Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America, in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and the new working poor—tens of millions of people, their lives shaped by financial insecurity, paying the price for a fractured economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system.
In his new book, The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives, Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows and, ultimately, suggests ways for moving toward a more economically just social contract. Exploring everything from housing policy to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky explores pragmatic and imaginative solutions that, taken as a whole, amount to a blueprint for a reinvigorated War on Poverty and a reimagined sense of community.