What if everything you knew about poverty was wrong?

Really interesting piece in Mother Jones about researchers who moved into the Camden NJ ghetto and stayed there for years:

Around that time, White discovered his girlfriend was pregnant. Ecstatic, he told his friends, “I just created a miracle!” White thought he’d overcome some pretty grim odds. “I’m going to be a dad, I’m 18, and I’m still alive! I’m passing a statistic,” he recalls.

White’s response to impending fatherhood was to look for an income. A number of the men in Edin’s book quit high school or college to work low-wage jobs trying to provide for their new children—giving up opportunities that would have helped them become better providers in the long run. Many turn to selling drugs because it pays better.

White began dealing as well. Eventually, he and his son’s mother split, and a few years later he had a daughter with another woman. But meanwhile, he’d started using drugs. At 24, he landed in a court-ordered drug treatment program and got clean. “My kids were my saviors,” he says. White’s girlfriend stuck with him, they had another daughter, and in 2006 they got married.

Today, White works full time at a screen-printing company, where he’s been for about 12 years, and spends his free time ferrying kids to sports practices and dentist appointments. He’s even got a house with a white fence—PVC, not picket—he put up himself.

Getting here hasn’t been easy. At one point, his first son’s mother, who now has two more kids, applied for welfare benefits. Even though White had always supported his son, the state automatically took him to court for child support, just as he got laid off from his truck-driving job.

His unemployment benefits were slow to come, so for about four months he had no income. The state threatened to revoke his commercial driver’s license. “My driving privilege was my job,” he says. He was able to pay in time to save his license, but the experience reinforced his sense that the welfare system “discourages a lot of guys from wanting to do the right thing. I’ve got family members right now who don’t even want to go work, because once child support gets done with their paycheck they’ve got $45, and that’s not enough to pay their bills,” he says.

Instead, they’re driven into the underground economy. “Don’t get me wrong,” White says. “There are some deadbeats out there that deserve that treatment. I’m not defending those guys. I’m defending the guys who actually take care of their kids regardless of a court order.”

As an academic, Edin generally shies away from policy recommendations. But she says the way to reunify families is not by beating up on men—particularly when the child support system doesn’t recognize the realities of the labor market. “To establish a set of policies that require you to be a superhero doesn’t make sense,” she says. “These men have a tremendous amount to contribute if we can just find a way.”

NOT EVERYONE COMES to the same conclusions. Ron Haskins, a Republican architect of the Clinton-era welfare reform, is an old friend of Edin’s but thinks she’s being too kind to her subjects. Her book, he says, is “extremely valuable. But I think she put the best possible face on these young men. I think it’s possible to be much less sympathetic than she is. Someone has to start demanding that these guys shape up.”

Nonetheless, her research may already be prompting some changes. Joe Jones is the founder of the nonprofit Center for Urban Families in Baltimore, which works with low-income men, and serves on Obama’s Taskforce on Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families. He says Edin’s work has helped inform his effort in Maryland to pass legislation overhauling the welfare system to focus not just on women and children, but on couples and joint parenting. The bill would also offer men more access to job training and other supports that now go almost exclusively to women.

Edin, for her part, is on to another project. This one involves scouring the streets of Cleveland alongside Nelson, on a pair of purple cruiser bikes, to find the growing population of Americans living on less than $2 a day—”a third-world measure of poverty in first-world America,” Edin says.

In this pursuit, Edin has become obsessed with plasma centers. She now spends hours sitting in her car outside one, watching people come and go. She has zeroed in on a mother with no teeth who has raised herself since age 12 and recently lost her Walmart job after her aunt’s car died and she missed work. Edin is talking to people so poor they’re dependent on barter because they never have cash. One man she met is raising 12 children—four from his first wife, who just died of cancer, plus one of hers from another partner; three by his second, estranged wife, plus three of her kids from a previous relationship, and her niece. Since he lost his house in an eviction, they’ve all been squashed into his parents’ three-bedroom home, and he’s on the verge of losing the kids to foster care for lack of a bigger place to live.

Edin wants to tell stories like these to a larger audience to show how many people are not just struggling, but falling through the cracks entirely. When you lose the kind of low-wage, part-time work that dominates in places like East Camden, there are rarely unemployment benefits to cushion the blow. Welfare has been decimated, and food stamps can’t buy diapers.

Over a steaming bowl of chicken soup near the Urban Promise headquarters in Camden, Nelson and Edin marvel at how little policymakers know about the economic realities that poor people face. “You hear people say there’s not material poverty in the US,” says Nelson; census data, the argument goes, shows that most of America’s poor have TVs and air conditioning. But Edin—who is writing her first mass-market book on extreme poverty with colleague Luke Shaefer—*says the people they’re finding in Cleveland and other study sites “aren’t in the census.” Even she has trouble keeping track of her subjects. “They can just fall right off the map,” she says.

This is one reason why “people have been lulled into complacency thinking poverty is solved.” With the new book, Edin says, “we’re hoping to stoke the American conscience. These people are not a dependent class. They’re trying to do the right thing.”