In September, $2.00 A Day, written by Shaefer and Johns Hopkins prof Kathryn Edin, was published to much acclaim–the New York Times Book Review compared it to Michael Harrington’s 1962 classic The Other America. Shaefer says that he and Edin have met with Ohio senator Sherrod Brown and are slated to testify before the Senate Finance Committee “on the hard experiences of families living in $2-a-day poverty.”

Their collaboration started in 2011, when Shaefer was a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Edin was on the Harvard faculty. Edin had been struck by how many of her research subjects lived in households with a cash income of $2 or less per person daily. She enlisted Shaefer, an expert on the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, to find out how many American households lived below that line.

When Shaefer crunched the numbers, he came up with a shocking statistic: since the 1996 welfare reform law limited federally funded benefits to a maximum of five years, the number of extremely poor households has doubled, to 1.5 million.

The book combines historical and statistical perspective on poverty in America with accounts of the lives of eight desperately poor families. Edin and Shaefer, now thirty-six, interviewed families in Appalachian Tennessee, the Mississippi Delta, Cleveland, and Chicago.

His first day of research, in Chicago, Shaefer interviewed four families–and wept in his hotel room that night. He was particularly moved because one of the children he’d met was about the same age as his daughter, then three. “I just sort of choked up, thinking they could be best friends and their lives could be completely different.”

An Ann Arbor native, Shaefer attended Gabriel Richard High School, where he met his future wife, Susie Hernandez. A talented student, he played sports and was active in the youth group at St. Clare’s Episcopal Church. But, unlike many classmates, he knew something about financial struggle. His father’s midlife career change–he left the Episcopalian priesthood and struggled before finding a job in computers–meant that the family had to pinch pennies. They lived in a small house in the Bryant-Pattengill neighborhood. “But my extended family had money,” he says, and helped them get by.

He got his undergrad degree at Oberlin and his master’s and PhD at the University of Chicago before returning to take a tenure-track job at Michigan. With his personal background, he says, he felt “I could be a useful go-between in maybe helping the broader population understand what was going on with struggling families.”

Readers have told Shaefer they were especially shocked to learn how many people sell blood plasma for cash. “There’s something personal about blood,” Shaefer reflects. Yet selling plasma is so common, he says, that he and Edin learned to recognize the scars along the creases of their interviewees’ elbows “from so many needle pricks.” Readers also reacted strongly to the story of “Tabitha,” a teenager in the Mississippi Delta who agreed to have sex with a teacher to get money to feed her younger siblings.

The book’s final chapter plays out possible responses to the rise in extreme poverty the authors identified. Shaefer calls it “the toughest chapter” to write, because welfare programs are the kindling for political brush fires. In their research, they met people so eager to work they took deplorable jobs, like cleaning out filthy, freezing foreclosed homes in the Chicago winter. But many jobs pay so little or have such irregular hours that families must double up with relatives to live and rely on federal food aid and charity pantries to eat. The authors suggest possible responses ranging from subsidizing private-sector jobs to requiring chain stores to post work schedules in advance so workers can arrange transportation, childcare, and doctors’ appointments.

Shaefer says that the “hidden” quality of American poverty makes it easy for middle-class Americans to ignore it. In Ann Arbor, he says, “I could go about my daily life without ever seeing anyone who’s struggling.”

But even here, he sometimes catches glimpses of extreme poverty. The Burns Park resident took a bus ride with his two kids recently and was struck by the sight of disheveled passengers who looked like they “had been living on the bus a couple of days.”

Poverty is out there, he says, “but life is organized in a way that we cannot see it.” He’s hoping the book might help change that.