Unit Introduction and What You Will Learn

Week five includes an in-person class session on Saturday (06/27/26). In $2.00 a Day, Edin and Shaefer (2016) shift toward the work of survival that can be so consuming for people living on the margins. There is a forum to consider potential policies that could support this population or reflect on the systemic nature of this poverty. Linquiti’s (2022) reading is focused on the characteristics that make up an effective policy analyst. Students will engage in several forums this week—developing and sharing their own Fermi Cheat Sheets, responding to applied policy discussion questions, and critically examining what it means to “deconstruct” a policy claim. During the in-person class session, we will consider this practice with constructing and deconstructing policy claims and understanding the characteristics of an effective policy analyst.

Unit Assignments

Read

• Edin and Shafer (2016) Chapter 4: By Any Means Necessary
• Linquiti (2022) Chapter 7: The Mindset of an Effective Policy Analyst

W-05 A-01 Asynchronous Participation and Engagement

The expectation is that each of your replies will be substantive and provide meaningful perspectives, contributing to the forum’s conversation and scholarship. They can be related to the prompts or building on conversations shared by peers. There are four forums for this week, and you are expected to make at least 3 replies across any of the forums. These forums include the following:

• Drawing from $2.00 a Day, the Policy Connection to Those Living on $2 Per Day forum invites students to reflect on the structural nature of extreme poverty and consider potential policy responses using Linquiti’s policy claim framework.
• Through the Deconstructing and Critiquing Policy Claims forum, students are encouraged to engage more critically with the foundations of policy analysis by exploring alternative approaches like decolonization, critique, or defamiliarization.
• The Develop and Share a Fermi Cheat Sheet forum gives students the opportunity to apply Fermi estimation techniques by creating a cheat sheet on a topic of their choice, helping them practice data-informed reasoning for complex policy questions.
• In t
• he Chapter Seven Discussion Questions forum, students select from a range of applied prompts provided by Linquiti to sharpen their skills in making policy claims, critiquing arguments, and estimating outcomes under time constraints.

A-02 Attendance and In Class Participation

Attend and engage in class this Saturday.

Unit Resources

You can listen to a podcast episode for this week’s reading Chapter 7: The Mindset of an Effective Policy Analyst, or see the entire series Podcast Series.

During class I show this short video from Wealth Inequality in America (Politizane, 2012).

I also share short by a creator, Whisper Pickle, but it seems no long available. you can see similar content, of Humphrey Yang showing what a billion¹ looks like. If you are interested, I wrote about the mind-breaking differences between financial quantities back in 2009. At the time, I made an Adobe Flash Video² showing a dollar dropping one per second into a hole. Since I posted that graphic over 17 years ago, about $ 550 million has dropped into the hole.

I will post my slides when we get closer to class.

The Lecture Videos tab in the MyHeritage course is where you will be able to find class recordings. The video this week is at [Summer 2026 SOWK 588 Week 05]().

To-Do List

• Attend class
• Read chapters 7 of the textbook and By Any Means Necessary in the $2 per day book
• Complete at least three replies across any of the four forums