Poverty: Everything you thought about poverty is wrong.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/03/kathryn-edin-poverty-research-fatherhood

A sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, Edin is one of the nation's preeminent poverty researchers. She has spent much of the past several decades studying some of the country's most dangerous, impoverished neighborhoods. But unlike academics who draw conclusions about poverty from the ivory tower, Edin has gotten up close and personal with the people she studies—and in the process has shattered many myths about the poor, rocking sociology and public-policy circles.

10 Poverty Myths, Busted

1. Absent dads are the problem. Sixty percent of low-income dads see at least one of their children daily.

2. Single moms are the problem. Only 9 percent of low-income, urban moms have been single throughout their child's first five years.

3. Handouts are bankrupting us. In 2012, total welfare funding was 0.47 percent of the federal budget.

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For three years Edin lived with her family in a studio apartment smack in between the two crime scenes we just passed and a few blocks from one of the city's largest and most notorious public housing projects. Here she spent years doing intensive fieldwork for her latest book, coauthored with husband and Johns Hopkins colleague Tim Nelson, on low-income, unwed fathers. Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City is a complicated portrait of a group of people all but ignored by statistics-driven social-science research—in large part because there's little ready-made data about them.