$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

Published in 2015, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America is a nonfiction investigation into how a new form of virtually cashless poverty emerged in the United States. Authors Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer are both academics with extensive experience researching poverty, but it is only in recent years that they have come across households with almost no cash income at all. There are now 1.5 million families with children in the US who must survive on less than $2 per person, per day. It is a level of extreme destitution that most Americans are unaware exists in the United States. Edin and Shaefer trace the rise of $2-a-day poverty to a welfare reform in 1996, which expanded aid for the working poor while killing the cash welfare system.

How did these families become so poor while living in the richest nation in the world? How do they manage to survive with so little money? Edin and Shaefer discuss the lives of eight families who live in $2-a-day poverty. They conducted fieldwork over many months by visiting these families in their homes, observing how they lived, and talking with them about their daily lives.