic, Jessica is the plasma donator of that we feature. And this young couple was truly desperate. They had gone months without work. In fact, as we talk, each time we visited, Travis was sitting at the window looking for the sheriff to come and evict the family from the home because they were so far behind on the ramp. When I said-- maybe I think, Luke, it was you who said. I said, "Travis, what about welfare? What about TANF?" And Travis looks stunned and said, "What's that?" Now, some of our respondents had heard of TANF or welfare. One such person was Ray McCormick [assumed spelling], who steadfastly had resisted going to the welfare office because she felt that she was a worker and she didn't think that this was something workers did unless they were truly desperate. But that point came. And Ray did finally go down to the TANF office. And when she came back, her report is that she had been rejected and told, honey, there are so many poor people, we just don't have enough to go around, you need to come back next year. And there are more and more examples of states and locales, even local welfare offices that are engaged in these so-called soft diversions, to keep people from the world. And in Q and A, we can talk about why TANF offices might be motivated to do that. Wow. Luke will fix it. But if you want even more evidence that welfare is truly dead in the minds of the $2 a day poor, all you have to do is go back to the SIPP. So we followed children over the course of the year, and we looked at whether those children had any adult who was claiming even a penny from TANF or any adult who is engaged in the formal labor market. And what we saw here was truly stunning. Like only 1 in 10 of these households was claiming even a penny from TANF over the course of a calendar year while 70% had an adult in the labor market. OK. So, this is really important. This told us something. This told us this was not a story of a group of people who were sort of fundamentally separated, you know, from the mainstream who were, you know, sort of set apart. But these were families for the most part who are really trying to hang on to the ragged end of a low-wage labor market that had become badly degraded. And as we begin of course delving into the evidence on this, we learn that the bad jobs of yesterday, even the bad jobs in the days of welfare reform were far better than the truly bad jobs of today.

>> So these-- the families who we talked to really envision themselves as workers as Kathy says and want to work. It's a core, you know, with many like Ray McCormick. He was a very serious sort of opposition to applying for TANF. But it was really a combination of the unstable jobs that were there available to them. We saw many examples of unsafe work conditions, not getting enough hours as a core dilemma of the $2 a day poor as well as we work fluctuations, the number of hours going from say, 10 in 1 week to 20 in another week or 30 down to 20. And lots of examples of clear labor law violation sometimes called wage set in the case where somebody might have actually got an overtime, not being paid for overtime, or people being asked to clean a hotel room as a hotel maid before they clock in or clean up the store after they have clocked out. So you have a lot of instability in the jobs and you can think of, you know, most of our folks says it's those at the very bottom only having access to the jobs that maybe nobody else wanted. But they might be able to survive that if they had a stable personal life that can sort of make up for some of us. But in the case of our families, we would often see sort of the interaction of unstable work opportunity combined with unstable family life. So you'd see volatile living arrangements, right? A large degree of overlap with the number of children who our doubled up, not having a permanent place, not knowing are they' going to be able to stay, and often actually subject to a fair amount of risks in these circumstances. And in the case of these families-- and I want to be clear, we don't think this is a story about the poor in general, but among those at the very bottom, they're often sort of seemed to be situated in a social network of family and friends that are at best unsupported and at worst downright harmful. So, to give you two examples, Jennifer Hernandez, when we met Jennifer, she was a living-- had been living for 10 months in a succession of homeless shelters in Chicago with her kiddos, Caitlin and Cole, nine and seven years old. And she was actually just about to be asked to leave the homeless shelter that she was in because most of these places, if you don't find a job, you are actually asked to move on. And Jennifer was incredibly good at finding the resources that are relatively affluent, city like Chicago has to offer struggling families, but she had no idea where the next place they're going to stay was. And she couldn't stay with family for some of these reasons I just mentioned, they've been an extremely abusive situation in the recent pass, but she was able to find a job at Chicago City Custodial Services, a small family cleaning company on the South Side. And when she started the job, she really liked it. She loves the actually the ability to go in and clean a room and had made a visible differences in that day. I think a lot of-- many of us like about our jobs. And it was going well and she appreciated the structures. She would say, "My mental health challenges were [inaudible] when I'm working and I have the structure." But when she started the work, it was really a lot of corporate apartments, right between leases, maybe consultants coming in and out or office bases in the loop, but as the Chicago winter set in, she found herself going more and more to foreclose homes on the South Side of the city and the West Side of the city especially. And there's a large industry around getting all of these foreclose abandon homes back and ready for resale. And she was at the very bottom, I think, of this industry. So you can imagine going into these homes. There's been no lights, there's no heat and particularly, there's no water. So they would come in and they never know what to expect as she said, "You know, sometimes, we wonder, is there going to be a drug den when we get inside, is there going to be family that's squatting there. Is everything going to be-- have been ripped out of the, you know, anything of value have been ripped out of the unit by scrappers have come in. And, you know, even ripped open the walls and take some of the piping, the toilets, the tile off the walls." And then she would find that they were cleaning in coats obviously. She'd go down to the Salvation Army and sort of grab another coat to wear. But maybe, the thing that did it for her was the water. So, everyone knows water is an important piece of the puzzle. And so, there's no water at these places. They've had to bring their own buckets in and so they would come in, but you might imagine these places she says where really dirty, a lot of cleaning had to be done. So after a half of an hour or 45 minutes, maybe the water we get is black, of no use at all and they'd have to dump out the water and go to the nearest neighbor who might have an faucet or go to the nearest gas station and go, you know, [inaudible] contact and go into the bathroom to refill the heavy jugs and then carry them back to the cleaning inside and maybe repeat these a couple times. So, Jennifer was an asthmatic and she has little kids and so she started to get sick, she had a few asthma attacks but she find she was susceptible to viruses, you know, cleaning in the cold. And everyone, I have small kids, 6 and 2. Everyone knows when you get sick, your children get sick so she starts to call in more and more and her boss starts to see her as not a reliable employee so then her hours start to tick downward. And she makes this decision where she says, "You know what, I'm barely getting 10 or 15 hours a week now and I have to call off some of those sometimes. I need to quit this job," because she got housing subsidy that cut them stable. She's going to have that for a couple more months through the family homeless shelter. "I need to quit this job and get healthy and start looking for the next one because how long it's going take me to find a next job." So, despite conditions like that though, there remain the sort of real attachment to work and the desire to work so think of Ray McCormick in Cleveland who I think Kathy maybe mentioned. Ray was about 23, 24 when we met her, she'd been abandoned when-- by her mother when her father died at 11. And one thing that you would probably not notice about Ray right away is that she actually has lost all of her teeth because she have some sort of dental disease and had never gotten dental care and so, all of her teeth were gone, but she was incredibly skilled at sort of covering that up. So whenever she laughs, the hand went right over the mouth. She worked to Walmart. Her last employment was at Walmart as a cashier. And she wanted to be the fastest cashier in the store so she have this technique where she would actually-- she knew to be the fastest cashier, you had to be able to key in the produced items really fast. So, she would take the most popular produced items and she would read the barcode in her recording device on her phone. And then, she would actually set that recording of herself to play over night and she'd say in the morning, my subconscious had done the work. And she was named "Cashier of the Month" two times in the six months that she worked there. But that in that six month, she had been living with an aunt and uncle who are not related and she actually got in to the truck that they shared and she had given $50 in to get gas. And she gets in the truck to go to Walmart and the gas light is on, there's no gas, the car won't start up. She goes in and says what's the deal, you know, this is supposed to be for me to be able to get to work and they say, "Well, you know, we're running errands and we use the gas, sorry". Ray has no way to get to work and she calls her manager. She works in the suburbs partially because she likes the ability to go the suburbs and I think can get away from the city. She work in the suburbs, there was no way to get there by public transportation. And she called her manager and said, "I can't get to work, you know, can you float me a loan. I don't have anymore money until the next paycheck," and her manager said, "If you can't get in, don't bother coming in again." So, we see the interaction of both volatile work conditions with a non-supportive family.

>> So if you think about our argument, there's a three legged stool. The first piece is really the welfare is dead claim. The second piece really is that work has become-- welfare is dead but work has become degraded to the degree that is incredibly hard to raise the family. And in fact, it is the degradation of those jobs and job loss which usually predates entering into $2 dollar a day poverty. But the third leg of this tool is housing instability. A housing instability was ubiquitous among the poor. Housing has-- rental housing has increased in cost by about 6% since 2000, but renter's incomes have declined by 13% so we see this increasing disconnection between rent and wages. Of course, these folks have incomes so unstable that they're often unable to stay in a place of their own and end up in a series of parallel stable ups or homeless shelters. And this is often when we see kids exposed to the greatest risk. But housing instability also interferes with work and often, both deepens and elongates a spell of extreme poverty as to the family relationships of many of our folks. And in these parallel stable ups we often see the true harm, the trauma especially the children experience while their parents are living in less than $2 a day in poverty. Jennifer Hernadez had 1 point, flees to an uncle's house to escape, about of $2 a day poverty. He's a respectable ground's keeper at a country club. She comes home one day, of course, and finds him molesting her daughter Caitlyn. The family flees to a good will who generously clears on office for the family to live in for a while since there are no family beds in the shelter. And when recounting the story, she said, "I never expected that". Ray McCormick similarly has lived among the $2 dollar a day poor on and off since she was 12 and asked about the trauma she experienced as a child. She says matter of factly to us, "I've been beat, I've been raped." And her daughter at aged 6 has also been molested.

>> So, when we start to look at the question that Kathy post at the beginning of, is cash important? So, we have some resources of non-cash, SNAP. Some of these charitable organizations play a vital, vital role but does cash matter? Really, I think the most compelling evidence of that is the work, the extent to which people spend their time trying to generate just enough cash to go on to the next day. So, Travis and Jessica content, when Travis's work hours got cut down after the holiday surge at a fast food restaurant. The only cash coming in to the household was Jessica's donation. I've been told to call that the selling of her blood plasma. So, every-- two times a week and in fact we're the only country that allows plasma donation more than once a week. But two times a week is much [inaudible] allow the whole family Travis and Jessica and Rachel and Blight [assumed spelling], their two little girls, four and two, I think, would actually walk down to the plasma clinic. And Jessica is only about five foot two, and in fact she would always have this panic as they're going to the center that she's not going to meet the health requirements for the day. Her iron count is not going to be high enough and-- or her blood pressure is not going to be sort of in the range it has to be, and she's not going to be allowed to sell her plasma because of the $30 that that provides actually is perhaps the sort of the best hourly rates that they could get for anything. So she has all of these very sort of, sort of planned out techniques that she always eats an iron-rich supplement bar right as she's going in the door so that that's going to boost her iron count. And she does these breathing exercises as she's waiting to get her blood pressure taken, so she can make sure she's the a range to brings in Nicholas Parks' novel that she checks out from the library to try to calm her. And across the range of folks, you see all of the sort very serious strategies, and I think almost an American spirit in a way, right? We originally titled this chapter, "The Entrepreneurial Spirit", because it was all about sort of figuring out what resources you have, whether it's your blood, whether it's your body, to sort of make-- get that little bit of cash that'll keep you going to the very next day.

>> So you have to go back to the last slide real quickly. So plasma cells were so obliquitous, right, that many people had little [inaudible] in their arms from selling plasma. It was almost like a marker of $2 a day poverty, but a very debilitating thing if you do it very often and many people actually weren't healthy enough or strong enough to be able to give plasma that often. Trading SNAP is probably not common among they just plain poor. We have a lot of evidence. The evidence is actually quite rare. But among the $2 a day poor, it is actually obliquitous. And the generally, for your trade, you get 60 or even 50 cents on a dollar. So it-- since food stamps actually don't generally cover, we know this from surveys, our family's food needs for an entire month is guaranteed that you and your children won't go hungry. But when it comes to buying socks and [inaudible] for school, paying for the utilities or, you know, staying-- keeping the rent going for just one more month, our families do make that tradeoff. Finally we see a just a lot of creativity. We occasionally see selling sex. We do see scrapping. But all of these are very, very low level survival strategies that generate only a few dollars of cash typically and really leave families both consumed with the work of survival but of also very badly off. Of course, the ultimate expression of this was in the Mississippi Delta. The two towns that we were in Percy and Jefferson we [inaudible] the skies by the way to protect the identity of our respondents, are in some sense, in exception because they are so poor, you know, the poorest places on Earth. But if you look at the Census Bureau's data, you can see that there are little hidden rural places like this all across the country that share many of the characteristics of these towns. And it is here in the Delta they really saw the intensification, a system of mutual exploitation that kind of sprung up because there were so much poverty. You can almost throw a stone in any given direction and you would be likely to hit a household of a family who was $2 a day poor. TANF face so little in Mississippi that you actually in most cases will qualify as $2 a day poor, even if you happen to get it. So here, what we saw is that they're not quite poor, who didn't really have enough cash to survive. This is specially disabled people, would often be the purchasers of the food stamps of the extremely poor, right, often transporting the extremely poor to the grocery store and then of course basically at taking their price by loading up at that the extreme poor family's car with their own groceries. We also what passed for the middle class in these towns. Sometimes exploiting the poor because of their desperate circumstances, Tabitha Hicks in the little town of Percy was inboxed by teacher when she's 15 years old. Her mother, Olva [assumed spelling] had roughly a dozen children. This was probably the poorest family that we encountered. They typically sold their food stamps when they came in because they need to pay the utilities and the temperature just in the last six months had ranged from 9 degrees to 109 degrees. So the family was always hungry as a result. And in fact, even when we met her, Tabitha was almost at unbelievably thin after those years of hunger. So a teacher who did Facebooked her when she was 15 years old and wrote to her as follows. "I've been watching you waiting for you mature." Then he suggested she come over to his house after school and promised food. And this led to, of course, a four-month liaison between the teacher and Tabitha were she exchanged sex in return for food. Now, as we were talking with Tabitha about the story, I asked her, you know, what did it feel like to be that hungry? And she answered as follows. "Well, actually it fells like you want to be dead because it's peaceful being dead."

>> So what do you do with that, you know, as we sort set out to write the last chapter trying to think what are the policy implications as folks situated in schools of public and social work. And I don't think we have-- clearly don't have all the answers that we think that we need to do something. But I think there's a couple of hopeful notes here. We have heard-- we do understand that our book is depressing, so sorry about that. But really, the folks who-- you know Jennifer and even Tabitha, they haven't given up and they saw a hope and I think-- so I think we can't either, necessarily. So we don't provide all the answers or moving forward and sort of trying to tackle the type of extreme poverty. But we did sort of, I think, get a couple of insights that at least wasn't on my radar when we went in. The first was the importance of dignity and the extent to which families would actually trade in hunger in a sense. Trade in some resources like SNAP for the chance to-- especially with their children sort of get them some clothes at the Thrift store that would give them a little bit of dignity when they go to school, or get them, get them underwear. And I think there's very strong connection to work, really has a lot to do with a desire to be a part of a community, right? Be a part of America. So, we have this premise, and maybe it's a simple premise that whatever we do, whatever policy sort of solutions we might try, maybe there's a litmus test and maybe it's simple but maybe it's something more than that, that whatever we do either through government policy or as universities or as nonprofit, we should see of these, these intervention or these programs work to incorporate poor family and especially those at the very bottom into society rather than isolating them from it. And the history of welfare in this country is one of isolating families. So we talked about how what we see is partially significantly I would say, related to the welfare reform of 1996. But in no way that Kathy and I want to go back to the system we have before, which absolutely failed this test of a litmus test of incorporating the poor.

>> So, we endorsed three principles. And I think we do have a little-- we have quite a lot of detail about how we think we might move forward in the book. But the first principle is really about work, because work equals citizenship in the society. The poor know it and they want it. There is no doubt that we have too few jobs to go around especially too few good jobs at the bottom of the labor market. It's a serious problem. And if we're going to have a work-based safety net and that's essentially what happen in 1996, we moved toward a work-based safety net, then we must insure the opportunity. Second, parents should be able to raise children in a house of their own, this follows from the trauma that we often see-- saw children exposed to. But third, we do have to have a safety net that catches people when they fall because sometimes work won't work. I'll end there and turn it over to Professor Danziger, et.al.

>> OK. So, ton of questions have come in, a ton, we really appreciate it. And Rashid [assumed spelling] and Melanie [assumed spelling] are going to give you questions back and forth. They're sort of split between a little-- other ideas about causes and further explanations and ideas about policy, questions about policies. So, well maybe go kind of back and forth.

>> First off, thank you so much for the wonderful presentation. My name is Melanie, I'm a first year Master student at the Public Policy School here. Our first question, how might extreme poverty be growing because of mass incarceration, especially the removal of many men from their communities?

>> Anyone?

>> Do you have ideas?

>> Well, you know, it's interesting, we were really looking at households with children and certainly households are made more vulnerable when the father is taken out of the household and separated from his children. We saw that in, I believe, at Jennifer Hernandez's childrens-- one of her children's father was incarcerated. At this no doubt plays a role and I've written about it extensively in my other book, especially the relationship between male incarceration and family instability. So, it is important, it's not something that we focus on here because these families are often-- what's interesting about $2 poverty is that sort of that equal opportunity condition. Right. We see white families as well as black and Latino families and they're also in fact I think half of the families in the--

>> In the household.

>> -- the households are white. We see married and unmarried households, we see households across the country. So, maybe this is a special kind of poverty certainly incarceration interacts with it but there are a number of groups are represented in this category that you don't sort of think about when you think about a poverty this deep. And those are not necessarily the group most attracted by mass incarceration.

>> Hello and I am Rashid Malik [assumed spelling], I'm a second year Masters of Public Policy student here at Fort School, interested in social welfare policy and a student of Luke Shaefer's. I, well, have a two parts question. What administrative burdens are imposed on those living on less than $2 a day when they seek government assistance? And how can we-- and as policy makers design programs that alleviate that burden and improve access and use of these programs.

>> So, this is a-- this gets us into the question of why TANF is sort of failing. Even I think in its stated mission, temporary assistance for needy families. And I at least thought when we started this investigation and it was really about work requirements which were part of the-- sort of the welfare reform and there was about time limit, lifetime limits that would make a lot of sense. And those play roles but are really I think the bigger factor is the structure-- the very structure of the black grant itself. So the way that TANF is set up, is to say, states here is-- here is a fixed pot of money, right, that we're going to distribute across the States, and by the way we're not going to sort of in, you know, adjust it for inflation at all. So it's declining in real value every year since 1996. Here's a fixed pot of money, and you can use it for cash assistance, right? You can use it for the Stigmatized Program that not many people like and if you do that, we're going to impose a lot of, sort of restrictions on you. That you have to have a certain fraction of the case load working and you have to take care of this and that. Or, if you don't give it out, through cash assistance, which you don't have to do, you can pretty much use it for any other related thing. Right. So, you see a very, very clear incentive, and here at the Fort School, we now how important incentives are. For States to keep their cash assistance case loads artificially low. And we saw that and clear as force I think during the great recession where the case loads very much didn't sort of in any ways sort of leap up like some of these other, like snap, for example. And a case of a lot of States they've actually kept their case loads incredibly low so might just have 23 out of every 100 poor families on the program. But I think we have some States that are bound to eight or nine poor families out of every 100 on the program. And in those cases, a lot of those States are actually, redistributing that money to other things that they would've spent on any ways. So there's actually not net positive benefit of the money going into TANF rather than to provide a little bit of caution for states. So I guess, to answer the question I would say, building effective policy. This is a great case example of what not to do, right. And paying attention to the incentives that are sort of coming from the way that the program is designed, I think we have a lot of nice examples like, snap which is going to electronic EBT card. And we'll, you know, TANF istoo. But that actually reduces especially when we have rates of residential instability reduces people loosing their benefits. And you have a lot of States that are doing the online and sort of longer re-certification periods. And those will all make a difference.

>> So to add to that, the qualitative story here really is that our welfare has disappeared from the imaginations of the poor it has become so rare. Out of the social networks which might have spread the word, have really atrophied. But I do want to emphasize this point about pride almost to a person, actually to a person of the people on our study. We followed 18 of these families very in depth over several years really saw themselves as workers. And perhaps that's partly a credit to welfare reform, you know, back when Laura and I we're studying, Dean Lein and I was studying Welfare Acceptance in the early 1990s, mother's would say, "I don't know if I can be a good mother and a worker." Now, they say, "I don't know how I can be a good mother if I'm not a worker because I have to model the value of education to my children." So for better or for worst, a strong working identity motivates a lot of job seeking and that's what you see over and over again in this book, these heartbreaking endless-- seemingly endless searches for work. But it doesn't make people very eager to come to TANF store because that is really the antithesis of what workers do to survive.

>> Can you expand a bit on the role of mental health and extreme poor?

>> So we saw a significant agree. I think of mental health challenges and we can trace a lot of those in the stories of the families to-- let's call them a literature, adverse childhood experiences, right? So this is the sort of experience of physical, sexual abuse, emotional neglect and we know very clearly that these sort of experiences and especially accumulatively experiencing many of them follows a person through their lifetime. And we can see very clear associations with physical health that and mental health. And so that was very clear. And when you look at the ACE Literature, it's actually quite astounding the significant degree of just all Americans who experience this-- experience ACEs. But we think it's very much concentrated among this group at the bottom. So, you can sort of see a clear link there. Now, for us, we are actually very interested in the effect of work as mental health intervention. And the idea that Jennifer Hernandez really like the stability of work, the structure of work, I think a lot of us in this room can probably relate to that, right, of, you know, if you lost your job, what would you do and how would you feel? And so we're very taken with the possible healing effects of work structured well, right, decent work with dignity. And the last thing I'll say on this is that we did have, you know, there's pretty good coverage especially for kids of medical insurance through our public health insurance programs. One of the good things we did during the 1990s was expand access to public health insurance for kids and you can see a dramatic decline on the number of uninsured kids. And the earned income tax [inaudible] which provided a wage subsidy in this, the story in Kathy's other-- one of her other recent books. It's a little intimidating to write a book with somebody who's an-- writes one before and after yours, but that's for me to deal with. And so, it's not like I'm [inaudible] about the ITC. It's also actually like the happy story in the 1990s, right, of providing, you know, a significant wage subsidy for folks who go to work. So, expanded health insurance was a part of this and we can see mental health treatment. Now, we didn't write about this in the book but I will say we very much question the quality of the both physical and mental health treatment that many of our respondents got and wondered, are they actually-- you know, this is an expensive program. We spend a lot on health insurance for the poor and there's a-- and it's still a question-- open question on my mind. Sort of what, especially for this group at the bottom, is the net benefit that they receive out of the treatment they get.

>> And on to the next question from the policy pile. How might the policy idea of a universal child allowance help alleviate extreme poverty?

>> So people have, you know, learned summers and others have sort of noted that we may be running out of work that automation might be affecting many jobs in the US. I know people have varied opinions on this. I think in one PC suggest that we need some sort of guaranteed minimum income to get us out of this mess of too little work. To us, a guaranteed child allowance is a little different than a guaranteed minimum income because parents feel worthy because they're claiming them in behalf of their children. And in fact, in the EIC book, people often coded it as the kid's money because they knew they were getting it in part because they had children. So what I'm about to say probably applies more to this notion that we will suggest, you know, basically subsidize a large group of Americans who aren't working. Again, work equals citizenship in the United States. If you've seen the "Joe, run" ad that was running last night during the presidential debates, where he speaks very eloquently about the dignity of work and work is-- you know, a good job is the ability to say to your child with confidence, it's going to be, OK, honey. You know, kind of-- thinking about the story of his own father who had to leave town to find a job and then bring the family along later. But in any case, we think in America that it's really important to find a solution for work. Because we're not just interested in the financial wellbeing of the $2 a day poor, we're interested in America where everybody gets to take part, where everybody is sort of a part of the same community. What AFDC did was to divide the poor. It was almost as if you had to trade your citizenship card in to cross the road that separates the worthy from the destitute. That's a rough rephrase of TH Marshall's world in order to get that help. And we think that this is the 21st century and we should have a 21st century approach to caring for the poor that allows them to claim dignity and be part of society. And the work have several political scientists to at least suggest that there might be spillover benefits beyond financial wellbeing that extend to citizenship participation. Maybe we'll no longer be so prone to bowl alone and maybe even voting, and other activities that benefit our democracy.

>> You described how family and friends could often have detrimental impact on these families from abuse to maltreatment to theft? Did you find any trends that challenge this such as family networks and smaller towns in the south or communities with more active churches and social clubs?

>> So, I think we had examples where family was a support. So that's what you're asking. And we take Susan Brown that we write about in the first chapter is living with her husband Devin and their daughter Lauren, baby daughter Lauren, with a number of other family members who are both sort of among the $2 a day poor, but they're able to live in a house that's sort of owned by the family. And it's clear actually you can see Susan as we've followed up with her sort of after the book, she is doing the best, I think, of virtually all of our respondents, right? And so, that family buffer is an important one. So I think what we were trying to note in the book was that, you know, family is not always positive. In fact, it can be a serious detriment. And again, we're not trying to say this is a story about the poor or, you know, in general, but I think among this specific group, there's almost like a selection effect of, you know, if you're in these circumstances, you're-- but you have family that can support you, you either get out very quickly or you don't-- never sort of fall into our-- the sample we selected.

>> Next question. How optimistic are you for a genuine policy response to the new data you've discussed?

>> Well, I think we're both pretty optimistic people. So maybe that's what I'm going to reflect here. But, you know, I do think that we are in a moment during the reception of this book, both at the state and federal level has been absolutely astonishing. Our people seem very hungry for the information they see moved. But this is one voice among many sort of pointing out the degradation of work and the deepening need of families, not just at the very bottom of the labor market, but maybe even, well, at the bottom 40% of the labor market that's experiencing many of the things that are [inaudible] they are-- poor experiencing but to a less severe degree. If you watched the debate last night, you might have seen the anti-Walmart ad, another total heartbreaker. It's as if-- it was as if those families could be our families. So, people are catching on. There are, you know, there's pressure for increasing the minimum wage. Some folks are even thinking about expanding the reach of the EITC. So, if not now, when?

>> Actually I applied for a job at Walmart as part of the [inaudible] and Kathy was my reference and I didn't get a call. But yeah, I think you know, I'm sort of-- we're both sort of pessimists again, incredibly optimistic at the same time. And I'm thinking in Washington, it's very hard to sort of do anything. Maybe we'll see sort of more stuff at the state level. And I do think you can expect sort of any one book to sort of really move the dial. It has to come with the other things but maybe we'll be a part of it. You also just never know, I'm sorry, when the policy windows are going to open up. So what doesn't seem possible, you know, for David Ellwood writing "Poor Support" in the late 1980s becomes very possible, like in the first month that he goes into the [inaudible] administration where they expended their income tax credit which is by the way billions and billions more than we ever spend on AFDC. It's just only you can only get it if you work. So, it's not really a safety net. Right. So, so maybe it will happen-- something good will happen this year or maybe it will happen five years from now. I will say that as we've been in Washington, I think, the notion of doing something to create more jobs and government intervention, whether it's for the private ship-- public/private partnership, is more on the table than it was, I think, five years ago.

>> Thank you. Next question. Reading your book, I was surprised that more of the extreme part didn't turn to drug trade though you mentioned other felonies. Do you think this is about character and their commitment to parenthood or is there an economic calculation behind this as well? Not available or worth it?

>> OK. Great question. So, you know, one of the things that gives me great comfort is I've been in this business a long time. I've talked to thousands of poor families across 11, as well-- let me see now, roughly, you know, 15 different locales across the United States. So, we restricted our sample to parents with custodial children. Right? Parents with a custodial children very rarely sell drugs. And why, it's because they're almost certain to lose custody of their kids to the state and their kids are their most precious asset, so they don't wan to do that. Now, are there drugs in the Mississippi Delta, are there drugs in Chicago, Cleveland, and Johnson City? Absolutely. But it's generally not parents who are engaging in those kinds of behavior. So, it is interesting how, you know, we can-- We tend to think of drug dealing as sort of this ubiquitous activity. And you do hear a lot about this in all locales that we talked to, but these are parents desperately trying to keep their families together. You know, if they weren't tough, they are-- we would have already lost their children's child protection. They're very-- living circumstances often put them at risk of CPS involvement. Paul Hackwilder [assumed spelling] had the 22 people in his house. He was very nervous to engage with social services because of course that would have violated the rules many times over of how many children could be in the same room and what their ages and genders could be. So, I'll end there but it's a question that comes up every time and it's actually quite interesting to see how little we see of this, especially since all of our families except one actually did have to commit at least one felony in order to survive during the period that we observed them.

>> Our next audience question asks, "Besides the welfare reform, have you seen major changes on the low wage-- in the low wage labor market side that leads to more instability?

>> We think that there is a fairly significant change or start of a trend in the low wage labor market starting in the early 2000s. And we've actually-- I think a lot of us has thought it was there and we're starting to get more data that I think confirms that. And a lot of that has to do with the prevalence of these sort of unstable sort of work conditions outside of wages. So, low wages is a part of this story, right? But these, you know, keeping large part time workforces, keeping the, you know, this sort of very closely linking consumer demand to the number of people you have in the store, right, unlike an hour to hour basis. Some of these things employers just couldn't do, you know, 20 years ago. So we think all of these things are clear. The-- actually we see a lot of examples of on call work also where somebody doesn't get paid but is actually required for a sort of a set of hours to be by their phone and able to come in. Or in some cases, they actually have to call in every couple of hours just to see if they're one and they don't get paid for that. And so I think there's a lot of talk about, you know, what kind of policy reforms do you undertake to sort of fix those kind of problems. And I tend to think often that employers are smarter than policymakers. So if you did something to say, well, you can't keep people on call. Employers might figure out a way to get around that or they might come up with something else that tries to help them. So that's why we have such a focus, I think. I think we absolutely need to look at policies that can kind of curb some of these. One thing we can do is try to curb the extent of labor law violations that exists, right? So, as it is right now, it's better for an employer to sort of not pay over time, if people actually get over time or to sort of engage in some of these practices and risk being caught. Because chances are they won't be caught. And if they get caught, the penalty isn't that bad, right? So, actually benefiting from those is better, so maybe we just start by enforcing what we have on the books. But in addition, I think, this notion of creating more jobs, right. And these public/private partnerships that potentially subsidize jobs or jobs coming to the nonprofit sector will put pressure on the labor market and should positively impact some of these practices.

>> Having said that, the problem is really big and I think many of the programs we can point to right now are pretty small. So we also say in the book that we might actually have to reconceptualize how we think of work and how we think of the government as an employer. Maybe this is too big of a thought for a policy school, I hope not, but there are still much work to be done in our community. So, there are parks that aren't clean, they are not open because we can't afford the personnel to keep them open. We have recreation centers that have limited hours, public libraries that are barely open. On the little town of Percy, there is a public library that has virtually no books, and it is only open limited hours because they can't afford a librarian. Our cities are filthy. Our preschools are too few. Our classrooms are too large. There's so much work to be done in our society. And if you say to me, well, the government is never proved to be a very good employer, I would just like to point at our teachers and our firefighters and many fine public service-- servants who our employees of the government and whose work is a vital value to our daily lives.

>> And this will be the last question we have time for today. We spoke a bit about potential policy responses, but what do you hope will come from the public reading your book?

>> Well, so when Kathy and I started to write this book, we knew we wanted to try to do a popular press book, right, and try to actually connect with the-- a broader audience. And we were happy to get a contract with Houghton Mifflin that has brought us such literary icons as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Curious George. But, you know, I think that we have sort of a targeting policymaker strategy and also being a discussion point, right? And I hope maybe the book goes a little bit on these lines of social incorporation that it allows. We tried to tell people stories. My mother is a professional storyteller. So, I sort of known the importance of stories for a long time, tried to tell the stories in a respectful but honest way, right, and try to sort of bring people to meet peoples that they wouldn't have ever met in their life because, you know, we're so stratified in society. So, I think we would be really happy if people picked up this book who didn't necessarily agree or had thought a lot about poverty in the United States and used it as a sort of a resource to hone what they, you know, sharpen their ideas about what poverty is like and what we should do about it.

>> Well, thanks again.

>> Thank you, thank you very much. I'd also like to thank Sandy, Rashid and Melanie for facilitating the questions and all of you for a fabulous group of questions. I know we didn't get to all of them, I hope you'll stay so that we can continue the conversation in the great hall and you all can get your book signed. Please join me in a final round of thanks to Kathy Edin and Luke Shaefer.

• Luke Shaefer
• $2.00 a Day
• Kathryn Edin

Claremont Review of Books

• Book Reviews
• Digital Exclusive

Poverty and Policy

Poverty isn't fixed by cash.

Books  Reviewed

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

The primary purpose of $2 A Day is to summon the reader’s compassion for America’s poorest families. The authors do this superbly, portraying industrious but poorly educated single mothers who struggle to raise children on annual cash incomes that work out to less than $730 per person. (Two dollars a day in total income is how the World Bank defines “extreme poverty.”) Johns Hopkins professor Kathryn Edin is a skilled ethnographer whose work exposes the grim details of daily life for such families: their struggle to find minimally decent housing; their often fruitless efforts to land and hold jobs; their bouts of depression and sometimes mental illness; and the constant threat of domestic violence and abuse. The saddest part is learning how these conditions affect young children. “Toxic stress,” as it is now known, not only makes it hard for them to keep up in school or form healthy relationships with adults and peers, but also adversely affects brain development.

A critical reading of $2 a day , though, shows that compassion alone is not nearly enough to address the problem the authors describe so well. Clear thinking about policy is also imperative, and largely absent from this book. Edin and Luke Shaefer, a professor in the University of Michigan School of Social Work, repeatedly blame the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the welfare reform law enacted in 1996, for deep poverty. They condemn the law for turning the old, cash-based Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC) into the new employment-based Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), focusing entirely on the hardship produced by the reduction of cash benefits and completely ignoring the extent and advantages of increased employment. The authors repeatedly assert that “welfare is dead,” even using that idea in a chapter title. “Who killed welfare?” they ask. Their answer: a coalition of misinformed, misanthropic Republicans and cowardly Clinton Democrats.

One can compare this “welfare is dead” rhetoric with the following description of post-1996 income maintenance programs: 

Other means-tested income supports have grown considerably, most notably SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps] and EITC [Earned Income Tax Credit, a negative income tax for the working poor], along with other refundable tax credits for low income families. SNAP eligibility requirements have been relaxed in some ways since the 1990s, and the value of EITC benefits has been increased in a number of ways since the early 1990s. SNAP caseloads increased from an average of 25.5 million recipients per month in 1996 to 47.3 in June 2013. The number of families claiming EITC rose from 19.5 million in 1996 to 27.8 million in tax year 2010.

Who described this rapidly expanding welfare state? It turns out to have been Edin and Shaefer, in a 2013 journal article. The “welfare is dead” claim rests entirely on their idiosyncratic, tendentious stipulation that any sort of government assistance apart from benefits paid immediately in cash is not “welfare.” Through this prestidigitation they are able to eliminate SNAP, EITC, housing subsidies, and Medicaid from the welfare state. Welfare is dead; long live welfare!

This strange understanding of “welfare” informs the book’s misleading title. Unlike the hundreds of millions of people around the world who live in extreme poverty, none of the families profiled in $2 a Day actually lives on…$2 a day. One mother and her daughter who feature prominently in the book receive $370 per month (about $6 a day per person) from SNAP alone. Before losing her job the mother received $5,700 in SNAP and EITC. Some of these families lived in subsidized housing. Others shared housing with people receiving Supplemental Security Insurance and Social Security disability benefits. Almost all were eligible for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Edin and Shaefer’s real argument is that these families don’t have much cash , which limits their ability to participate in ordinary American life. They make that point convincingly, but feel compelled to turn this sober assessment into an overheated attack on the 1996 welfare law.

The families Edin and Shaefer describe are troubled in many ways. Few of the parents graduated from high school. Their children struggle in school. Parents and children alike suffer from multiple physical and psychological afflictions. Their lives are so disorganized that they have a hard time finding and retaining jobs.

Most disturbing is the conduct of the men who live on the periphery of these families. The women who receive most of Edin and Shaefer’s attention—Modonna, Jennifer, Rae, and Martha—are single mothers who get neither financial nor parental support from their children’s fathers. Even worse, there are repeated incidents of serious abuse by boyfriends and male relatives. Cliff, the father of eight of Alva Mae’s 13 children, is a drug addict whose occasional appearances create more hardship than his prolonged absences. Several mothers were abused or abandoned when they were young, and the same thing is now happening to their children. The tales Edin and Shaefer tell are simply horrible.

How representative are these appalling stories? One of the book’s problems is that we have no way to know. A major theme is that these women really want to work, and they work hard when they have a job. That is no doubt true of many adults living in deep poverty. But others (some of whom make cameo appearances in the book) are alcoholics, drug addicts, abusive parents, schizophrenics, and petty criminals. The group now known as “disconnected” single mothers is diverse, and the authors make no attempt to provide us with a random or representative sample.

This is not to deny that these stories provide a number of illuminating details. One is the debilitating effect of inadequate housing. Most of the families in $2 a Day share a dwelling with another poor family or relative, and sometimes more than one. They lack privacy and control over their lives. Drunken arguments and sexual abuse are commonplace.

Another revelation is the enterprising way some families make ends meet. One woman ran an informal taxi service, another a small store from her apartment. Many sell food stamps on the black market. At times, entrepreneurship turns degrading: “only three parents out of the eighteen families we followed admitted to engaging in sex for pay, but two had teenage daughters who had done so in an effort to help the family survive.” Edin and Shaefer’s studies help us understand why surveys of poor families’ expenditures indicate that they have more money than do surveys of their reported income. The reader is no more inclined to condemn these actions than to censure Oliver Twist for being a pickpocket. But once again we see how misleading the “$2 a day” claim has become.

The authors assert that the number of families living in deep poverty has increased since 2000, but they don’t defend this controversial argument in this book. Other studies have indicated that the percentage of children living in deep poverty remained relatively constant during and after the Great Recession. More importantly, studies that take into account the value of government benefits indicate that poverty levels among children fell dramatically in the 1990s, and have remained below the levels of the pre-welfare-reform era, despite the bad economy of the early 2000s and the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

For single mothers able to find and keep jobs, welfare reform has generally worked well. They have more income than they did before the transition, and are more connected to the rest of the world. There was always the danger that those who for some reason could not work regularly would end up worse off. That is Edin and Shaefer’s claim, and for some families it might well be true. But how many? Might our efforts to show compassion for a few undo the gains achieved by a much larger group? That is the big question, one they make no effort to address.

Edin and Shaefer are so intent to avoid “blaming the victim” that they say little about the bad choices most of these women have made—and admit to having made. The Brookings Institution’s Isabel Sawhill has shown in her book Generation Unbound (2014; reviewed in the Fall 2015 CRB ) that poverty is extremely rare among Americans who do three crucial things: finish high school, work 40 hours a week, and delay childbearing until they are over 21 and married. If you don’t do the first, it becomes harder to do the second. If you don’t do the third, it is very hard to do either the first or the second.

For that reason, Sawhill places great emphasis on urging at-risk young women to use effective contraception. The key event that sent most of the women in $2 a Day spiraling downward into deep poverty was conceiving a child at a young age with a man either unable or unwilling to become a decent father. The good news is that teenage pregnancies have been declining. The bad news is that more and more children live in single-parent homes. And the worse news is that we don’t know what to do about this. Edin and Shaefer choose simply to ignore it.

$2 a Day concludes with some recommendations on how to make the lives of these families more bearable. Some are sensible, such as increasing government wage subsidies, encouraging employers to make their work rules more family-friendly, and focusing government benefits more on housing than on food. Others are more dubious. Edin and Shaefer argue for an increase in the minimum wage, despite the fact that they have shown that the employers of these women tend to be so economically marginal that higher wages are likely to put them out of business. They call for New Deal-style public works projects to rebuild our infrastructure, implying, unpersuasively, that single mothers with few marketable skills have bright futures holding down construction jobs at national parks. Their recommendations just don’t fit with the problems they have chronicled.

Oddly, $2 A Day never mentions one promising experimental program that addresses precisely the problems the authors describe: the New Hope program first developed in Milwaukee. New Hope combines additional work incentives with counseling, subsidies for childcare, and community service jobs. One suspects it was omitted because it was a product of the same reform movement that brought us the 1996 welfare reform law (which was largely based on the Wisconsin experiment) and is run through the state’s TANF office. Edin and Shaefer’s insistence that the 1996 law is responsible for deep poverty blinds them to the ways the new regime can be adapted to help those who have the hardest time finding stable employment.

For decades, the debate over welfare policy has resembled the old Miller Lite beer commercials: competing shouts of “Tastes great” and “Less filling!” Among welfare analysts, one side yells, “Better benefits!” and the other, “More family values!” For the Left, welfare is entirely about economics; for the Right, it’s solely a question of social norms and individual character.

The point of the commercial, of course, is that the lucky beer drinker doesn’t really have to choose. In dealing with persistent poverty, however, we don’t have the luxury of choosing. We need all of these things: jobs and benefits, norms and family structure. They reinforce one another, which is precisely what makes the problem so hard to solve.

After finishing $2 a Day , the newly compassionate conservative and the increasingly indignant liberal should take a look at the recent Brookings/American Enterprise Institute report, “Opportunity, Responsibility, and Security: A Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream.” In it an impressive array of experts on the left and the right try to address both sides of the equation. Their sensible reply to Edin and Shaefer’s attack on the 1996 welfare reform law recalls a phrase from the Clinton Administration: “Mend it, don’t end it.” Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer have helped us understand the problem of deep poverty, but we need to look elsewhere for thoughtful solutions.

Next in the spring 2016 Issue

The subway to nowhere, deep down things, what’s at stake.

What Makes This Trade Great? A Day in the Market with Barrie Einarson

Apr 26, 2024.

Hello, fellow traders! It’s Barrie Einarson here from Trade Ideas, bringing you another exciting edition of “What Makes This Trade Great?” Today, I’m eager to share a glimpse into a trade that caught my eye early in the day and how it played out with some intriguing potential.

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Our day kicked off with a bang when our AI system flagged an intriguing alert at $1.79, suggesting a potential long position. I jumped on this quicker than a hiccup, securing a position before the stock had any time to pull back. Lo and behold, it shot up to $1.96 in no time at all. That’s trading for you—fast and furious!

After that initial surge, we did see some pullback, which is pretty standard in the trading world. But here’s where it gets interesting. I’ve got my eyes peeled on the $2.00 mark. Why, you ask? Let me paint the picture for you. Pulling up the weekly chart, there’s a clear resistance line at $2.00. If we can break past this, the stock has a lot of open sky up to around $2.52. That’s not just good; that’s golden!

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$2.00 a Day

36 pages • 1 hour read

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

“Deep on the South Side of Chicago, far from the ever-evolving steel skyline of America’s third-largest city, sits a small, story-and-a-half white clapboard house clad in peeling paint.” 

The part of Chicago that most Americans would visit is the downtown core, where there are skyscrapers and affluence. The opening sentence of the book contrasts this with a side of Chicago that most Americans will not encounter in their lives. In doing so, the authors emphasize how large the gap is between $2-a-day poverty and mainstream American society.

“Two dollars is less than the cost of a gallon of gas, roughly equivalent to that of a half gallon of milk. Many Americans have spent more than that before they get to work or school in the morning. Yet in 2011, more than 4 percent of all households with children in the world’s wealthiest nation were living in a poverty so deep that most Americans don’t believe it even exists in this country.” 

Edin and Shaefer provide some context for readers to understand just how poor these families are. Many Americans spend $2 without even thinking about it—it is an almost inconsequential amount of money for them. Not only is having to live on $2 per person, per day hard to imagine for many people, but they don’t realize it is a level of destitution that actually exists in the US. $2-a-day poverty is far removed from the everyday comforts that many Americans take for granted.

“Susan is sick of going hungry, sick of eating instant noodles morning, noon, and night. She’s tired of falling further and further behind on her bills, tired of being a freeloader in her own home.” 

Being so poor you can barely survive doesn’t just leave people with barely enough to eat, it also leaves them demoralized and emotionally exhausted. Poverty is difficult to escape and can leave people feeling trapped. Susan’s stories in particular exemplify the emotional baggage that comes with being destitute.

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Opening statements in Trump's historic trial set to begin Monday after tense day of jury selection

Opening statements are set to begin next week in Donald Trump’s historic criminal trial after the final members of the jury were seated Friday, following a dramatic day in which two prospective jurors broke down in tears, an appeals court judge rejected Trump's request for a stay, and a man set himself on fire in front of the courthouse.

“We’re going to have opening statements on Monday morning. This trial is starting,” Judge Juan Merchan said towards the end of the day, after successfully seating the remaining five alternate jurors that were needed.

The case — the first-ever criminal trial of a former president —will be heard by a panel of 12 jurors and a total of six alternates. It's expected to last roughly six weeks.

The five alternates ultimately selected Friday include an unemployed married woman who’s into art and described herself as not political, an audio professional, a contract specialist, a clothing company executive and a construction company project manager. It took four days of jury selection to find the 18 jurors.

Around the same time the judge declared, "we have our full panel" inside the courtroom in the early afternoon, a man set himself on fire outside the courthouse. The NYPD said the man, identified as Max Azzarello of Florida, later died. He appeared to have had pamphlets describing a conspiracy involving cryptocurrency that he threw around before setting himself ablaze, police said.

Later in the afternoon, Trump's attorneys were in a state appeals court trying again to get an emergency stay of the trial. Trump attorney Cliff Robert argued his client could not get a fair trial in Manhattan, which had been Trump's longtime home before moving to Florida after he was elected president in 2016.

Steven Wu of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office countered that "what the last week has shown is that the jury selection has worked."

"We have 18 ordinary New Yorkers who are ready to serve. It would be unfair to them and the public for this to be delayed further," he argued. The judge rejected Trump's stay request a short time later.  

The jury selection process Friday was especially intense, some potential jurors breaking down in tears and others saying they were too anxious to serve.

The day began with the judge calling up the 22 remaining potential jurors from the previous pool of 96 to answer questions designed to indicate whether they could be fair and impartial about the divisive real estate mogul and presumptive Republican nominee for president.

The first of those potential jurors was dismissed after she said she didn’t think she could be fair. “I have really, really bad anxiety and people have found out where I am,” she told the judge. A short time later, two other potential jurors were dismissed after each told the judge that upon further reflection, “I don’t think I can be impartial.”

Other potential jurors included a married father who said he listens to a podcast called “Order of Man,” which is described on Apple’s website as discussions about “reclaiming what it means to be a man.” Some past guests of the podcast include people who’ve been outspoken in their support of Trump and were highly critical of the civil fraud case New York Attorney General Letitia James brought against the former president. The man, an audio specialist, was chosen as one of the alternates.

Another potential juror was a married fund manager who said he’d done “get-out-the-vote” work for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 presidential opponent. Trump and his attorney Todd Blanche passed notes back and forth while that juror was speaking. He was later dismissed after being asked about a 2020 Facebook post where he apparently called Trump “the devil and a sociopath.”

Trump appeared most interested in jurors whose answers offer ambiguity around their personal political views. When one prospective juror said they were a Fox News viewer, Trump cocked his head, then quickly conferred with his lawyer, Todd Blanche.

Another potential juror was a woman who became emotional as she disclosed she'd served two years in prison on drug-related charges, but said she could be "fair and impartial."

During a morning break, Merchan — who'd chided reporters on Thursday for disclosing too much information about potential jurors — said the woman had shared "very personal things about her life" and was "very brave." “I just wanted to encourage the press to please be kind. Please be kind to this person,” the judge said. He later dismissed her, saying she needed a certificate of release to be qualified for service going forward. On her way out, she cheerfully called out, "Good luck!"

Following that juror's departure, the DA's office began its individual questioning of the jurors. One woman, who'd disclosed that her father is lifelong friends with Trump ally turned critic Chris Christie, broke down in tears when prosecutor Susan Hoffinger asked her an innocuous question about the burden of proof in the case. "I feel so nervous and anxious right now. I’m sorry," she responded, bursting out into tears. "I thought I could do this," she said, adding "I wouldn’t want someone who feels this way to judge my case." She was dismissed.

Hoffinger's questioning was followed by Trump attorney Susan Necheles, who asked a potential juror who'd started their own business how she would assess a witness's credibility. The woman then asked to speak to the judge, saying she was "getting anxiety and self-doubt” from Necheles's line of questioning. She was dismissed. 

Necheles later asked another woman — who previously said she was a victim of sexual assault — whether she would hold it against Trump that women outside this case have accused Trump of sexual assault. She said she would not have a problem setting those accusations aside but the judge ultimately excused her, saying, "It’s best to err on the side of caution."

Another man said he has some differences from Trump on his policies but thinks he's “usually awesome.” He was not chosen for the jury.

On his way into court in the morning, Trump again complained the case against him is "unfair," and that the partial gag order preventing him from lashing out at witnesses, prosecutors, court staffers and jurors is not "constitutional." "Everyone else can say whatever they want about me. They can say anything they want. They can continue to make up lies and everything else. They lie. They’re real scum. But you know what? I’m not allowed to speak," he told reporters.

Prosecutors this week asked the judge to fine Trump and hold him in contempt for social media posts that they said violate the gag order. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Tuesday.

The m a in pa nel of 12 is made up of seven men and five women, including two lawyers, a teacher, a retired wealth manager, a product development manager, a security engineer, a software engineer, a speech therapist and a physical therapist. The foreman — the juror who essentially acts as the leader and spokesperson for the panel — is a married man who works in sales and gets his news from The New York Times, MSNBC and Fox News.

The lone alternate selected Thursday is a woman who works as an asset manager.

Trump vented about the speed of the process in a post on social media shortly after the final jurors were selected, claiming the judge is “‘railroading’ me, at breakneck speed, in order to completely satisfy his ‘friends’.”

Later in the day, Merchan held what's known as a Sandoval hearing . That's a type of hearing designed to let defendants know the scope of questions they could face from prosecutors on cross-examination so they can make informed decisions about whether to take the witness stand in their own defense.

Leaving court on Friday, Trump was asked whether he was still planning to testify and he said he was.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office disclosed in a court filing that it would like to ask Trump about several items, among them the $464 million civil judgment against him and his company for fraud , the total $88 million verdicts and liability findings for sexual abuse  and  defamation in lawsuits brought by writer E. Jean Carroll and a number of other adverse court rulings over the past few years.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in all the cases and is appealing  the fraud judgment and the Carroll verdicts.

Prosecutors said they want to be able to bring those findings up “to impeach the credibility of the defendant” if he takes the witness stand.

Discussing the findings in the fraud case, prosecutor Matthew Colangelo told the judge it was "hard to think of something that is more squarely in the wheelhouse” for the DA to ask Trump about "than a finding by a judge of persistent and repeated fraud and illegality."

Trump's attorney Emil Bove countered that prosecutors shouldn't be able to breach the topic at all because Trump's appeal is still pending. He made similar arguments over the DA's contention that they should be allowed to ask about a judge's finding that he was untruthful on the witness stand during the fraud trial and had violated a gag order in the case.

“Is it your position that because a case is being appealed or might be appealed, that therefore it can not be used?" Merchan asked the lawyer. "Not necessarily," Bove replied.

The judge said he'd issue his ruling on the dispute on Monday morning.

Trump said last week he  “absolutely” plans to testify , but he is under no obligation to do so.

Asked by Necheles at the end of the day who the DA's first witness would be, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said they wouldn't inform Trump's team of the person's identity until Sunday, given that Trump has been criticizing some witnesses on social media despite the partial gag order in the case. “And if that should be tweeted, that’ll be the last time we provide that courtesy,” Steinglass said.

Merchan called the DA's position "understandable" and told Necheles "I will not compel them to do anything."

Trump has pleaded  not guilty  to 34 counts of falsifying business records and faces up to four years in prison if he is convicted.

Bragg alleges that Trump falsified records to hide money he was paying his former lawyer Michael Cohen to reimburse him for $130,000 he paid adult film actor Stormy Daniels  near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels has claimed she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. Trump has denied that he slept with Daniels, but he has acknowledged repaying Cohen.

The DA’s office also alleges that as part of a scheme to boost Trump, National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc. paid $150,000 to model and actor Karen McDougal , who appeared in Playboy magazine and claimed that she had a nine-month affair with Trump before he was elected president “in exchange for her agreement not to speak out about the alleged sexual relationship,” according to a statement of facts filed by Bragg.

Trump has also denied having a sexual relationship with McDougal.

Adam Reiss is a reporter and producer for NBC and MSNBC.

Lisa Rubin is an MSNBC legal correspondent and a former litigator.

Dareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.