Class of 1930 Fellow: Kathryn Edin, "Living on Virtually Nothing in America"
Sponsored by The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College.
January 31, 2017
After two decades of groundbreaking research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen before — households surviving on virtually no cash income. Edin, whose deep examination of her subjects’ lives has “turned sociology upside down” (Mother Jones), 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 households, including about three million children.
But the fuller story remained to be told. Where do these families live? How did they get so desperately poor? What do they do to survive? In search of answers, Edin and Shaefer traveled across the country to speak with families living in this extreme poverty, and then authored the book $2.00 a Day. Through the book’s many compelling profiles, moving and startling answers emerge: 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. Not just a powerful exposé, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality.
Kathryn Edin is one of the nation’s leading poverty researchers, working in the domains of welfare and low-wage work, family life, and neighborhood contexts. A qualitative and mixed-method researcher, she has taken on key mysteries about the urban poor that have not been fully answered by quantitative work: How do single mothers possibly survive on welfare? Why don’t more go to work? Why do they end up as single mothers in the first place? Where are the fathers and why do they disengage from their children’s lives? How have the lives of the single mothers changed as a result of welfare reform?
Edin has authored 5 books, including $2.00 a Day: Living on Virtually Nothing in America, with a sixth forthcoming and some 50 journal articles. The hallmark of her research is her direct, in-depth observations of the lives of low-income women, men, and children. Edin is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Formerly, she was Professor or Public Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School and chair of the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Margaret Mead Fellow at the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. She is a Trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation and on HHS’s advisory committee for the poverty research centers at University of California Davis, University of Wisconsin, and Stanford University. She is a founding member of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Network on Housing and Families with Young Children and a past member of the MacArthur Network on the Family and the Economy.
