As the previous reading by Shapiro demonstrated, the American Dream and accumulation of wealth have been difficult to obtain for many African Americans. They also have been impossible goals for the working poor. Instead, many poor people struggle to meet the economic requirements of everyday survival. In their 2013 book, Living on $2.00 a Day, Shaefer and Edin found a large rise in “extreme poverty,” which consists of households with children living on $2.00 a day or less between 1996 and 2011. In this reading, they explore the underlying dynamics of this phenomenon using both quantitative and qualitative data. Challenging conventional thinking, they find that the majority of children who live in these households that have less than $2.00 a day often have at least one parent working. The authors of this piece are Kathryn Edin, who is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Zanvyl Krieger School and Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University; H. Luke Shaefer, who is an associate professor of social work at the University of Michigan School of Social Work; and Elizabeth Talbert, who is a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University. This powerful excerpt from their research raises many questions about how unsuccessful many US policies are not only in terms of welfare and low but also in terms of how families and children are surviving in extreme poverty. wage work,