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$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America Katryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, 2015. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 240 pages, ISBN 978-0544811959
Edin and Shaefer's $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America is an ethnographic study focusing on individuals living drastically below the poverty. Individuals living on less than two-dollars a day are often thought to be living in a third world country, however, this book, provides evidence to the country and suggests this extreme poverty is happening right here in the United States. Edin received national attention for her co-authorship with Maria Kefalas of the text Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. Edin and Shaefer (2015), however, this time focuses on the extreme poor in the United States and assists in understanding the current debate about income inequality. Edin and Shaefer states in 2011, the number of families living on two dollars a day had more than doubled in only a decade and a half. In 2012, the number of individuals living on two dollars a day has increased drastically to one and half million households with about three million children. This accounts to more than 4 percent of all households or about one-fifth of all families living below the poverty line. These findings suggest a drastic change is necessary to address the increasing extreme poverty in the United States as well as a means to help those families...