A Short Review of “The Working Poor Invisible in America” by David K Shipler Essay

The Working Poor Invisible in America is a book written in 2004 by American born David K Shipler. David combines researches and personal interviews to present the life stories and anecdotes of the people in America considered as the working poor. He illustrates by use of examples how the so called working poor struggle in their endeavors to escape poverty. Shipler illustrates several economic issues that make it hard for the working poor to overcome poverty. The examples Shipler uses in the book portray the working poor as people who live in very dangerous neighborhoods and who may never have had the opportunity to attend college. These people buy homes with the highest lead paint contamination that are priced cheaply. Due to the little money they have, renovating their homes or getting rid of the lead paint becomes hard and they have to sell the houses at lower prices, this makes their investment wasted in this kind of capital. The working poor lack other things in addition to capital or the power to purchase, such as human and social capital required for evading poverty. They face a higher rate of crime in their neighborhoods with dreadful living conditions. The high crime rate makes the working poor less concerned about the well being of each other, and the luck of care and trust make their neighborhoods inefficient economically. This makes it hard for them to have adequate human support and network from their communities to overcome poverty. It is hard for the working poor to acquire high paying jobs which can lift them up from their situations since they have no satisfactory technical skills or degrees.
The society does very little to elevate the working poor from their conditions. Normally, families considered to be for the working poor are headed by single mothers. These mothers cannot find proper child care services or inexpensive child care services and are most of the times forced to leave their jobs and go to do welfare. Even though the next working generation in the society will be brought by these caring mothers, they are not paid for their work and are even penalized for their care work. Frequently, single mothers find it hard to pay for their child care replacement cost, so they stay at home and take care of their children which in turn make them pay the cost of this by not earning income. As the US grows to be more industrialized, prices for child daycare services continues to increase, while goods production becomes inexpensive relatively. The name given to this phenomenon is Baumol effect, and several of the working poor are found at the short end of this effect since they must spend the highest percentage of the income they gather on such services as child care. This paper gives a detailed back story of how the working poor are in the contemporary society as compared to David Shilder's book and gives insight on how to change their conditions for the better.