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The cover of $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer

Edin and Shaefer trace how families with children survive on almost no cash amid unstable work, scarce housing, and a safety net tied to employment.

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7 parts, about 20 minutes to read.

At a glance

Author
Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer
Parts
7 parts
Reading time
about 20 minutes
The whole book
Also to read in full

The idea people argue about

The book's most contested move is to treat two dollars per person per day in cash as a meaningful measure of extreme poverty in the United States. A common objection is that the measure omits food benefits, housing assistance, tax credits, informal earnings, and other resources, so it can make deprivation look more absolute than it is. Edin and Shaefer address this directly by recalculating their survey estimates after adding food benefits, tax credits, and housing subsidies. The resulting counts fall, but the increase over time remains, which is why they retain cash scarcity as the problem they want to examine. They also acknowledge that households can underreport informal income and use fieldwork to test what the survey pattern looks like in daily life. Their answer therefore supports a narrower claim than the headline sometimes suggests: the book documents a growing lack of spendable cash, not the total absence of every form of aid or exchange.

Three common misunderstandings

  1. The two dollar threshold does not mean that a family literally possesses no food, shelter, or material help. It measures reported cash income, while the authors separately discuss food benefits, shared housing, charity, and informal exchanges that may keep a household alive without paying rent or utilities.
  2. The families in the book are not presented as people who simply refuse employment. Many adults move in and out of low wage jobs, and the authors connect their cashless periods to unstable schedules, illness, transport, child care, and the disappearance of cash welfare.
  3. The authors do not propose restoring the old welfare system without qualification. Their conclusion favors more available work, better job quality, and a temporary cash floor when employment fails, while preserving the value that many participants place on work and self support.

What the summary covers

  1. Introduction: When Cash Disappears2 min
  2. 1. Welfare Is Dead3 min
  3. 2. Perilous Work3 min
  4. 3. A Room of One’s Own2 min
  5. 4. By Any Means Necessary3 min
  6. 5. A World Apart3 min
  7. Conclusion: Where, Then, from Here?4 min

Read it alongside

  • Goes deeperEvicted

    Edin and Shaefer show how low incomes and limited housing aid undermine stable homes; Desmond adds that landlords can use eviction records to screen applicants, turning a past housing loss into a barrier to the next home.

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