Shipler introduces the subject of his study: the lives and experiences of America’s “working poor” (ix). He explains how people from all parts of America and from every ethnicity fare badly, regardless of the market’s performance, suffering “in good times and bad” (x). 

He describes how he followed his subjects from 1997 onwards, for six years, through major life events. He has purposely sought out case studies of people who live a little above or below the government’s official poverty line to illustrate the obstacles these marginalized people face as they attempt to escape poverty.

For Shipler, the term “poverty” is unsatisfying and cannot be delineated by the government’s limits on annual income because “more people than those officially designated as ‘poor’ are, in fact, weighed down with the troubles associated with poverty” (xi). Shipler’s definition of “poor” is deliberately imprecise, so as to encompass the lowest level of economic attainment and all of its accompanying problems.

While Shipler has tried to be demographically representative, he notes that most of working poor in the country are unmarried women with children. Importantly, there are no “composite characters” (xi) in the text; every person is real and is either introduced on a first name basis or given a

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