Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

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Today is February 24, 2010, and my guest is Katherine Newman, the Malcolm Stephenson Forbes

class of 1941, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She's the

author of many books. The one we'll talk about today is Schutz and Ladders, navigating

the low wage labor market, which came out in 2006. Katherine, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thank you, Russ. So, this book is an outgrowth of an earlier book you did and an earlier study

and research you did on the working poor. Talk about the field work you did and how the sample

was created. Who are the people you're going to be talking about and who you looked at?

In the middle of the 1990s, I got interested in the lives of the working poor because so much of

the research in my field on poverty focused on those who are part of the welfare system, which

has never been popular, even among people who are on welfare. And my feeling was that sociologists

and to large degree economists at well had really ignored the large number of poor people in the

United States that worked for a living in favor of studies that focused on the dynamics of the

welfare system. And because I was living on the upper west side of New York where I was teaching

at Columbia University, Harlem was right next door to me. In fact, I lived on the edge of Harlem.

And it was evident to me that people in Harlem were going to work in very large numbers. You

could see them every morning on their way to work. In neighborhoods that by any standard of

measurement would be regarded as very poor. You still had a very large number of workers. In fact,

...