The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America

A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed&nbsp;$2.00 a Day:&nbsp;Living on Almost Nothing in America.&nbsp; "This book forces you to see American poverty in a whole new light." (Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, by America and Evicted) &nbsp;Three of the nation's top scholars ­- known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America - turn their attention from the country's poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that&nbsp;America's most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural.&nbsp;Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there. This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas.&nbsp;Immersing themselves in these communities, pouring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America--including inequalities shaping people's health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the "internal colonies" in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse.&nbsp; The unfolding revelation in&nbsp;The Injustice of Place&nbsp;is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common--a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation's places of deepest need.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Business & Money

Nelson, Timothy J.

Edin, Kathryn J.

Shaefer, H. Luke

Economics

Mariner Books

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

A revelatory account of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don’t think it exists Jessica Compton’s family of four would have no cash income unless she donated plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna in Chicago often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends. After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen since the mid-1990s — households surviving on virtually no income. Edin teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on calculating incomes of the poor, to discover that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children. Where do these families live? How did they get so desperately poor? Edin has “turned sociology upside down” (Mother Jones) with her procurement of rich — and truthful — interviews. Through the book’s many compelling profiles, moving and startling answers emerge. The authors illuminate a troubling trend: a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America’s extreme poor. More than a powerful exposé, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality.

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

The story of a kind of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don't even think exists from a leading national poverty expert who defies convention (New York Times). Edin and Shaefer tell the stories of eight families who live on what is almost unimaginable-an income that falls below the World Bank definition of poverty in the developing world. Their stories need to be heard, especially as we head into our election year that will highlight the questions on income and inequality, and our commitment to making prosperity available to all. We have made great steps toward eliminating poverty around the world-extreme poverty has declined significantly and seems on track to continue to do so in the next decades. Jim Yong Kim of the World Bank estimates that extreme poverty can be eliminated in seventeen years. This is clearly cause for celebration. However, this good news can make us oblivious to the fact that there are, in the United States, a significant and growing number of families who live on less than $2.00 per person, per day. That figure, the World Bank measure of poverty, is hard to imagine in this country most of us spend more than that before we get to work or school in the morning. In $2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, Kathryn Edin and Luke Schaefer introduce us to people like Jessica Compton, who survives by donating plasma as often as ten times a month and spends hours with her young children in the public library so she can get access to an internet connection for job-hunting; and like Modonna Harris who lost the cashiers job she held for years, for the sake of $7.00 misplaced at the end of the day. They are the would-be working class, with hundreds of job applications submitted in recent months and thousands of work hours logged in past years. Twenty years after William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears, it's still all about the work. But as Edin and Shaefer illuminate through incisive analysis and indelible human stories, the combination of a government safety net built on the ability to work and a low-wage labor market increasingly designed not to deliver a living wage has delivered a vicious one-two punch to the would-be working poor.More than a powerful expose of a troubling trend, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our central national debate on work, income inequality, and what to do about it.

HighBridge Company

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