Shipler shows how desperate circumstances such as having insufficient funds to pay a bill before payday make people vulnerable to 'loan sharks,' who promise immediate relief in exchange for further debt. Crucially, he challenges the stereotype of the 'invisible' poor by populating his study with individual faces, personalities, and experiences.Ĭhapters 1 and 2 highlight the precariousness of the poor in financial matters.

In each chapter, Shipler examines a different factor that contributes to a low standard of living while acknowledging that such factors are interrelated and hardship in one area of life can cause and augment troubles in another. Moreover, while affluent Americans thrive and suffer according to the economy’s fluctuations, poorer Americans endure hardship in both good and bad times, a factor that further enhances their separation from the rest of the country.

Their stories of demonstrating hard work while remaining trapped in a low socio-economic position challenge the country’s prevailing American Dream narrative, whereby anyone with enough initiative and perseverance can defy the circumstances of their birth. He argues that both through oversight and the shame that comes with not being able to make ends meet, the difficulties of the poor are invisible to the rest of the country. In 1997, “as America’s prosperity soared” (ix), Shipler undertook a six-year study of the people who had been left behind. The book’s aim is to discover, analyze, and expose the lives of the people who do work that is essential to America’s comfort and prosperity but who do not share in it. He wrote the 2004 national bestseller The Working Poor: Invisible in America. Shipler is a former New York Times correspondent and a 1987 Pulitzer Prizewinner who has authored nonfiction books on global politics, civil liberties, and racial inequality.

The working poor shipler