One of the United States great promises is that all children will be given the opportunity to work to achieve a comfortable standard of living. That promise has faded profoundly for children who grow up in poverty, particularly black and Hispanic children, and many of the deepening fault lines in the social order are traceable to this disparity. In recent years the promise has also begun to fade for children of the middle class. Education and hard work, once steady paths to economic success, no longer lead as far as they once did. But that doesn't have to be the case, as Duncan Lindsey shows in this articulate, impassioned volume. We can provide true opportunity to all children, insuring them against a lifetime of inequality, and when we do, the walls dividing the country by race, ethnicity, and wealth will begin to crumble.
Long a voice for combating child poverty, Lindsey takes a balanced approach that begins with a history of economic and family policy from the Great Depression and the development of Social Security and moves onward. He details the shocking extent of economic inequality in the U.S., pointing out that this wealthiest of countries also has the largest proportion of children living in poverty. Calling for reform, Lindsey proposes several viable universal income security policies for vulnerable children and families, strategies that have worked in other advanced democracies and also respect the importance of the market economy. They aim not just to reduce child poverty, but also to give all children meaningful economic opportunity. Just as Social Security alleviates the sting of poverty in old age, asset-building policies can insulate children from the cumulativeeffects of disadvantage and provide them with a strong foundation from which to soar.
Politicians, pundits, and parents always say that children are the future, but as long as so many grow up poor or without opportunity, that slogan will sound hollow. Duncan Lindseys book should be read by anyone who wants to know how we can take real action to brighten the future for children and for society as a whole.

Time and Poverty in Western Welfare States is the English language adaptation of one of the most important contributions to welfare economics published in recent years. Professors Leibfried and Leisering offer a time-based (dynamic) analysis of the study of poverty, and suggest the need for a radical rethinking of conventional theoretical and policy approaches. Its methodology will make it of great interest to students and researchers in the social sciences, with particular importance for social policy and welfare economics.

By focusing on Mamluk Cairo, Adam Sabra explores the attitude of medieval Muslims to poverty and the experience of being poor in an Islamic society. He also considers the role of pious endowments (waqfs) in sustaining the poor. In this way the book affords fascinating insights into a world far removed from elite society, hitherto the focus of Mamluk studies. This trend, in conjunction with comparisons offered between the Islamic world, Europe and China, will entice a broad range of scholars from within the field and beyond.

Poverty has dire consequences on the ability to fulfil one's aspirations for life. Poverty has strong implications for social cohesion and societies' abilities to function in harmonious ways. This book presents the readers with the core concepts, latest development and knowledge about policies that work to eliminate absolute poverty. This volume shows what the consequences are for the quality of life of those living in poverty. It describes life for people in poverty in general, but also deals more specifically with children, in-work poverty and the elderly, thus providing a life, generational and global perspective on poverty, including the impact on people's happiness levels. The book also discusses policies aimed at poverty reduction, such as changes to the labour market - including the risk of working poor - and shows that there is a variety of possible instruments available to reduce poverty. These range from direct provision of social security to ensuring education and a better functioning labour market. Written in an engaging and accessible style, the book provides a succinct insight into the concept of poverty, how to measure it, the situation of poverty around the globe as well as different types of possible interventions to cope with poverty. Supporting theory with examples and case studies from a variety of contexts, suggestions for further reading, and a detailed glossary, this text is an essential read for anyone approaching the study of poverty for the first time.

There is enormous inequality between the income and wealth of the richest 1 percent and all other Americans. While the top 1 percent own 42 percent of all wealth in America, the lower half on the income ladder has only 2 percent of all of the wealth. This book develops a viewpoint contrary to the prevailing conservative paradigm, setting out both reasons for this inequality and the impact of this. To explain inequality, conservative economists focus on individual characteristics such as intelligence and hard work. This book puts forward new evidence to show that changes in economic inequality are primarily due to characteristics inherent in the standard operation of capitalist institutions. Furthermore, the authors seek to explain the cycle of boom and bust by considering political and social factors often overlooked by conservative economists. This book also explores how wealth influences political policies in a way that increases economic inequality even more than its present level. Through analysis of American political and economic institutions, Inequality, Boom, and Bust presents concrete steps for an activist, progressive policy to greatly reduce inequality through free healthcare, free higher education, and reduced unemployment.

There is enormous inequality between the income and wealth of the richest 1 percent and all other Americans. While the top 1 percent own 42 percent of all wealth in America, the lower half on the income ladder has only 2 percent of all of the wealth. This book develops a viewpoint contrary to the prevailing conservative paradigm, setting out both reasons for this inequality and the impact of this. To explain inequality, conservative economists focus on individual characteristics such as intelligence and hard work. This book puts forward new evidence to show that changes in economic inequality are primarily due to characteristics inherent in the standard operation of capitalist institutions. Furthermore, the authors seek to explain the cycle of boom and bust by considering political and social factors often overlooked by conservative economists. This book also explores how wealth influences political policies in a way that increases economic inequality even more than its present level. Through analysis of American political and economic institutions, Inequality, Boom, and Bust presents concrete steps for an activist, progressive policy to greatly reduce inequality through free healthcare, free higher education, and reduced unemployment.

Neighbourhoods of Poverty is concerned with the spatial dimension of urban social exclusion and integration. It draws on research from twenty-two neighbourhoods in eleven European cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, London, Birmingham, Berlin, Hamburg, Milan, Naples and Paris and addresses two questions: - How do different neighbourhoods have an impact upon the opportunities and perspectives of poor individuals and households? - Are these neighbourhood impacts conditioned by national and welfare state contexts, by the wider metropolitan structures and by specific neighbourhood characteristics? Various aspects of poverty, social exclusion and integration are brought together and provide a new assessment of the place of neighbourhood within these wider debates.

In the 1790s, for the first time, reformers proposed bringing poverty to an end. Inspired by scientific progress, the promise of an international economy, and the revolutions in France and the United States, political thinkers such as Thomas Paine and Antoine-Nicolas Condorcet argued that all citizens could be protected against the hazards of economic insecurity. In "An End to Poverty?" Gareth Stedman Jones revisits this founding moment in the history of social democracy and examines how it was derailed by conservative as well as leftist thinkers. By tracing the historical evolution of debates concerning poverty, Stedman Jones revives an important, but forgotten strain of progressive thought. He also demonstrates that current discussions about economic issues -- downsizing, globalization, and financial regulation -- were shaped by the ideological conflicts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Paine and Condorcet believed that republicanism combined with universal pensions, grants to support education, and other social programs could alleviate poverty. In tracing the inspiration for their beliefs, Stedman Jones locates an unlikely source-Adam Smith. Paine and Condorcet believed that Smith's vision of a dynamic commercial society laid the groundwork for creating economic security and a more equal society.

But these early visions of social democracy were deemed too threatening to a Europe still reeling from the traumatic aftermath of the French Revolution and increasingly anxious about a changing global economy. Paine and Condorcet were demonized by Christian and conservative thinkers such as Burke and Malthus, who used Smith's ideas to support a harsher vision of society based on individualism and laissez-faire economics. Meanwhile, as the nineteenth century wore on, thinkers on the left developed more firmly anticapitalist views and criticized Paine and Condorcet for being too "bourgeois" in their thinking. Stedman Jones however, argues that contemporary social democracy should take up the mantle of these earlier thinkers, and he suggests that the elimination of poverty need not be a utopian dream but may once again be profitably made the subject of practical, political, and social-policy debates.

Find out how welfare reform has affected women living at the poverty level Women, Work, and Poverty presents the latest information on women living at or below the poverty level and the changes that need to be made in public policy to allow them to rise above their economic hardships. Using a wide range of research methods, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, small-scale surveys, and analysis of personnel records, the book explores different aspects of women's poverty since the passage of the 1986 welfare reform bill. Anthropologists, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and social workers examine marriage, divorce, children and child care, employment and work schedules, disabilities, mental health, and education, and look at income support programs, such as welfare and unemployment insurance. Women, Work, and Poverty illuminates the changes in the causes of women's poverty following welfare reform in the United States, using up-to-date research that's both qualitative and quantitative. Taking racial and ethnic diversity into account, the book's contributors examine new findings on the feminization of poverty, the role of children and the lack of child care as an obstacle to employment, labor market policies that can reduce poverty and improve gender wage equality, sex and race segregation in the labor market, and the low quality of jobs available to low income women. Women, Work, and Poverty examines: marriage, motherhood, and work pay equity and living wage reforms community resources welfare status and child care acquiring higher education advancing women of color income security repaying debt after divorce gender differences in spendable income women's job loss Women, Work, and Poverty is an invaluable aid for academics working in social work, social policy, women's studies, economics, sociology, and political science, and for policy researchers, anti-poverty activists, and women's leaders.

How do young people get by in hard times and hard places? Have they become a "lost generation" disconnected from society's mainstream? Do popular ideas about social exclusion or a welfare-dependent underclass really connect with the lived experiences of the so-called "disaffected," "disengaged" and "difficult-to-reach"? Based on close-up research with young men and women from localities suffering social exclusion in extreme form," Disconnected Youth? will appeal to all those who are interested in understanding and tackling the problems of growing up in Britain's poor neighborhoods.

World poverty represents a failure of the international community to see half of the global population secure their basic socio-economic rights. Yet international law foresees cooperation as essential to the realization of these human rights. In an era of considerable interdependence and entrenched economic and political advantage, the particular features of contemporary world poverty give rise to pressing questions about the scope, evolution, and application of the international law of human rights, and the attribution of global responsibility.
This book considers the evolving nature of public international law and human rights with respect to international cooperation as a basis for addressing the role and responsibility of the international community in the creation of an environment conducive to a human-centered globalization. It offers a detailed examination of the historically controversial right to development and, through a careful consideration of its current significance and application, reflects the importance of the rationale of the right to development onto the critical challenge of poverty in the 21st century. Through doctrine and jurisprudence, this book charts recent changes in international law relevant to the ability of states to develop and to fulfill their human rights obligations, and the reality that they are constrained by the actions and structural arrangements of the powerful members of the international community.
This book explores developments in the system of international safeguards meant to correspond to the deprivation of economic, social, and cultural rights today. By analyzing the approach, contribution, and current limitations of theinternational law of human rights to the manifestations of world poverty, the reader is challenged to rethink human rights and, in particular, the framing of responsibilities that are essential to their protection.

This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. Prior to 1680, Africa's economic and military strength enabled African elites to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics that made slaves so necessary to European colonizers. He explains why African slaves were placed in significant roles. Estate structure and demography affected the capacity of slaves to form a self-sustaining society and behave as cultural actors. This second edition contains a new chapter on eighteenth century developments.

This study of English policies toward the poor from the seventeenth century to the present 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. The English poor laws went through cycles of generosity and meanness that affected men and women unequally. The long term history of welfare in England and Wales was not one of continued progress and improvement but one determined by continually changing attitudes toward poverty.

The poverty rate for children in the United States exceeds that of all other Western, industrialised nations except Australia. Moreover, poverty among children has increased substantially since 1970, affecting more than one-fifth of US children. These persistent high rates require new ideas in both research and public policy. Escape from Poverty presents such ideas. Four modes of possible change are addressed: mothers' employment, child care, father involvement, and access to health care. It examines the implications of these new policy-driven changes for children. The editors have developed an interdisciplinary perspective, involving demographers, developmental psychologists, economists, health experts, historians, and sociologists - a framework essential for addressing the complexities inherent in the links between the lives of poor adults and children in our society.

In the Deep Heart's Core is the uplifting story of young Teach for America volunteer who becomes an English teacher in a desperately impoverished African-American high school in the rural Mississippi Delta beset by gang violence, drug abuse, ruptured families and teen pregnancy-but among the sorrow and struggle he finds dignity and hope, and works to bring the nascent intellectual curiosity of his students to full flower.

A comprehensive guide to implementing SAE methods for poverty studies and poverty mapping There is an increasingly urgent demand for poverty and living conditions data, in relation to local areas and/or subpopulations. Policy makers and stakeholders need indicators and maps of poverty and living conditions in order to formulate and implement policies, (re)distribute resources, and measure the effect of local policy actions. Small Area Estimation (SAE) plays a crucial role in producing statistically sound estimates for poverty mapping. This book offers a comprehensive source of information regarding the use of SAE methods adapted to these distinctive features of poverty data derived from surveys and administrative archives. The book covers the definition of poverty indicators, data collection and integration methods, the impact of sampling design, weighting and variance estimation, the issue of SAE modelling and robustness, the spatio-temporal modelling of poverty, and the SAE of the distribution function of income and inequalities. Examples of data analyses and applications are provided, and the book is supported by a website describing scripts written in SAS or R software, which accompany the majority of the presented methods. Key features: * Presents a comprehensive review of SAE methods for poverty mapping * Demonstrates the applications of SAE methods using real-life case studies * Offers guidance on the use of routines and choice of websites from which to download them Analysis of Poverty Data by Small Area Estimation offers an introduction to advanced techniques from both a practical and a methodological perspective, and will prove an invaluable resource for researchers actively engaged in organizing, managing and conducting studies on poverty.

This book provides selections from the seminal works of Karl Marx, Max Weber, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman that reveal some of the reasons why class, race, and gender inequalities have proven very adaptive and can flourish even today in the 21st century.

Confined in their governmental offices and with their eyes fixed on the opinion polls, politicians and state officials are all too often oblivious to the lives of their citizens. On the other hand, the ordinary men and women who have so much hardship in their lives, and so few means to make themselves heard, are obliged either to protest outside the official frameworks or remain locked in the silence of their despair.

Under the direction of Pierre Bourdieu, a team of sociologists spent three years analysing the new forms of social suffering that characterize contemporary societies - the suffering of those who are denied the means of acquiring a socially dignified existence, as well as the suffering of those who are poorly adjusted to the rapidly changing social and economic conditions of their lives.

Declining housing estates, the school, the family, street-level state services, the everyday world of social workers, teachers and policemen, factory workers and white-collar clerks, the universe of small farmers and artisans, of teachers and of the unemployed and partly employed: these are just some of the spaces where conflict occurs, where specific discriminations and recriminations, tensions and contradictions, abound and accumulate, and where new forms of suffering are produced and experienced by ordinary people in the course of their daily lives.

This book can be read like a series of short stories - the story of a steel worker who was laid off after twenty years in the same factory and who now struggles to support his family on unemployment benefits and a part-time job; the story of a trade unionist who finds his goals undermined by the changing nature of work; thestory of a family from Algeria living in a housing estate in the outskirts of Paris whose members have to cope with pervasive, everyday forms of racism; the story of a school teacher confronted with urban violence; and many others as well. Reading these stories enables one to understand these people's lives and the forms of social suffering which are part of them. And the reader will see that this book offers not only a distinctive method for analysing social life, but also another way of practising politics.

The publication of this book was a major social and political event in France, where it topped the best-seller list and triggered a wide-ranging public debate on inequality, politics and social solidarity. It will be essential reading for all those - including social scientists, educators, social and political activists and ordinary citizens - who are concerned about the current state of contemporary societies.

What are the poverty reduction goals of the European development co-operation agencies? This work examines the credibility of their actual record in terms of their commitment and approaches to poverty reduction. The poverty impact of their aid programmes and their good and bad practices are assessed based on field studies in seven poor countries. Ways of maximizing benefits to poor people are explored and changes in agency management systems and dialogue are recommended.

The industrial food system has created a crisis in the United States that is characterized by abundant food for privileged citizens and "food deserts" for the historically marginalized. In response, food justice activists based in low-income communities of color have developed community-based solutions, arguing that activities like urban agriculture, nutrition education, and food-related social enterprises can drive systemic social change. Focusing on the work of several food justice groups - including Community Services Unlimited, a South Los Angeles organization founded as the non-profit arm of the Southern California Black Panther Party - More Than Just Food explores the possibilities and limitations of the community-based approach, offering a networked examination of the food justice movement in the age of the non-profit industrial complex.

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.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow directs his attention here to one of today's most controversial social issues: how to get people off welfare and into jobs. With characteristic eloquence, wit, and rigor, Solow condemns the welfare reforms recently passed by Congress and President Clinton for confronting welfare recipients with an unworkable choice--finding work in the current labor market or losing benefits. He argues that the only practical and fair way to move recipients to work is, in contrast, through an ambitious plan to guarantee that every able-bodied citizen has access to a job.

Solow contends that the demand implicit in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act for welfare recipients to find work in the existing labor market has two crucial flaws. First, the labor market would not easily make room for a huge influx of unskilled, inexperienced workers. Second, the normal market adjustment to that influx would drive down earnings for those already in low-wage jobs. Solow concludes that it is legitimate to want welfare recipients to work, but not to want them to live at a miserable standard or to benefit at the expense of the working poor, especially since children are often the first to suffer. Instead, he writes, we should create new demand for unskilled labor through public-service employment and incentives to the private sector--in effect, fair "workfare." Solow presents widely ignored evidence that recipients themselves would welcome the chance to work. But he also points out that practical, morally defensible workfare would be extremely expensive--a problem that politicians who support the idea blithely fail to admit. Throughout, Solow places debate over welfare reform in the context of a struggle to balance competing social values, in particular self-reliance and altruism.

The book originated in Solow's 1997 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University. It includes reactions from the distinguished scholars Gertrude Himmelfarb, Anthony Lewis, Glenn Loury, and John Roemer, who expand on and take issue with Solow's arguments. "Work and Welfare" is a powerful contribution to debate about welfare reform and a penetrating look at the values that shape its course.

At a time when the gap between rich and poor has been increasing, Poverty, Riches and Social Citizenship provides an accessible introduction to current debates about inequality, exclusion and the nature of citizenship, while also presenting an innovative exploration of popular beliefs and values in Britain. The authors develop a series of conceptual models by which to understand the competing traditions which have informed ideas about citizenship, and the contradictory moral notions that currently inform popular expectations of the welfare state.

According to Ivar Berg's performance criteria, over half of the U.S. workforce is now underemployed. Using analysis based on U.S. and Canadian surveys of work and learning experiences and other documental data, author David Livingstone exposes the myth of the "learning enterprise" and argues that the major problem in education-work relations is not education but the mismatch between work and worker.