It is important to recognize that what Edin and Shaefer call $2-a-day poverty doesn’t mean that their subjects really survive for long periods on nothing but $2 a day, and I fear that too many readers will be thrown off by this distinction. Do not go there, as it’s an unnecessary distraction. The authors explicitly acknowledge that no one could survive in this country if that was all they had to live on over an extended period. What they call “$2-a-day poverty” means spells of scraping by on almost no regular, reliable income, though many may be able to access the dicey income sources just noted above.

Edin and Shaefer calculate that “1.5 million households with roughly 3 million children were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day in any given month” in 2011. That’s about 4 percent of all families with kids, though once you start adding other resources, like the value of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as food stamps), that percentage declines. Though blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately likely to be deeply poor, half are white.

The book is also a policy critique, one which carefully follows the role of President Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare-reform initiative in the growth of deep poverty. Far from a dry recounting, Edin and Shaefer turn this history into a powerful story of the collision of politics, economics, and the real lives of poor families with kids.

Both for political and substantive reasons, candidate Clinton made the reform of cash welfare, the receipt of which wasn’t much conditioned on work, a key plank in his platform. As Edin and Shaefer stress, this was not a wholly conservative or even centrist position. Progressive scholars recognized that work had to be a ladder out of poverty, and were thinking about ways to facilitate that upward climb. Notably, this view is widely held by the working-age people in Edin and Shaefer’s sample. They want decent, steady jobs, and not just because the recognize work as an economic necessity but because of the dignity they believe it will bring to their lives as people and as parents.

There are numerous things that need to be in place for that to happen, i.e., for the deeply poor to be able to work their way up. First, there have to be enough jobs paying livable wages. Second, work supports, including affordable child care, are necessary. And third, any skill deficits must be closed. As one might expect, many of the subjects in the book have few marketable skills, but not all. One woman, a cashier at Walmart, handily memorized four-digit bar codes on dozens of common items. Based on her numerical acumen, she’s heading for a management position when she gets fired because one of the people she lives with used up all the gas and there was no money left to fill the tank.