>> next up, booktv's "after words" program. kathryn edin talks about a growing number of american families surviving on virtually no income. she's interviewed by representative gwen moore, democrat of wisconsin. >> host: well, good -- well, hello, professor edin. >> guest: it's so is good to be here with you. >> host: well, it is fantastic to be with you to discuss your

book, "$2 a day, living almost nothing in america," co-authored by luke schafer. let me start out by thanking you -- >> guest: it was a labor of love. >> host: and the reason i need to thank you for writing the book, i think there are normative assumptions that most americans would not believe. and i would invite them to read your book. first of all, i think americans don't think that there are people who live off what the united nations describes -- >> guest: right. >> host: -- as extreme poverty in the world. they think people who are extremely poor are these little children we see on tv -- >> guest: right. >> host: starving to death and malnourished. they don't believe that people

in the united states live off $2 per person, per day. so that's one enlightening part of your book. >> guest: yeah. >> host: 1.5 million families, 3 million children. >> guest: that's right. >> host: another thing i think they won't believe is that most americans, according to you in this book, was it the general social survey says that 60-70% of americans think that we ought to provide more support to the poor. and yet when you, when you say that we need to provide more welfare assistance to them, then people sort of demure and think that that's not true. another normative assumption, why i'm so happy that you wrote the book, is that most people think of people who need public

support as being folks that ronald reagan described as the so-called welfare queens. >> guest: right. >> host: the woman that had, what, 80 names and 30 addresses -- >> guest: she was quite a character. and most of what, much of what reagan said about lynn taylor was not true. but years later when she was investigated, she was quite an impressive criminal. but hardly a traditional welfare recipient. >> host: right. and, of course, the most amazing thing before i get into some questions is that people who are poor want to work. >> guest: they do, indeed. >> host: i am just on a daily basis beaten over the head by my colleagues with notion that these are ne'er do well, lazy people who don't want to work, who are constantly lacking in

personal responsibility, and they don't want to work. they want to game the system. and in your book, you describe the eight folks here -- the 18 that you followed, but eight people in this book -- as people who were connected to the work force in some style throughout your study. so let's start with my first question. to -- you start the book out by describing, we talked about welfare reformers touting the success of welfare reform to. >> guest: that's right. >> host: and you said, and i need some clarification on this, that 58% of low income, single

mothers were employed by 2000. this was after the touted welfare reform of 1996. and then you say 75% of them were working. and child poverty rates fell four consecutive years around 1996. and, of course, democrats and republicans were taking their victory laps and have been since then talking about how well all these welfare leaders were. what happened? >> guest: so i just want to the give you a little bit of background so you know how i came to this topic. prior to welfare reform, i traveled the country asking low income single moms, welfare recipients, how they made ends meet. so i collected budgets from hundreds of single mothers and told a story in my first book with laura lane about how

welfare wasn't paying enough to survive, so you had to sort of work as well, but you couldn't tell the welfare office, or they would take away the money. so ever since then i've had sort of this mental calculator going off in my head. you know, after six years of asking people about, you know, their balance sheets, it's just automatic. and so when i, i studied poverty for quite a while, and then i went and studied urban families. and so in 2000 i sort of came back to the topic. and i was in baltimore interviewing young adults, and i began running across households for whom there was no visible means of support. i remember a young woman in latrobe homes, and if you know baltimore, you know it sits right in the shadow of, you know, the prison there downtown, this very old-looking structure.

and alicia just had a baby about three weeks ago. and i came to the house, and she was visibly depressed. there was no food in the house. there was only a table with one broken chair -- [laughter] and, you know, more worrying. there was no formula -- >> host: three-week-old baby. >> guest: and she was really having trouble sort of supporting the baby's head. so, you know, we said, gee, alicia, i think we need to interview you again, because i was concerned about the baby, and i thought maybe we could, you know, bring over some formula. so we gave her the $50 that we use, that we pay people, and lo and behold, we came the next day and alicia's just heading out the door. her hair had been permed, she looked terrific. she'd gone out to the goodwill and gotten a new pantsuit, and she was on her way out -- having

left baby with mom, to look for a job. >> host: wow. >> guest: and there was formula in the house. what we realized i think in that little moment, or what i realized -- this was before i met my co-author, luke schafer. he's the numbers guy, the one who analyzes this government survey is. but i realized that not only was it possible that a group of americans were living on incomes so low we didn't even as a nation think it was possible -- >> host: off the radar. >> guest: off the radar, but that cash had sort of a magical power. if you have no cash in the developing world, there's a rich barter economy that you can subsist on. it's not a pretty story, but a lot of transactions are done without cash. here we are in the world's

leading capitalist nation, and to not have cash is almost to not exist, to not be a citizen. and with that little infusion of cash, alicia, you know, felt, felt a sense of efficacy that allowed her to move ahead at least in some modest way. so this is where the nugget of $2 a day came, you know, just running into alicia. we then followed her over the next two years just watching her struggles. that was really the inspiration for this journey that has now led us to four other cities and through a a lot of number crunching to try to tell the story from both the statistical perspective so we can get a national portrait of $2-a-day poverty, but also in the very deep and human way that we felt it was necessary to tell the story. so americans could really think

through what does this mean. >> host: well, you know, you didn't -- this $2-a-day didn't, of course, interview the 1.5 million families that a you say live at these subsis tense levels, but you did make an effort to go beyond the urban experience. you went into ap appalachia, you went into the delta, the mississippi delta, and you went into cities like chicago and cleveland. and you even reference one of my favorite cities, milwaukee, wisconsin -- >> guest: great city. that's right. >> host: -- to gather these data to tell us what it's like toly off $-- to live off $2 per person,er day. and, you know, what we found with the recent recession -- >> guest: yeah. >> host: is that s.n.a.p. benefits, formerly called food

stamps, were the only form of income that some is people had. and you document that in this book. >> guest: that's right. >> host: so that, you know, people have s.n.a.p., but they didn't have money. and so you sort of talked about the difficulties that that provided even though we do know that that's the only income,you can call it that, that that presented. so could you just tell us a little bit about these folk who had nothing but s.n.a.p.? >> guest: about half of the $2 a day poor do get s.n.a.p.. the other half don't, interestingly, even though they're eligible. the half that do, you can actually see in the s.n.a.p. administrative data the exact same rise in households living without cash that we document with s.i.p., that's one interesting thing; you can just

see this rise since welfare reform in the number of people with s.n.a.p. who are telling the food stamp office, i have no income. >> host: but in a way, professor edin -- >> guest: yes. >> host: -- s.n.a.p. works. it's a countercyclical economy. i say to my colleagues all the time, this is a capitalist society. >> guest: right. >> host: and, you know, while it's not pleasant to have the great recession that we had in 2008, it's something that we can depend on happening in the kind of economy that we have. >> guest: that's correct. >> host: so that when there is no work, we have a social safety net. and s.n.a.p. served as that social safety net to provide people with something. >> guest: we see that in the recession. with our statistical analysis of the s.i.p., we see the protective, effective s.n.a.p. especially in the great recession. so if we counted s.n.a.p. as

cash which, you know, you may or may not want to do because, you know, reasons you know because you've read the book, and i can talk about in a minute, we can cut the amount of $2 after after day -- $2 a day poverty in half. and in many ways it's really the only social safety net we have left. and it's an incredibly important program. the reason i say, you know, you might not want to count s.n.a.p. as cash is when you don't have think cash and your kids need socks for school, they need a uniform to, they need a backpack, they need a change of underwear, you're going to need something fungible. and the bad part of s.n.a.p., of course, is that it's not fungible. so families do trade in s.n.a.p. for cash to provide essential goods for their kids, to keep the lights on. in jackson, mississippi, you know, in the delta outside of

jackson, mississippi, one of the only reasons -- ways you can, a lot of these households can keep the air-conditioning on is to sell the vast majority of their s.n.a.p.. now, what's the problem with that? s. n.a.p. doesn't cover all of the food a family needs in any case. so what you see in cases where families are selling s.n.a.p. are three weeks out of the month when the family -- if they have anything -- is eating, you know, the seven cent packs of ramen for every meal. ask, of course, you can -- and, of course, you can imagine the impact on hypertension and obesity and so on -- >> host: diabetes. >> guest: diabetes, all that sodium. >> host: well, you know, so you didn't find it was a matter of lack of personal responsibility.

you say, on page 45 of your book, that, quote: a lack of personal responsibility, blaming it on a lack of personal responsibility obscures the fact that there are powerful and ever-changing structural forces at play here. and then you start talking about how service sector employers often engage in practices that the middle class professionals would never accept. you say the job sets people up for failure. >> guest: yep. >> host: so i wanted to know, i wanted -- so here we are. we've got willie worker -- willing workers, people who want to work according to you, people who don't want to go on welfare according to your book. we talked about one of your recipients just refuses to go down to the tanf office, and

they want to work, but you say the jobs themselves set people up for failure. can you talk to us about that? >> guest: yeah. so if you -- one nice thing about having these government statistics is you can sort of play the stories and the numbers off against each oh. so you're -- each other. so you're talking about ray mccormack in cleveland, ohio, who still will not go on tnf. she sees herself as a worker. during the time we spent in cleveland, we began to ask who are the $2-a-day poor, and what is, yout( know, what can predica spell of $2-a-day poverty? are these long-term dependents who have just fallen off the welfare rolls, or is there another story? what we found was remarkable. over the prior two years, only 10% had claimed, you know, even a nickel from ting anf program.

-- tanf program. so our story is really one of people wanting to work, seeing themselves as workers, taking pride in thatç work status, eshooing welfare, thinking of welfare as something almost unacceptable, violates their sense of who they are. but yet, you know, the bottom of the labor market has become so degraded, and employers are eking out efficiencies from labor practices like on-call zero guarantee contracts. if the foot traffic slows you're sent home -- >> host: workloading. >> guest: exactly. >> host: just-in-time scheduling. i just wanted to know -- so just can you give us some examples of

this? >> guest: so just inform -- just this taoism scheduling is when you can't predict what your schedule is going to look like for maybe more than 48 hours. so if you're a mom with kids, it's very, very hard to pair these jobs with parenting. the other problem with these jobs, you know, the full time, zero-hour contract is that you never know what your income is going to be. so it's impossible to plan. the unpredictability of work means it's very difficult to take a second job. so working double shifts becomes almost impossible when you can't predict what shift you'll be on in the first job. >> host: so they say to you, you're a daycare worker, you're a waitress in a restaurant, you are to be on call for saturday afternoon so, therefore, you can't, you know, babysit or hair

in the informal economy on saturday afternoon, because you have to be available to go to work. and if they don't call you to work, then you don't get paid. >> guest: you don't get paid. exactly. >> host: and so you can't predict your income. and these are regular work practices by some of the large employers. you also talked about people not having safe work conditions. you know, working in -- >> guest: oh. this is jennifer hernandez has maybe the worst job in the book. >> host: yes. >> guest: she gets a custodial job after being homeless on and off for three years. she finally lands this job at chicago custodial. she's got these two little kids. she and both kids have asthma. so she goes to work for chicago city, and at first she's cleaning corporate apartment buildings, but then the work

slows, winter sets in, and suddenly the only contracts the company's pulling in are in foreclosed houses on chicago's south side. so, of course, there's no heat in these homes, there's no our. the crew from chicago city arrives, they unlock the door, you know, there might be vermin in there, they never know whether this is being used as, you know, as a shelter for wildlife -- [laughter] or a drug den. >> host: yeah, yeah, yeah. >> guest: you know, there's broken glass, and they're expected to clean up these places. you know, they're hauling water from the local restaurant, they're scrubbing in these, you know, in these frigid homes until the skin is just sort of, you know, falling off their hands. and, of course, jennifer begins suffering for asthma because of all of the mold and other toxins that she's exposed to in these homes. and so then she gets sick, the can kids get sick, and they end

up just in this cycle of illness. and as she comes to work anyway, but her employer says you're going to get the rest of the crew sick, you go home. but the employer then punishes her by giving her less than full-time hours. by the end of her work there, she's only getting half-time hours. she knows it'll take months to find another job, so she leaves chicago city so she'll have time, right? she'll have time to search for another job. butç heene while, the whole family, of course -- meanwhile, the whole family, of course, has been in and out of the hospital with these sort of repeated asthma attacks exacerbated by, youç know, by jennifer sort of wringing sickness -- >> host: and so, you know, like you said, middle class workers wouldn'tñr tolerate this, becaue they have osha and other work protections and so on. >> guest: right. >> host: wageçe1 theft -- >> guest: wage theft. >> host: you talk about wage theft as something that, you

know, we just say, hey, if they had better character, if they would accept responsibility, they would do well. we know they don't have a pension, we know often that they don't have health insurance, but these are things that people don't think about. they take a safe working environment for granted. what is wage theft? >> guest: so common practice is with hotel maids. so you're told you have to clean a room befe you clock in. >> host: yeah. >> guest: so you've put in 45 minutes before you're even allowed to clock in, and then you're paid minimum wage. so these kinds of practices where you're paid said minimum wage or you're forced to clock in or clock out -- clock in or clock out in ways that don't capture the full day, working overtime, but -- this also happened to jennifer at the spa

where she was working downtown. she was working 10, 12 hours a day and not being paid overtime. wage theft is a huge problem in our country, and it's something that, you know, not often talked about. but very real. >> host: so let's talk about things that middle class families may be able to take for granted or maybe not. personal days, sick leave, a perm day. i want to -- a personal day. i want to talk specifically about the employee of the month -- >> guest: oh, yes. >> host: awardee had been cited for being the employee of the month. >> guest: yes. she's an amazing woman. her name is ray mccormack, and she has a beautiful little daughter. and she gets -- she worked at

kmart for years. loves kmart, even though kmart never gives her more than part-time hours. but kmart closes done when a super walmart comes to the neighborhood. so she searches and finds a job at wal-mart. and she's, you know, again, i can't emphasize enough how important work is in the lives of these folks. she decides that she's going to memorize all of the war codes on -- bar codes on the produce item was that's what -- because that's what takes the longest to key in. she devises this method -- and by the way, this woman is so poor and so neglected that by the time she's 19 years old, she no longer has teeth. we're talking a deeply poor young woman from a deeply poor family. anyway, she reads, reads the bar code numbers into her recording device on her cell phone, and then when she goes home at night, she turns it on in

endless repeat add she sleeps. -- as she sleeps. and she's able to memorize an amazing amount of -- >> host: makes her the fastest. >> guest: and she prefers the day shift because she likes to work hard, and the night shift actually pays a dollar more, but she doesn't like to be bored, she likes to be busy. she has so many medications that, you know, she has sort of a special place in the employee locker room, you know, to keep her meds, and the bosses know, you know, she's -- sometimes she's going to have to go and get her meds, especially her asthma meds. but she's working. and then she's living with extended family in kind of an exploitive situation where she has to turn over a lot of her pay in return for use of the car. so her pay is supposed to pay for the use of the car and the gas.

so she's just made that payment. she's just gassed up the car and just made the payment to this extended family member, george, who's sort of her landlord, and she gets in the car on monday morning, and, you know, there's no gas. [laughter] she has no money left. she's given it all to george. george says, well, i spent all your money, you know? paying the rent here and doing other things. and so she's frantic. she is furious. and, you know, she's up in detroit, and the store's all the way down in parma. it would take three hours to get there by the bus. cleveland doesn't have the best transit system. she calls her manager after winning employee of the month twice in six months, and he says, well, if you can't find a way to get to work, just don't bother. >> host: and she lost her job. >> >> guest: she lost her job. >> host: she lost a minimum wage job, and she didn't have a

personal day that all of us can take for granted -- >> guest: exactly. >> host: -- if we were to have in this sort of emergency. >> guest: so there's no give. and that's another critical feature of these jobs, is you have people who have lives, you know, that require give. and you have a low-wage labor market that increasingly has no reason to give you give, because there's ten people lined up if or your job -- up for your job. >> host: well, you know, you talked a little bit, you talked a lot about the housing situations that people who are a part of this $2-a-day per person are subjected to. you say a lot of them double up with other family members. well, you know, that ought to be the charm. you've got, you know, some poor people who live with other poor people, they're able to share a pot, share a house and make it. so what did you find in your research? with these families?

>> guest: that can be true. since family is the first line of defense, and we spend quite a bit of time talking about paul who becomes the shelter in the storm for this extended family who are all in the pizza business together when all of their stores go bust at the same time. here's a whole family business that goes belly up in, i believe, 2009. and everyone ends up at paul's house. we tell the story of how this little two-bedroom house there on the west side of cleveland is just crawling with people, six to a room, beds everywhere. [laughter] and i met, i met paul at a food pantry in cleveland, and he was there with 12 of his grandkids, and i didn't realize there were another 8 living at the house. so that was a real protective

thing. but we can contrast that then to the story of what happened with jennifer hernandez when she doubled up with a relative from texas where she had grown up as a child and where her mother had grown up and what happens with jennifer. and jennifer has multiple double-ups, each of which sort of end in disaster because, you know, often times what sort of seals your fate is you've got something disfunctional in your family network. that's part of this noxious stew that creates the disadvantage. so anyway, of course, in jennifer's case her beautiful little girl ends up being molested by george, and they flee to a goodwill that makes a bedroom for them out of an office because it's a men's shelter.

they go to the police and, of course, the entire family turns their back on jennifer for reporting this uncle who, you know, who manages a country club -- she broke the family up, exactly. we see a similar story with madonna harris and her little girl, brianna. they're doubled up with her mother, and she has a foster sister thatç just taunts her. and brianna ends up in a psychiatric ward after this other little girl just -- it's so humiliating to be this poor, and, you know, little brianna was just so ashamed. there was so many times -- they'd been in the shelter for about three years before they

landed in this situation. so when the cousin taunts her and ridicules her again and again, she loses it and ends up spending a month in a psychiatric hospital. >> host: one of the things i found really heart wrenching was when a mother -- alva, i believe it is -- >> guest: yes. >> host: -- had aç much younger boyfriend/husband, and he was an abusive partner and made her choose between him and one of her other kids and made the mom put her daughter out. >> guest: yeah. so this is the story of tabitha, who i think is the real, the star of the book in many ways. she's this exceptional 18-year-old with such -- who is -- >> host: resilience. >> guest: resilience and capacity to really think and reflect on her situation in ways you almost never see. but in any case, cliff is this -- >> host: yeah, cliff.

>> guest: yeah. so there are five kids along with tabitha who are from dad one who they divorce, and she marries -- i don't think they marry -- >> host: right. >> guest: she gets together with cliff, and i believe they have nine more children. and cliff is a farm worker, you know, down in the delta there. he works on again/off again as a poorly-paid farmhand. he's an alcoholic and a drug addict and just brutally abusive. and, in fact, when you go over to their house, you know, you'll notice that half the windows are boarded up. well, this is because whenever they lock him out, he just stomps, you know, stomps his fist -- his foot through the window and comes in. but in any case, the kids are really always trying to defend their mother against cliff. and one day a big fight breaks

out, and she runs to this sort of juke joint/convenience store/liquor store down the road, and he chases her, and the kids follow. and there's this confrontation between tabitha and cliff. and cliff says to alva may, you've got to choose. and alva says, you know, honey, why don't you go live with a friend of yours for a while. >> host: well, i can tell you that, you know, when you talk about their need for money, i guess rent is one of the things you can't pay for with s.n.a.p -- >> guest: that's right. >> host: -- you can't pay for without money. and you started out by talking about how a lot of your passion for this subject started with cabrini green, your research in the projects. and, of course, a lot of us were

jubilant about them tearing down a lot of the so-called projects -- >> guest: right. >> host: -- because we thought that they were just crucibles for crime and other sorts of -- >> guest: yeah. >> host: -- social ills. but we now are experiencing a real dearth in affordable housing. and not only that, your book talks about between 1990 and 2013 rents grew faster than inflation. in every region of the country by 6%. and then real income dropped by, at 13%. the housing and urban development data says that we should spend no more than 30% on housing, and i guess that would include electricity and so forth. people are finding themselves, even those who are not living on $2 per person, per day spending 50-70% of their income on housing. >> guest: yes. >> host: so just by definition

people who have no money are at risk for being homeless, for having to double up with unscrupulous relatives who move from couch to couch to couch, salvation army. you talk about several of these people really using the library system to have a clean bathroom to clean up in, and that is a real struggle, having just some solid housing so that when you're part of the $2 per person, per day group, housing really becomes one of major struggles. and the ability to protect your family becomes impossible. and just having a launching pad -- >> guest: right. >> host: -- to get to work, i mean. where do you -- >> guest: yeah. >> host: what's your address? >> guest: we have a chapter, as you know, called a room of one's

own which is really what rae dreams of for her little daughter. and she fantasizes about the time when she'll have a place of her own, and she'll be able to get it, create a decked-out dora the explorer room -- [laughter] for her daughter with the princess bed and the poster and the special blankets and the canopy. this is her fantasy, this idea that someday i'm going to have a home of my own. it is true that rents have risen. we argue that the affordability crisis is at least as much as falling wages as it is about rising rents. but the combination of the two is really toxic for families. so it, you know, to describe to you the constellation of the home rae was living with when we left her in the book -- of course, we've been in touch with

her since -- is, let me try to paint the picture. so she's live anything a neighborhood in cleveland called stockton. it's a poor white neighborhood on the west side. the house that they rented from an unscrupulous landlord was completely stripped of most of its wiring and copper pipes in the time between the old tenants moving out and they moving in. so a scrapper came and, you know, in the middle of night and ripped everything out. they moved in not quite realizing this, they were desperate, and the landlord, of course, refused to fix anything. so you have rae and her little daughter, you have george this sort of unscrupulous, you know, kind of an unscrupulous guy who basically takes in ssi borders then collects their checks in

full in return for his kind of running an ssi boarding house -- >> host: so what you're saying is poor people become victims to real predators -- >> guest: yes. >> host: landlords, employers. >> guest: right. >> host: there's this whole subculture of people -- >> guest: right. >> host: -- who take advantage of how vulnerable people with no money are. >> guest: yeah. so she's with george. his wife, camilla, who is a chain smoker -- [laughter] then there's big art, an elderly, disabled man who's incontinent -- very sad story, very sick. there's a young disabled couple who both have profound mental disabilities, and then there's two stray boys whose mother drops them off one day for a play date and doesn't come back. and there's no running water, so they have to go down to the basement, haul up water there a broken pipe. there's one outlet that still works upstairs, and so there are just cords running everywhere --

creating an incredible fire hazard. especially in a neighborhood where all the homes are built out of wood. so, yes, exactly. this is the kind of mutual exploitation that goes on on the bottom when everybody doesn't have enough for anybody. and so the way to get by is to -- it's kind of the op set, i guess, of the -- opposite, i guess, of the image we have of the happy poor who are sharing and supporting. it's a much darker picture than that. >> host: so, you know, i just want to get backxwa little bit before we wrap it up and sort of think about what, where we ought to go from here and talk about the character of the to people in the -- of the people in the book. it's just, you know, it was amazing to me that you developed enough trust and confidence with many of people to admit that

they participated in anxdç infol economy, that they didko things that were, you know, illegal, immoral, and, of course, that sort of tracks with what a lot of people think about poor people anyway. that they are lacking in character. and i was wondering why we shouldn't judge them and say that it's their lack of personal responsibility and character that got them this situation in the first place? how do we, how do we connect their worthiness with their behavior? >> guest: so one thing i think that the book does8(zq you don't often see is it -- we follow theseç families for several years each. i mean, we -- [laughter] it was an incredibly intense experience, doing the research.

an incredible privilege, frankly. but by sort of seeing these people as people over a long period of time, it really allowed you to understand the conditions under which they were willing to do something. so you saw, for example, that jennifer hernandez would only sell her food stamps -- an act she felt was deeply immoral -- when not doing so would have threatened the well being of her kids. >> host: the lights would be turned out. >> guest: the lights would be turned out. the only time alva sold food stamps for that very large family who was the hungriest family you've ever met, you know? was when she had to pay to keep the electricity on. so, you know, in this little town in mississippi, right, within six months the temperature had gone from 9 degrees to 109 degrees. so living without power in that kind of, in that kind of environment is not safe.

especially when you have young children at home. and so this was very important to the narrative, because you don't want to, you know, you don't want to take your subjects' word at face value. you need to watch and observe, and you need to ask the questions that you know, you know, people watching c-span or, you know, we've got fox news here in the building or msnbc would ask. and you need to explore those things over time as you sort of watch and live life with these folks. and i think in the end reader can judge for themselves, because they learn a lot about these people. but my sense as a researcher coming out of this experience was a profound sense of there but for the grace of god go i.

of course, i would do these things if i had to insure that my child, you know, wasn't ridiculed at school. >> host: right. exactly. well, i can tell you that, you know, some of the things that struck me were the conclusions that you reached. you know, obviously, you thought that job creation was very important and, of course, all politicians talk about, well, we these to create jobs and create better jobs. obviously, raising the minimum wage is an obvious sort of solution. and your book really recites those data that suggests it doesn't destroy the economy -- >> guest: right. >> host: -- to do that. but many of the folk here don't have the skill set, quite

frankly, to take on a new economy. you talked about the situation in the delta and talked about how there's a lot of automated agricultural techniques -- >> guest: right. >> host: and so a lot of the jobs had been lost to technology. and it wasn't just that there were individual families that were poor, the entire community was impoverished by the dearth of jobs and money within that community. so i guess, i guess there are a couple of, you know, what do do you suggest -- >> guest: okay. >> host: i guess the conclusion that you work is we shouldn't go back to just afdc -- >> guest: that's right. >> host: although you were very, very critical of, you know, starting from ronald reagan all

the way through to ending welfare in 1996. you were very critical of people who you say didn't reform welfare, they killed it. >> guest: they did, indeed. >> host: and we don't have are a social safety net -- have a social safety net with money. you describe all of these people, but then you say we shouldn't go back -- >> guest: that's right. >> host: -- to afdc. >> guest: so i think we learned a fundamental truth by talking to these people and, you know, hearing sort of how they think about the world. we do sort of pin the rose of $2-a-day poverty on welfare reform, but none of our respondents think welfare is the answer. [laughter] they want to work. they see themselves as workers. in some ways welfare reform created $2 after -- $2-a-day poverty, but it also kind of made a bargain with people at the bottom. it said that the if you, you

know, the name of the act was personal responsibility and work opportunity act. if you engage in personal responsibility, we'll give you the work opportunity. so as we showed, people have entered the labor market. they full tilled their part of the -- fulfilled their part of the bargain. there is simply not enough work to go around. and not just in he's, but even in -- in mississippi, but even in chicago which is, you know, a boom town in comparison to mississippi. there's not enough work in johnson city, tennessee, or in cleveland, ohio, and certainly not enough full-time, full-year, stable work. and automation is likely to make this worse. so when a lot of economists look at this, they say, well, maybe we should create a credit system. but that seems that went against

what our respondents wanted. they wanted to work. even if, you know, mary in the last chapter from the delta can't stand on her feet for more than 20 minutes, she doesn't want to be on ssi. she wants a job, you know? and, you know, if you look around america, even though these folks are generally low-skilled, there is so much work to be done. you know, we don't have enough after school programs, you know? our streets are full of litter. national parks aren't able to open all year round. our libraries are short staffed. we can't open our recking ration centerings. -- recreation centers. so what we really call for is a radical rethinking of what it means to guarantee work opportunity. and we think that given american culture, given the fact that we're in a country where work equals citizenship and everybody buys that, that we need to find ways of connecting people with

opportunities -- >> host: sort of like the old work programs that we saw back during the depression? >> guest: that's right. that's right. so can we think about ways either through stimulating employers -- and we have proposals this the last chapter for how you can stimulate the private sector to provide more of these jobs and the public sector to really make sure that every american who wants to work can get a job. now, we do say, you know, we do need a functioning safety net. there will always be times in which somebody won't be able to work for some reason. so we need to restore tanf as a supple, responsive, guaranteed short-term, short-term way to address some of the conditions we see. >> host: it's just not, tanf is

just not structured correctly. >> guest: it really isn't. >> host: with all of is -- all of the complaints that people had about afdc, you know, during the great recession, that's the timeu! when we should have expected the tanf rolls to go up, and they didn't. >> guest: that was really -- >> host: and they didn't, one of the reasons that you really raised in your book is that we provide a block grant, a flat grant of $16.5 billion for tanf. and because of the so-called flexibility that everyone touts, about 11 billion -- did i read this right? >> guest: yes, that's right. of. >> host: about $11 billion of this goes towards that flexibility. and so there's a real perverse incentive not to actually provide the money to the poor. >> guest: that's right. >> host: you know, you can balance your state budget with the $11 billion, you can shore

up your childcare system so that people can do job search which may not lead to actually finding a job, you can use this flexibility in ways and just simply divert the poor away from the benefits that they, that they provide. thank you for writing this book. and i guess i just wanted you to sort of wrap it up. i really commend this book to those in the audience. and especially to those people who are truly in search for a model that can ameliorate poverty. and i commend this book to those hard-nosed folks who just believe that if welfare recipients would just get up off their dusty crusties, they could

find work. [laughter] sometimes there is no work when there is work, it pays substandard wages. it doesn't provide the work protections. and our housing policy really needs to be fortified. and so i just want to make sure, professor edin, in the last few minutes that we have together, that you share with me any, you know, the takeaways that we ought to get from this book that will help us and help me, people like me with developing public policy going forward. we're probably going to reauthorize tanf. what would you put out there as some of the main guide posts that we ought to do? >> guest: well, first -- >> host: look toward? >> guest: the biggest sort of proof of the dignity of these folks is that they do refuse to take tanf even though they're eligible, you know? they're too proud to go to tanf.

[laughter] >> host: right. >> guest: i think that's really something, you know? that they brand work as so important that they can't, they can't sacrifice this worker identity, you know, and go stand in that line that i stood in with ma donna harris -- madonna harris as she was convinced that they didn't give out out anymore. i think the main takeaway here is that we have an unfished revolution -- unfinished revolution. welfare reform put a lot of people to work. that's a good thing, right? >> host: that's a good thing. >> guest: that's a very good thing. but because of changes in the labor market that maybe, you know, the crafters of welfare reform couldn't have foreseen, i mean, ai%ju of what's happened to the labor market is new. we've got this rising group of children. if you kind of add it all up and you look at how many children in america are spending at least four months in a calendar year

in this condition, you know, it's 3.3 million. >> host: wow. >> guest: that is as many children as we rescue from poverty with tax credits. so it's a big group of kids. and given the stories in this book, given what families have to go through when they're in that condition, it's likely going to be a very expensive group of children moving forward. so we have to do something, but we have to pay attention to what the poor want more than anything else. and really their ambitions are so endearingly modest, you know? $12, $13 an hour, a job you can count on, full-time hours, you know? health. they don't even think about personal days. they've never had a job like that. so what they want is modest. and, you know, if somebody is willing to work and play by the rules, shouldn't they have the

opportunity to achieve that modest dream? >> host: thank you so much for this. this is, again, i cannot stop thanking you. i will be quoting you over and over again, $2 a day. and one of the things that you said that, you know, we owe it to their children, because it is going to cost us so much more to not provide these kids with parents who have the capacity to parent be them. >> guest: yeah. right. >> host: and so it's a lot less expensive to give people just basic dignity. thanks. >> guest: pleasure. >> host: ooh, a pleasure. [laughter]

>> that was "after words," booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policymakers and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday and 12 a.m. on monday. and you can also watch "after words" online. go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. lissa warren is with decap poe press. what, first of all, is decap poe? >> guest: we are a company that focuses on nonfiction titles, very strong in the areas of history, entertainment, sports, and we have a lifelong wellness interest. >> host: what does it mean? >> guest: it's a