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Books: $2 A Day
Oct. 28th, 2015 12:22 pmOn recommendation of a friend who wrote a wonderful review, I picked up $2 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer (http://www.twodollarsaday.com/).
I then spent two days being vaguely cranky at the world and marginally depressed while reading it, but I recommend it nonetheless. Very short, well researched, and does a nice-enough job of combining the narrative "stories" with the policy analysis and data to work for most people, I think.
I grew up in a not-well-off family with an extended family who were middle class and upper class. We were poor but we were cushioned from the kind of deep poverty that this book is about. We were occasionally homeless, we were on WIC and received food stamps (they were still food stamps back then) when I was a kid in the 1980s. But I always had winter coats. We got enough shoes. When we were homeless we couch-surfed in pretty nice houses, or got to stay in motels. We had running water and heat. Though I knew this book was focused on people and situations more difficult than the ones I grew up in, I knew a lot of people growing up who were poorer than we were. I did not expect that there would be a lot that was new for me in this book.
There was a lot that was new to me. The policy changes of the 1990s came after my family had (re)-entered the middle class. Most of those changes took effect after I had gone to college, and I have not needed to access social services of these types since college. Things for the lower working class may have gotten better (at least according to notes in this book), but, as the authors very clearly show, things for the very poorest in America have gotten a lot worse.
If you have the emotional energy, this was a very worthwhile read. Probably at a similar level of depressing and angering as, oh, Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol? But possibly with more triggers.
( Trigger warnings behind the cut )
[edited because I forgot to put in the authors' names after the title when first posted.]
I then spent two days being vaguely cranky at the world and marginally depressed while reading it, but I recommend it nonetheless. Very short, well researched, and does a nice-enough job of combining the narrative "stories" with the policy analysis and data to work for most people, I think.
I grew up in a not-well-off family with an extended family who were middle class and upper class. We were poor but we were cushioned from the kind of deep poverty that this book is about. We were occasionally homeless, we were on WIC and received food stamps (they were still food stamps back then) when I was a kid in the 1980s. But I always had winter coats. We got enough shoes. When we were homeless we couch-surfed in pretty nice houses, or got to stay in motels. We had running water and heat. Though I knew this book was focused on people and situations more difficult than the ones I grew up in, I knew a lot of people growing up who were poorer than we were. I did not expect that there would be a lot that was new for me in this book.
There was a lot that was new to me. The policy changes of the 1990s came after my family had (re)-entered the middle class. Most of those changes took effect after I had gone to college, and I have not needed to access social services of these types since college. Things for the lower working class may have gotten better (at least according to notes in this book), but, as the authors very clearly show, things for the very poorest in America have gotten a lot worse.
If you have the emotional energy, this was a very worthwhile read. Probably at a similar level of depressing and angering as, oh, Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol? But possibly with more triggers.
( Trigger warnings behind the cut )
[edited because I forgot to put in the authors' names after the title when first posted.]
