Sasha Abramsky

Journalist Sasha Abramsky talks about what Americans fear, often irrationally, and what those fears tell us about ourselves. 

For the first installment of our series Strapped: A Look at Poverty in America, Sasha Abramsky, author of The American Way of Poverty, and Chris Wimer, researcher at Columbia Universty's Population Research Center, discuss how poverty is defined, and how that definition has changed—or remained stagnant—over time. They’ll also talk about what living in poverty means for individuals, families, and children, the ways of addressing poverty, and the successes and failures of the war on poverty in the 50 years since it was launched.

Poverty in America is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and the new working poor—the tens of millions seriously affected by the economic downturn and cutbacks in social welfare programs. Sasha Abramsky argues that for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm. He looks at economic inequality and poverty, and suggests ways for devising a fairer and more equitable social contract. In The American Way of Poverty, he looks at topics from housing policy to wage protections to affordable higher education, and calls political changes and a new, more effective War on Poverty.

Sasha Abramsky, journalist, senior fellow at Demos and author of Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It, says one in five Americans experiences "food insecurity." He talks about hunger in America--and how to fix it.