Years after the Great Recession, the economy is still weak, and an unprecedented number of workers have sunk into long spells of unemployment. Cut Loose provides a vivid and moving account of the experiences of some of these men and women, through the example of a historically important group: autoworkers. Their well-paid jobs on the assembly lines built a strong middle class in the decades after World War II. But today, they find themselves beleaguered in a changed economy of greater inequality and risk, one that favors the well-educated or well-connected. Their declining fortunes in recent decades tell us something about what the white-collar workforce should expect to see in the years ahead, as job-killing technologies and the shipping of work overseas take away even more good jobs. Cut Loose offers a poignant look at how the long-term unemployed struggle in today's unfair economy to support their families, rebuild their lives, and overcome the shame and self-blame they deal with on a daily basis. It is also a call to action a blueprint for a new kind of politics, one that offers a measure of grace in a society of ruthless advancement.

The book explores the content and background to Sir Keith Joseph's famous 'cycle of deprivation' speech in 1972, examining his own personality and family background, his concern with 'problem families', and the wider policy context of the early 1970s. With this background, the book explores New Labour's approach to child poverty, initiatives such as Sure Start, the influence of research on inter-generational continuities, and its stance on social exclusion. The author argues that, while earlier writers have acknowledged the intellectual debt that New Labour owed to Joseph, and noted similarities between their policy approaches to child poverty and earlier debates, more recent attempts to tackle social exclusion, by both the Labour and Coalition Governments, mean that these continuities are now more striking than ever before.With a new Preface for the paperback edition, From transmitted deprivation to social exclusion is the only book-length treatment of this important but neglected strand of the history of social policy. It will be of interest to students and researchers working on contemporary history, social policy, political science, public policy, sociology, and public health.

One in seven of the world's population live in poverty in urban areas, and the vast majority of these live in the Global South - mostly in overcrowded informal settlements with inadequate water, sanitation, health care and schools provision. This book explains how and why the scale and depth of urban poverty is so frequently under-estimated by governments and international agencies worldwide. The authors also consider whether economic growth does in fact reduce poverty, exploring the paradox of successful economies that show little evidence of decreasing poverty. Many official figures on urban poverty, including those based on the US $1 per day poverty line, present a very misleading picture of urban poverty's scale. These common errors in definition and measurement by governments and international agencies lead to poor understanding of urban poverty and inadequate policy provision. This is compounded by the lack of voice and influence that low income groups have in these official spheres. This book explores many different aspects of urban poverty including the associated health burden, inadequate food intake, inadequate incomes, assets and livelihood security, poor living and working conditions and the absence of any rule of law. Urban Poverty in the Global South: Scale and Nature fills the gap for a much needed systematic overview of the historical and contemporary state of urban poverty in the Global South. This comprehensive and detailed book is a unique resource for students and lecturers in development studies, urban development, development geography, social policy, urban planning and design, and poverty reduction.

As an adult, I learned this: persist. Work hard.

Face rejection, weather the setbacks, until you meet the gatekeeper who will open a door for you.

Jesmyn Ward grew up in a poor, rural community in Mississippi. Today, as the first woman to win the National Book Award twice, she is celebrated as one of America's greatest living writers.

Navigate Your Stars is a stirring reflection on the value of hard work and the importance of respect for oneself and others. First delivered as a 2018 commencement address at Tulane University, it captures Ward's inimitable voice as she reflects on her experiences as a Southern black woman, addressing the themes of grit, adversity and the importance of family bonds.

Beautifully illustrated in full colour, this is a meditative and profound book that will inspire all readers preparing for the next chapter in their lives.

Child poverty is a central and present part of global life, with hundreds of millions of children around the world enduring tremendous suffering and deprivation of their most basic needs. Despite its long history, research on poverty and development has only relatively recently examined the issue of child poverty as a distinct topic of concern. This book brings together theoretical, methodological and policy-relevant contributions by leading researchers on international child poverty. With a preface from Sir Richard Jolly, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, it examines how child poverty and well-being are now conceptualized, defined and measured, and presents regional and national level portraits of child poverty around the world, in rich, middle income and poor countries. The book's ultimate objective is to promote and influence policy, action and the research agenda to address one of the world's great ongoing tragedies: child poverty, marginalization and inequality.

Janice Perlman wrote the first in-depth account of life in the favelas, a book hailed as one of the most important works in global urban studies in the last 30 years. Now, in Favela, Perlman carries that story forward to the present. Re-interviewing many longtime favela residents whom she had first met in 1969--as well as their children and grandchildren--Perlman offers the only long-term perspective available on the favelados as they struggle for a better life.
Perlman discovers that while educational levels have risen, democracy has replaced dictatorship, and material conditions have improved, many residents feel more marginalized than ever. The greatest change is the explosion of drug and arms trade and the high incidence of fatal violence that has resulted. Yet the greatest challenge of all is job creation--decent work for decent pay. If unemployment and under-paid employment are not addressed, she argues, all other efforts will fail to resolve the fundamental issues. Foreign Affairs praises Perlman for writing "with compassion, artistry, and intelligence, using stirring personal stories to illustrate larger points substantiated with statistical analysis."

Poverty and Prostitution is a study of 1,400 prostitutes and brothel-keepers operating in a Victorian cathedral city over a half century. It is based on the unique and systematic use of detailed evidence from such sources as the weekly newspaper reports of magistrates' court proceedings, workhouse records, Quarter Sessions Lists and material relating to the local refuge for 'Fallen Women'. The book also draws on the city's wealth of slum clearance records and on the evidence from the census enumerators' notebooks. Dr Finnegan examines the social and geographical origins of the prostitutes and their associates. The conclusions reached challenge existing interpretations of the subject and show that far from being a healthy and comparatively harmless activity which could be abandoned with ease, the Victorian street-walker's career was generally tragic and brief, overshadowed by poverty and characterized throughout by desperation, drunkenness, frequent prison sentences and disease. In addition to considering York's recorded prostitute community as a whole, the book is illustrated throughout with the histories of individual women, and contains fascinating photographic material.

The Solidarities of Strangers is a study of English policies toward the poor from the seventeenth century to the present that combines individual stories with official actions. Lynn Lees shows how clients as well as officials negotiated welfare settlements. Cultural definitions of entitlement, rather than available resources, determined amounts and beneficiaries. Indeed, industrialization and growing wealth went along with restricted payments to the needy, while universal allowances and insurance systems expanded as the economy faltered and world wars crippled budgets and drained resources. Although the English poor laws were a 'residualist' system, aiding the destitute when neither family nor charities covered needs, they went through cycles of generosity and meanness that affected men and women unequally. The long-term history of welfare in England and Wales has not been a story of continued progress and improvement but one determined by continually changing attitudes toward poverty.

During the last third of the eighteenth century, most parishes in rural southern England adopted policies providing poor relief outside workhouses to unemployed and underemployed able-bodied labourers. The debate over the economic effects of 'outdoor' relief payments to able-bodied workers has continued for over 200 years. This book examines the economic role of the Poor Law in the rural south of England. It presents a model of the agricultural labour market that provides explanations for the widespread adoption of outdoor relief policies, the persistence of such policies until the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834, and the sharp regional differences in the administration of relief. The book challenges many commonly held beliefs about the Poor Law and concludes that the adoption of outdoor relief for able-bodied paupers was a rational response by politically dominant farmers to changes in the rural economic environment.

If poor individuals have always been with us, societies have not always seen the poor as a distinct social group. But within the Roman world, from at least the Late Republic onwards, the poor were an important force in social and political life and how to treat the poor was a topic of philosophical as well as political discussion. This book explains what poverty meant in antiquity, and why the poor came to be an important group in the Roman world, and it explores the issues which poverty and the poor raised for Roman society and for Roman writers. In essays which range widely in space and time across the whole Roman Empire, the contributors address both the reality and the representation of poverty, and examine the impact which Christianity had upon attitudes towards and treatment of the poor.

This book is about family life in areas of concentrated poverty and social problems - areas where it is difficult to bring up children and where surrounding conditions make family life more fraught and more difficult. The book is based on a long-run UK study of neighborhood conditions as they affect parents raising their children. The book draws on the lives of 200 families that the authors interviewed annually over a 10 year period. It examines the future prospects of families living in low income urban areas that suffer multiple problems of deprivation. It provides a unique insight into: what families need, what works and doesn't work, what helps or hinders, what is left to do, and which new approaches may be helpful. (Series: CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy)

This landmark study provides the first comprehensive assessment of the nature and associations between the three main forms of social disadvantage in Australia: poverty, deprivation and social exclusion. Drawing on the author's extensive research expertise and his links with welfare practitioners, it explains the limitations of existing approaches and presents new findings that build on the insights of disadvantaged Australians and views about the essentials of life, providing the basis for a new deprivation-based poverty measure.

This book is a case study, based on the Montpellier region in southern France, which analyses charity and poor relief from 1750 to the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, and the effect of the French Revolution on the treatment of the poor. The breadth of the book's timescale is one of its most notable features; so too is the way in which the changing treatment of the problem of poverty is seen not only in its political and administrative context, but also in terms of police forces, charitable benefactors, the administrators of charitable institutions, and the poor themselves.

The poor seem easy to identify: those who do not have enough money or enough of the things money can buy. This book explores a different approach to poverty, one suggested by the notion of capabilities emphasized by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. In the spirit of the capabilities approach, the book argues that poverty refers not to a lack of things but to the lack of the ability to live life in a particular way. The authors argue that the poor are those who cannot live a life that is discovered and created rather than already known. Avoiding poverty, then, means having the capacity and opportunity for creative living. The authors argue that the capacity to do skilled work plays a particularly important role in creative living, and suggest that the development of the ability to do skilled work is a vital part of solving the problem of poverty.

The Land of Too Much presents a simple but powerful hypothesis that addresses three questions: Why does the United States have more poverty than any other developed country? Why did it experience an attack on state intervention starting in the 1980s, known today as the neoliberal revolution? And why did it recently suffer the greatest economic meltdown in seventy-five years? Although the United States is often considered a liberal, laissez-faire state, Monica Prasad marshals convincing evidence to the contrary. Indeed, she argues that a strong tradition of government intervention undermined the development of a European-style welfare state. The demand-side theory of comparative political economy she develops here explains how and why this happened. Her argument begins in the late nineteenth century, when America's explosive economic growth overwhelmed world markets, causing price declines everywhere. While European countries adopted protectionist policies in response, in the United States lower prices spurred an agrarian movement that rearranged the political landscape. The federal government instituted progressive taxation and a series of strict financial regulations that ironically resulted in more freely available credit. As European countries developed growth models focused on investment and exports, the United States developed a growth model based on consumption. These large-scale interventions led to economic growth that met citizen needs through private credit rather than through social welfare policies. Among the outcomes have been higher poverty, a backlash against taxation and regulation, and a housing bubble fueled by "mortgage Keynesianism." This book will launch a thousand debates.

The first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century: the first century of welfare. The English 'Old Poor Law' was the first national system of tax-funded social welfare in the world. It provided a safety net for hundreds of thousands of paupers at a time of very limited national wealth and productivity. The First Century of Welfare, which focusses on the poor, but developing, county of Lancashire, provides the first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century. Drawing on thousands of individual petitions for poor relief, presented by paupers themselves to magistrates, it peers into the social and economic world of England's marginal people. Taken together, these records present a vivid and sobering picture of the daily lives and struggles of the poor. We can see how their family life, their relations with their kin and their neighbours, and the dictates of contemporary gender norms conditioned their lives. We can also see how they experienced illness and physical and mental disability; and the ways in which real people's lives could be devastated by dearth, trade depression, and the destruction of the Civil Wars. But the picture is not just one of poor folk tossed by the tidesof fortune. It is also one of agency: about the strategies of economic survival the poor adopted, particularly in the context of a developing industrial economy, of the support they gained from their relatives and neighbours, andof their willingness to engage with England's developing system of social welfare to ensure that they and their families did not go hungry. In this book, an intensely human picture surfaces of what it was like to experience poverty at a time when the seeds of state social welfare were being planted. JONATHAN HEALEY is University Lecturer in English Local and Social History and Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

If "badneighborhoods are truly bad for children and families, especially the minority poor, can moving to better neighborhoods lead them to better lives? Might these families escape poverty altogether, beyond having a better quality of life to help them cope with being poor? Federal policymakers and planners thought so, on both counts, and in 1994, they launched Moving to Opportunity. The $80 million social experiment enrolled nearly 5,000 very low-income, mostly black and Hispanic families, many of them on welfare, who were living in public housing in the inner-city neighborhoods of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Yet five years after they had entered the program, many of the families in the favored experimentalgroup had returned to high poverty neighborhoods. Young women showed big drops in risky behavior and big improvements in mental health, on average, while young male movers did not. The males even showed signs of increased delinquency if they had lived, at least for a time, in the low poverty areas. Parents likewise showed major drops in anxiety and depression-two of the crippling symptoms of being chronically poor in high-risk ghettos-but not in employment or income. And many movers appeared to be maintaining the same limited social circles-mostly disadvantaged relatives and close friends-despite living in more advantaged neighborhoods. The authors of this important and engaging new book wanted to know why. Moving to Opportunity tackles the great, unresolved question of how to overcome persistent ghetto poverty. It mines a unique demonstration program with a human voice, not just statistics and charts, rooted in the lives of those who "signed upfor MTO. It shines a light on the hopes, surprises, achievements and limitations of a major social experiment-and does so at a time of tremendous economic, social, and political change in our nation. As the authors make clear, for all its ambition, MTO is a uniquely American experiment, and this book brings home its lessons for policymakers and advocates, scholars, students, journalists, and all who share a deep concern for opportunity and inequality in our country.

If "badneighborhoods are truly bad for children and families, especially the minority poor, can moving to better neighborhoods lead them to better lives? Might these families escape poverty altogether, beyond having a better quality of life to help them cope with being poor? Federal policymakers and planners thought so, on both counts, and in 1994, they launched Moving to Opportunity. The $80 million social experiment enrolled nearly 5,000 very low-income, mostly black and Hispanic families, many of them on welfare, who were living in public housing in the inner-city neighborhoods of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Yet five years after they had entered the program, many of the families in the favored experimentalgroup had returned to high poverty neighborhoods. Young women showed big drops in risky behavior and big improvements in mental health, on average, while young male movers did not. The males even showed signs of increased delinquency if they had lived, at least for a time, in the low poverty areas. Parents likewise showed major drops in anxiety and depression-two of the crippling symptoms of being chronically poor in high-risk ghettos-but not in employment or income. And many movers appeared to be maintaining the same limited social circles-mostly disadvantaged relatives and close friends-despite living in more advantaged neighborhoods. The authors of this important and engaging new book wanted to know why. Moving to Opportunity tackles the great, unresolved question of how to overcome persistent ghetto poverty. It mines a unique demonstration program with a human voice, not just statistics and charts, rooted in the lives of those who "signed upfor MTO. It shines a light on the hopes, surprises, achievements and limitations of a major social experiment-and does so at a time of tremendous economic, social, and political change in our nation. As the authors make clear, for all its ambition, MTO is a uniquely American experiment, and this book brings home its lessons for policymakers and advocates, scholars, students, journalists, and all who share a deep concern for opportunity and inequality in our country.

Poverty is not simply the result of an individual's characteristics, behaviors or abilities. Rather, as David Brady demonstrates, poverty is the result of politics. In Rich Democracies, Poor People, Brady investigates why poverty is so entrenched in some affluent democracies whereas it is a solvable problem in others. Drawing on over thirty years of data from eighteen countries, Brady argues that cross-national and historical variations in poverty are principally driven by differences in the generosity of the welfare state. An explicit challenge to mainstream views of poverty as an inescapable outcome of individual failings or a society's labor markets and demography, this book offers institutionalized power relations theory as an alternative explanation. The power of coalitions for egalitarianism, Leftist political groups and parties, and the social policies they are able to institutionalize shape the amount of poverty in society. Where poverty is low, equality has been institutionalized. Where poverty is widespread, exemplified by the U.S., there has been a failure to institutionalize equality. A comprehensive and state-of-the-art study, Rich Democracies, Poor People places the inherently political choices over resources and the political organization of states, markets, and societies at the center of the study of poverty and social inequality.

With the use of wide-ranging case studies the author clearly illustrates the impact of schemes intended to re-allocate land in developing countries. Concluding that land reform can play a major part in stimulating rural economies this book explores the extent to which such policies can successfully reduce poverty and increase agricultural growth.

The first book to study women's poverty over the life course, this wide-ranging collection focuses on the economic condition of single mothers and single elderly women--while also considering partnered women and immigrants--in eight wealthy but diverse countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In a rich analysis of labor market and social welfare sectors, Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg and a team of outstanding international contributors conclude that both living-wage employment and government provision of adequate benefits and services are necessary if lone women are to achieve a socially acceptable living standard. Taken together, the chapters extend a feminist critique of welfare state theories and chart nations' disparate progress against poverty -- probing, for instance, how Sweden emerged a leader in the prevention of women's poverty while the United States continues to lag.
By identifying the social and economic policies that enable women to live independently, Poor Women in Rich Countries provides nothing less than a blueprint for abolishing women's poverty.

Power and Pauperism aims to provide a new perspective on the place of the workhouse in the history and geography of nineteenth-century society and social policy. The workhouse system is set in the wider context in an age associated, paradoxically, with both laissez-faire and increasing state regulation. The study pays particular attention to conflicts over Poor Law policy and workhouse design. Dr Driver demonstrates that despite appearances the workhouse system was far from monolithic, and that official policy was beset with conflict: his study combines a national perspective on the system with a sensitivity to regional variation in policy and practice. The analysis of patterns of relief regulation and institutional provision presented here provides, for the first time, a truly national picture of the workhouse system in operation. Power and Pauperism emphasises the need to link the study of social policy with wider patterns of power and the value of a geographical perspective in the study of social policy. The book as a whole offers a challenging new interpretation of the historical geography of social policy in nineteenth-century Britain.

The new millennium raised hopes for a better future for humanity through a new spirit of international cooperation. Participants at the United Nations Millennium Summit agreed on an ambitious agenda for international cooperation that singled out, among other issues, environmental protection and development as key objectives. The increasing degradation of our planet continues to emphasize the need to conserve and preserve natural resources. Yet with more than half of the global population still living on $2 dollars a day or less, there is also a glaring need for development initiatives to combat poverty. This book draws on contributions to the People and the Environment lecture series at Fordham University, organized in partnership with the United Nations Development Program Equator Initiative and The Nature Conservancy. The essays offer a wealth of fresh perspectives and strategies to promote both environmental conservation and poverty eradication. Reflecting a range of disciplines, issues, and settings, they cover four interrelated topics: the link between poverty reduction and the environment and encouraging integration of environmental management and development; environmental disasters, their impact on poor people and ways to prevent and mitigate their consequences; conservation knowledge and the role of information and education in sustainable development; and legal empowerment of the poor. Each part offers an overview of the theme and introduces the perspectives of leading experts and scholars-from the lessons of Katrina and the Tsunami to model agricultural policies for sustaining the environment while strengthening local economies. Demonstrating the roles the environment can and should play in poverty alleviation, the essays deepen our understanding of the some of the world's most difficult challenges-and provide a toolkit of ideas and techniques for addressing them.

Poverty is not an individual's choice. Nor, as David Brady demonstrates, is it necessary. Building on the latest scholarship in poverty studies, this book points out that among affluent Western societies, there is immense cross-national and historical variation in poverty. Brady seeks to determine what makes poverty so entrenched in some affluent democracies whereas it is a solvable problem in others. He illustrates that, among these democracies, the United States is in the worst shape, with three times as much poverty as some West European countries. In the U.S., nearly 20% of the population is poor, as are almost a fourth of U.S. children and elderly. Searching for the causes of this dilemma, Brady puts forth a sweeping new theory to explain that the fundamental cause of poverty is politics, starting from the simple claim that the distribution of resources in states and markets is inherently political. Societies make collective choices about how to divide their resources, and these choices are institutionalized. Brady points out that where poverty is low, equality has been institutionalized, and where poverty is widespread, as most visibly demonstrated by the US, there has been a failure to institutionalize equality. Hence, it is a society that collectively decides how much of the population will be economically secure. Countries with a relatively low level of poverty in fact socialize the responsibility of preventing citizens from being poor. This book effectively tackles the issue of how this collective responsibility is conceived and institutionalized, by defining the mechanisms that shape this ideology, or prevent it from coming into being. David Brady offers promising new directions for understanding the politics of social equality, and takes an ambitious step forward in the struggle against poverty.

Reduction of poverty is a tremendous and persistent challenge for the global community. Given that the livelihood of millions is at stake, there is an urgent need to reconsider the causes of and the remedies for poverty. Poverty and its reduction are closely linked to the natural-resources base. The quality and bounty of the local environment certainly affect living conditions of the poor and their poverty is often seen as a contributing factor to the degraded condition of the local environment. Teasing apart the direction of causality in this resourcea "poverty nexus is a serious empirical challenge.

This book contributes to an improved understanding of the economic dimensions of environmental and natural-resource management and poverty alleviation. The ten chapters of the book offer an overview of the current knowledge concerning the relation between poverty, environment and natural-resource use. Three sides of the debate receive particular attention. First, the relation between resource use and poverty is discussed from a theoretical point of view. Second, it is questioned whether payments for environmental services or considering values of resources can be an effective tool for stimulating both sustainable resource use and poverty alleviation. Third, alternative strategies to break the land degradationa "poverty cycle are discussed.