$2.00 A DAY
Living on Almost Nothing in America
Kathryn J Edin and H Luke Shaefer
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
210 pages; $28
From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, a number of developments turned out to have profound effects on destitute families in the United States, which Kathryn J Edin and H Luke Shaefer's $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America brings into sharp relief. Critics of welfare repeatedly argued that the increase of unwed mothers was mainly due to rising rates of welfare payments through Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). Even though the scientific evidence offered little support for this claim, the public's outrage against the programme led to calls for a major revamping of the welfare system.
In 1993, Bill Clinton and his advisers began a discussion of welfare reform that was designed to "make work pay," a phrase coined by the Harvard economist David Ellwood in his 1988 book Poor Support. Ellwood, one of Clinton's advisers, argued that to ease the transition from welfare to work, it would be necessary to provide training and job placement assistance; to help local government create public-sector jobs when private-sector jobs were lacking; and to develop child care programmes for working parents. President Clinton's early welfare-reform proposal included these features, as well as another component that Ellwood submitted - time limits on the receipt of welfare once these provisions were in place.
Republicans, however, seizing control of Congress in 1994, devised a Bill that reflected their own vision of welfare reform. Designed as a block grant, giving states considerably more latitude in how they spent government money for welfare than AFDC permitted, the Republican Bill also included a five-year lifetime limit on benefits based on federal funds. States were allowed to impose even shorter time limits. Although the Bill increased child care subsidies for recipients who found jobs, the all-important public sector jobs for those unable to find employment in the private sector were missing. Moreover, there wasn't enough budgeted for education and training. Much to the chagrin of the Bill's critics President Clinton signed the Bill, called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), on August 22, 1996, two days after his signing into law the first increase in the federal minimum wage in five years.
In the immediate years following the passing of welfare reform, supporters of TANF argued that the critics were proved wrong. Timing, though, had something to do with the apparent success of welfare reform. The tight labour market during the economic boom of the late 1990s significantly lowered unemployment at the very time that TANF was being implemented. Besides, studies revealed that the number of "disconnected" single mothers - neither working nor on welfare - had grown substantially since the passage of TANF, rising to one in five single mothers during the mid-2000s. This is the group featured in $2.00 a Day, a remarkable book that could very well change the way we think about extreme poverty in the United States.
When Ms Edin returned to the field in the summer of 2010 to update her earlier work on poor mothers, she was surprised to find a number of families struggling "with no visible means of cash income from any source." To ascertain whether her observations reflected a greater reality, Ms Edin turned to Mr Shaefer, a University of Michigan expert on the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation, who was visiting Harvard for a semester while she was a faculty member. Mr Shaefer analysed the census data, which is based on annual interviews with tens of thousands of American households, to determine the growth of the virtually cashless poor since welfare reform. His results were shocking: Since the passage of TANF in 1996, the number of families living in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled, reaching 1.5 million households in early 2011. Ms Edin and Mr Shaefer found additional evidence for the rise of such poverty in reports from the nation's food banks and government data on families receiving food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and in accounts from the nation's schools on the rising numbers of homeless children.
In the summer of 2012, the authors also began ethnographic studies in sites across the country: Chicago, Cleveland, a midsize city in the Appalachian region and small rural villages in the Mississippi Delta. In each of these areas it did not prove difficult to find families surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day during certain periods of the year.
Ms Edin and Mr Shaefer's field research provides plausible reasons for the sharp rise in destitute families. The first has to do with the "perilous world of low-wage work." The mechanisation of agriculture has wiped out a lot of jobs in the Mississippi Delta, and even in cities like Chicago, the number of applicants for entry-level work in the service and retail industries far exceeds the number of available positions: "Companies such as Walmart might have hundreds of applicants to choose from" for any one position. Moreover, work schedules are often unpredictable, with abrupt ups and downs in the number of hours a worker gets.
This essential book is a call to action, and one hopes it will accomplish what Michael Harrington's The Other America achieved in the 1960s - arousing both the nation's consciousness and conscience about the plight of a growing number of invisible citizens. The rise of such absolute poverty since the passage of welfare reform belies all the categorical talk about opportunity and the American dream.
Living on Almost Nothing in America
Kathryn J Edin and H Luke Shaefer
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
210 pages; $28
From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, a number of developments turned out to have profound effects on destitute families in the United States, which Kathryn J Edin and H Luke Shaefer's $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America brings into sharp relief. Critics of welfare repeatedly argued that the increase of unwed mothers was mainly due to rising rates of welfare payments through Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). Even though the scientific evidence offered little support for this claim, the public's outrage against the programme led to calls for a major revamping of the welfare system.
In 1993, Bill Clinton and his advisers began a discussion of welfare reform that was designed to "make work pay," a phrase coined by the Harvard economist David Ellwood in his 1988 book Poor Support. Ellwood, one of Clinton's advisers, argued that to ease the transition from welfare to work, it would be necessary to provide training and job placement assistance; to help local government create public-sector jobs when private-sector jobs were lacking; and to develop child care programmes for working parents. President Clinton's early welfare-reform proposal included these features, as well as another component that Ellwood submitted - time limits on the receipt of welfare once these provisions were in place.
Republicans, however, seizing control of Congress in 1994, devised a Bill that reflected their own vision of welfare reform. Designed as a block grant, giving states considerably more latitude in how they spent government money for welfare than AFDC permitted, the Republican Bill also included a five-year lifetime limit on benefits based on federal funds. States were allowed to impose even shorter time limits. Although the Bill increased child care subsidies for recipients who found jobs, the all-important public sector jobs for those unable to find employment in the private sector were missing. Moreover, there wasn't enough budgeted for education and training. Much to the chagrin of the Bill's critics President Clinton signed the Bill, called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), on August 22, 1996, two days after his signing into law the first increase in the federal minimum wage in five years.
In the immediate years following the passing of welfare reform, supporters of TANF argued that the critics were proved wrong. Timing, though, had something to do with the apparent success of welfare reform. The tight labour market during the economic boom of the late 1990s significantly lowered unemployment at the very time that TANF was being implemented. Besides, studies revealed that the number of "disconnected" single mothers - neither working nor on welfare - had grown substantially since the passage of TANF, rising to one in five single mothers during the mid-2000s. This is the group featured in $2.00 a Day, a remarkable book that could very well change the way we think about extreme poverty in the United States.
When Ms Edin returned to the field in the summer of 2010 to update her earlier work on poor mothers, she was surprised to find a number of families struggling "with no visible means of cash income from any source." To ascertain whether her observations reflected a greater reality, Ms Edin turned to Mr Shaefer, a University of Michigan expert on the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation, who was visiting Harvard for a semester while she was a faculty member. Mr Shaefer analysed the census data, which is based on annual interviews with tens of thousands of American households, to determine the growth of the virtually cashless poor since welfare reform. His results were shocking: Since the passage of TANF in 1996, the number of families living in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled, reaching 1.5 million households in early 2011. Ms Edin and Mr Shaefer found additional evidence for the rise of such poverty in reports from the nation's food banks and government data on families receiving food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and in accounts from the nation's schools on the rising numbers of homeless children.
In the summer of 2012, the authors also began ethnographic studies in sites across the country: Chicago, Cleveland, a midsize city in the Appalachian region and small rural villages in the Mississippi Delta. In each of these areas it did not prove difficult to find families surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day during certain periods of the year.
Ms Edin and Mr Shaefer's field research provides plausible reasons for the sharp rise in destitute families. The first has to do with the "perilous world of low-wage work." The mechanisation of agriculture has wiped out a lot of jobs in the Mississippi Delta, and even in cities like Chicago, the number of applicants for entry-level work in the service and retail industries far exceeds the number of available positions: "Companies such as Walmart might have hundreds of applicants to choose from" for any one position. Moreover, work schedules are often unpredictable, with abrupt ups and downs in the number of hours a worker gets.
This essential book is a call to action, and one hopes it will accomplish what Michael Harrington's The Other America achieved in the 1960s - arousing both the nation's consciousness and conscience about the plight of a growing number of invisible citizens. The rise of such absolute poverty since the passage of welfare reform belies all the categorical talk about opportunity and the American dream.
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