Hey, it's NPR's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The author Barbara Aaron Reich died earlier this month. If you don't know, she was an absolute beast at dismantling the phoniest aspects of our capitalist profit-driven society. Probably her best known book is Nickel and Dime from 2001. For it, she lived as a low-wage worker to see if it was really possible to make ends meet on that kind of paycheck. So she took house cleaning jobs and waitressing jobs and lived in crappy apartments, all to document the impossible bind that low-wage workers find themselves in. After the book came out, she spoke to NPR's John Idsty, who asked her, like, what can we do about this? You know, like, how can we help people in poverty? And the answers she gives are kind of frustrating. Not because they're bad answers. They're noble, almost predictable answers. It's just, I'm not sure how much progress we've really made on that front since the book came out.

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At the end of the new book, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Aaron Reich writes,

it is common among the non-poor to think of poverty as a sustainable condition,

austere, perhaps, but poor people get by somehow. What is harder for the non-poor to see is poverty

as acute distress. Ms. Arnreich got closer than most of the so-called non-poor to understanding what getting by somehow actually means in the United States.

She took a series of low-wage jobs, waitressing in Florida, for example, cleaning houses in Maine and working at a Walmart in Minnesota.

And what she experienced and wrote about, she calls a state of emergency.

Barbara Aaron Reich joins us here in the studio. Welcome.

Oh, glad to be with you.

Why did you decide to do this project?

Well, I thought it was a project that should be done.

I was talking to Lewis Laugh, I'm the editor of Harper's, and in the course of the conversation, I said, you know, some journalists ought to go out and do the old-fashioned kind of journalism and just try living on entry-level wages.

I had the back of my mind welfare reform and mothers of young children being kicked out into the workforce rather suddenly. How are they going to make it on six, seven, even eight dollars an hour?

Anyway, the editor of Harper said, it should be you. And there I was stuck. I talked my way into it. And it went from being an article to becoming a book.

And you had some ground rules for yourself.

The rules I made seemed simple enough to stick to when I started out.

One was that I had to find the cheapest place to live in that I could.

And two was that I had to take the best paying job that I could find.

And the third rule was that I had to really do my best, no fooling around on these jobs,

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