In the early 2010s, a study was conducted across the U.S. to get a sense of the levels of poverty in the nation. Staggeringly, in the supposed “wealthiest nation on Earth,” 1.5 million households were living on $2.00 a day, including over 3 million children.

These were families where people had jobs, often multiple jobs, working their hardest and longest, and still were unable to escape from this extreme poverty, despite doing everything in their power to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.”

Luke Shaefer was one of the conductors of this study and has dedicated his life to educating people about the effects and causes of extreme poverty in America.

As the longtime Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy and associate dean for research and policy engagement at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Luke’s work has been cited in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, The Atlantic, and Los Angeles Times, and he has been featured on such programs as Marketplace and CNBC's Nightly Business Report.

He compiled much of his research into the book $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, co-authored by Kathryn Edin. The book was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2015 by the New York Times Book Review and won the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism among other awards.

Poverty is a full-time job and isn’t something that just goes away when a worker clocks in for their job. Luke understands how the effects of poverty permeate every part of a person's life, and ultimately, how that affects our economy, society, and country as a whole.

In a time when power is shifting in the labor market, this is something that desperately needs to be talked about, so with that...let’s bring it in!