Portfolios of the Poor but covering the US?

October 12, 2012 12:58 PM

The book Portfolios of the Poor details the financial lives of people living on less than $2/day. Where can I find similar studies/narratives/stories about poor people in the US?

The book's authors asked their subjects to complete financial diaries tracking income, expenses and transactions over a several month period and conducted a series of interviews to learn about each household's finances. Surely someone has done that same work in the US with people from a variety of income levels? My Googling found one study that is currently being conducted but nothing published.

posted by ChrisHartley to Work & Money (10 answers total)

Are you looking explicitly for financial stories, or just general stories about low-income people?

For more general stories, I highly recommend both Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and Michael Harrigton's The Other America, which was written in the early '60s but is sadly still tremendously relevant today.
posted by anotheraccount at 1:10 PM on October 12, 2012

Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work. And an article version; see Table 1.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:11 PM on October 12, 2012

It's not quite as detailed as your query, but try Off The Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor for a similar sort of story.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 1:19 PM on October 12, 2012

Response by poster: Thank you for the answers. The more financially detailed the better but I appreciate all suggestions.
posted by ChrisHartley at 1:33 PM on October 12, 2012

Tell Them Who I Am is about the lives of homeless women. It does talk some about finances as that is very relevant to their circumstances, but it is not as financially detailed as your initial example sounds.
posted by Michele in California at 1:47 PM on October 12, 2012

The Working Poor: Invisible in America is a depressingly thorough look at the finances of low-wage workers.
posted by Snarl Furillo at 1:51 PM on October 12, 2012 [1 favorite]

You may have already read this, but while Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich, is probably not quite as detailed as you're looking for, it breaks down the financial necessities and hardships of working class life in a vivid and unforgettable way.
posted by artemisia at 2:46 PM on October 12, 2012

Best answer: Presumably this is the in-process project you found? It's certainly the closest.

The ethnographic work that comes to mind is Jobs Aren't Enough: Toward a New Economic Mobility for Low-Income Families which looks at work histories for 25 low income families.

Jennifer Romich's work on effective marginal tax rates includes some balance sheet case studies.

If you're interested in broadening your search to studies that use survey data, the major surveys are the Survey of Consumer Finances , the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (which is longitundinal). Anyone doing serious ethnographic work on this topic would probably also be looking at that survey data for context. There's also the Consumer Expenditure Survey; this paper zeros in on low-income households using data from that survey.
posted by yarrow at 2:51 PM on October 12, 2012 [1 favorite]

Not really your target, but Poor People by William T. Vollmann was fantastic. It is more an extended essay, with impressionistic and journalistic profiles and precious few numbers. Its style takes getting used to, but it's as devastating a read as I know.
posted by mahorn at 8:35 PM on October 12, 2012

Response by poster: Thank you for the suggestions. It looks like there isn't an exact analogue except the US Financial Diaries which I found previously and yarrow linked. They say they will start publishing Mid-2012 so I guess I'll join their mailing list and wait. In the mean time I'll delve in to the books and surveys linked.
posted by ChrisHartley at 7:31 AM on October 15, 2012