Living On Almost Nothing In America Book Review

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$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America Book Review
If she did not make plasma deposits twice a week at a donation center in Tennessee, Jessica Compton and her family would have no income. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna, in Chicago, have gone for days with nothing to eat other than spoiled milk. The Harris and Compton families’ stories are just two accounts of devastating poverty documented in sociology professors Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer’s book, “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.”
After two decades of groundbreaking research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin observed something she hadn’t seen before – households surviving on virtually no cash income. Edin teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on surveys of the incomes of the poor. The two made a surprising discovery: the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to one and a half million American household, including about three million children. How did the families end up in $2-a-day poverty? What were the …show more content…
It shows that no family found it possible to survive apart from cash. The struggle of generating a little bit of cash often consumed families’ daily lives. To do so, many were forced to engage in illegal trafficking of their SNAP benefits from time to time, donate plasma, or collect scrap metal. Some were entrepreneurial, operating informal “sweet shops” out of their apartments, selling popsicles and other snacks. Other including some of the children, traded sex for cash or payment on a storage locker, a cell phone bill, or food. Many relied on the goodness of private charity, though the nonprofit sector is much weaker in poorer places such as Appalachia and the Delta than it is in affluent cities like Chicago. A few found succor in the arms of their extended family, though as often as not, kin were more a source of risk and even harm than

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