$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

If you were to ask the families in this book how $2-a-day poverty could be eradicated, what do you think they would recommend? Would their recommendations align with what the authors suggest?

With the exception of the Conclusion, all the chapters in this book begin with a vignette from the life of a person living in $2-a-day poverty. What does this achieve?

The authors use both qualitative data (in the form of interviews) and quantitative data (from SIPP, for example). What does each type of data contribute to the book?

The authors argue that social inclusion should be central to any antipoverty program in the United States, because otherwise the poor are excluded from mainstream society. Elaborate on how some of the families in this book experienced such exclusion and how this affected their lives.

The book contains many moments filled with emotion—from the happiness with which Rae describes the bedroom she wants to provide for her daughter to the pain Tabitha felt watching her siblings cry from hunger. What purpose do these emotional moments serve in the book? How do the authors convey these emotions?

The families in this book live in four locations across the American Midwest and South. How do their varying environments affect their circumstances?

Much of the book focuses on the human suffering that accompanies $2-a-day poverty. Why is this such a central focus of the book? How do the authors highlight and draw attention to it?

There are several broad similarities in how extreme poverty affects the families in this book. All of them have experienced housing instability, for instance, and most of them have had to find unconventional ways to generate cash. What differences are there in the ways these families experience poverty? What are the reasons for those differences?