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.

The largest UK research study on poverty and social exclusion ever conducted reveals startling levels of deprivation. 18m people are unable to afford adequate housing; 14m can't afford essential household goods; and nearly half the population have some form of financial insecurity. Defining poverty as those whose lack of resources forces them to live below a publicly agreed minimum standard, this text provides unique and detailed insights into the nature and extent of poverty and social exclusion in the UK today. Written by a team of leading academics, the book reports on the extent and nature of poverty for different social groups: older and younger people; parents and children; ethnic groups; men and women; disabled people; and across regions through the recent period of austerity. It reflects on where government policies have made an impact and considers potential future developments. A companion volume Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK Volume 2 focuses on different aspects of poverty and social exclusion identified in the study.

"This collection of 17 essays examines poverty and its causes from a variety of angles. The common thread is a concern for the structural causes of poverty; the book therefore offers a welcome alternative to the dominant ideological views that portray poverty as a result of individuals' decisions, attributes and/or moral failings...The authors show the connections between capitalism, slavery and the development of state policies and ideologies that maintained the oppressed and exploited status of African Americans after the Civil War and constituted the basis for the emergence of white identity and privilege to the detriment of working class identities based on a recognition of the common plight of workers, regardless of skin color...this is an outstanding collection, useful for courses in social stratification, the sociology of work, and race and ethnic relations."
"--Science and Society"

Since the end of the Second World War, poverty in the United States has been a persistent focus of social anxiety, public debate, and federal policy. This volume argues convincingly that we will not be able to reduce or eliminate poverty until we take the political factors that contribute to its continuation into account.

Ideal for course use, A New Introduction to Poverty opens with a historical overview of the major intellectual and political debates surrounding poverty in the United States. Several factors have received inadequate attention: the impact of poverty on women; the synergy of racism and poverty; race and gender stratification of the workplace; and, crucially, the ways in which the powerful use their resources to maintain the economic status quo.

Contributors include MimiAbramovitz, Peter Alcock, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Raymond Franklin, Herman George Jr., Michael B. Katz, Marlene Kim, Rebecca Morales, Sandra Patton, Valerie Polakow, Jackie Pope, Jill Quadagno, David C. Ranney, Barbara Ransby, Bette Woody, and Maxine Baca Zinn.

In Class Dismissed, John Marsh debunks a myth cherished by journalists, politicians, and economists: that growing poverty and inequality in the United States can be solved through education. Using sophisticated analysis combined with personal experience in the classroom, Marsh not only shows that education has little impact on poverty and inequality, but that our mistaken beliefs actively shape the way we structure our schools and what we teach in them.

Rather than focus attention on the hierarchy of jobs and power--where most jobs require relatively little education, and the poor enjoy very little political power--money is funneled into educational endeavors that ultimately do nothing to challenge established social structures, and in fact reinforce them. And when educational programs prove ineffective at reducing inequality, the ones whom these programs were intended to help end up blaming themselves. Marsh's struggle to grasp the connection between education, poverty, and inequality is both powerful and poignant.

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.

Amidst the current debates on the future of welfare, one voice has been conspicuously absent: that of the unemployed and underprivileged. The result of almost a half-century of research, "America Before Welfare" traces the leadership and activities of the unemployed from industrialization to the outbreak of World War II. It is at once a profound work of history and an anecdotal window onto America's past, in the days before FDR's New Deal.

In the revised and updated second edition of this comprehensive book, the first anthology to integrate social-psychological literature on prejudice with sociological and historical investigations, contributors introduce readers to the key debates and principal writings on racial and ethnic conflict, representing conservative, liberal, and radical positions. Presented in debate format, each section offers a provocative discussion of contemporary problems and issues, allowing students to take part in the controversies from an informed perspective. The editors' introductions provide current data and describe cutting-edge arguments that are reshaping the study of race and ethnicity today. The second edition boasts new readings which serve to further enhance the dialogue on America's continuing struggle with racial issues. Contributors tackle a wide array of issues which plague the country today--from discrimination and immigration to education and politics--and ask how we can affect change as we move into the twenty-first century.

The 1986 book deals with the continuing problem of poverty in Soviet society, a problem which the Revolution of 1917 was supposed to solve in a planned and expeditious manner. The topic is important both because it involves large numbers of people, and because it illustrates a major failing of Marxism-Leninism in practice. The book attempts to analyse Soviet poverty both from Soviet and western sources: the former are very limited, because discussion of poverty in the USSR falls under a strict censorship ban. This is one of the reasons why it has been so sadly neglected by western observers. The analysis concerns itself with most of the common problems of poverty and under-privilege in an industrialised society. Exclusion from the political process, and the particular social implications of the constitutional status of labour as both a right and a duty, are examined in an account that emphasises life-style and social problems, rather than merely the content of the wage-packet.

The contributions of this collected volume are the result of a call for papers. The authors met and discussed their drafts at the workshop "Inequality in Europe," organized by the editors. The workshop was sponsored by the "Population Economics" section of the German Association for Demography ("Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Bevoelkerungs wissenschafl" - DGBw) and by the "Josef-Popper-Naehrpflicht" Foundation. The aim of this foundation, located at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University of Frankfurt am Main, is to support research dealing with problems of achieving a "reasonable" standard of living. Originally the aim of the foundation was to further the notion of a guaranteed minimum income ("allgemeine Naehrpjlicht"). The publication of this book is also sponsored by this foundation. The workshop was held at the "Evangelische Akademie Arnoldshain," near Frankfurt am Main. The helpful discussions during the workshop benefitted greatly from the friendly atmosphere of the academy. Some of the articles were financially supported by the "Panel Comparability" Project (PACO), located at CEPS (Centre d'Etudes de Populations, de Pauvrete et de Politiques Socio-Economiques) in Luxembourg. PACO is a joint activity of the German Institute for Economic Research (DrW) in Berlin, CEPS and some other institutions in European countries. It is sponsored by grant No. ERBCHRX-CT92- 0037 ("European Network on Longitudinal Household Panel Studies Meeting Technology Requirement for Comparative Research") of the "Human Capital and Mobility" program of the Commission of the European Community."

Over the last twenty years more and more historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have turned their eyes away from the records of central administration, towards local archives, and the lives of the poor. What they have found is a wealth of sources some of which chronicle the lives, and many of which record the words, of working people. This book will bring together some of the best work based on these sources.

Poverty, inequality and social welfare are defined in this book. Previous poverty studies are surveyed and a new index of poverty is developed based on everyday meanings, and stressing the individual and relative nature of poverty. Previous definitions of inequality and welfare are described and the relations between them and poverty are explored. New estimates of poverty are made for Australia. Conclusions are derived from comparisons between measured levels of poverty over time and across family types. Previous Australian studies of inequality and welfare are surveyed and new estimates are made for Australia for recent years.

The idea that Britain, the US and other western societies are witnessing the rise of an underclass of people at the bottom of the social heap, structurally and culturally distinct from traditional patterns of "decent" working-class life, has become increasingly popular in the 1990s. Anti-work, anti-social, and welfare dependent cultures are said to typify this new "dangerous class" and "dangerous youth" are taken as the prime subjects of underclass theories. Debates about the family and single-parenthood, about crime and about unemployment and welfare reforms have all become embroiled in underclass theories which, whilst highly controversial, have had remarkable influence on the politics and policies of governments in Britain and the US. This text addresses the underclass idea in relation to contemporary youth. It focuses upon unemployment, training, the labour market, crime, homelessness, and parenting. It should be of interest to students of social policy, sociology and criminology.

The economies of Latin America have undergone a deep process of change in the last decade as a result of the application of major reforms. The outcome can be fairly described as a New Economic Model. This New Economic Model is distinguished from its predecessor, in force before the 1980s debt crisis, by an emphasis on market forces and export-led growth. This book explores the main features of the New Economic Model in Latin America and, through analysis of the reform process and case studies, examines its impact on income distribution and poverty.

Covering a key topic in nearly every sociology course, this book is a thorough and lively introduction to the role and importance of youth and employment in contemporary British society. The book looks at the momentous changes that have occurred in the nature of youth employment in recent years. Examining the range of young people's experience of employment and unemployment, Professor Roberts highlights the importance of class, gender, ethnic divisions, and geography in explaining these differences. He assesses the huge impact of educational changes on the patterns of youth employment, and compares the British experience with the rest of Europe. The book will be an invaluable introduction and point of reference for students of sociology, human geography, and economics. The Oxford Modern Britain series comprises authoritative introductory books on all aspects of the social structure of modern Britain. Lively and accessible, the books will be the first point of reference for anyone interested in the state of contemporary Britain. They will be invaluable to those taking courses in the Social Sciences. Series Editor: Professor John Scott, Department of Sociology, University of Essex

The rapid pace of industrial restructuring and the emergence of new employment policies have focused attention on the role of employers in determining the quantity and quality of employment. This book draws on important new data from the ESRC's Social Change and Economic Life Initiative to test, modify, and challenge much of the current academic literature on the determinants of employer policy and how these influence employment structures and individual employment opportunities. The book begins with an authoritative synthesis of the influential debates on labour market segmentation, flexibility, post-Fordism, deskilling, the gendering of work, and the `new' industrial relations. Ten substantive chapters then extend these debates in several directions. The contributors make significant progress on three fronts: BL They suggest that the determinants of employer policy are both complex and strongly related to product market conditions. BL They find that employee attitudes and perceptions are critical to the implementation and effectiveness of employer policy. BL They explore the interdependency between internal employment policies and external labour market conditions and begin to develop an integrated approach to internal and external labour markets. Contributors: Brendan Burchell, Jane Elliott, Duncan Gallie, Anne Gasteen, Bob Morris, Roger Penn, Michael Rose, Jill Rubery, John Sewell, Jim Smyth, Michael White, Frank Wilkinson

In Employment and Human Rights: The International Dimension, Richard Lewis Siegel discusses the historical evolution of the right to employment as well as regional and global efforts to achieve full employment. In the first section of the book, he examines a wealth of material, from English radical pamphlets of the seventeenth century to the recent debates at the United Nations and the International Labor Organization, placing intellectual history in the broadest possible economic, political, and social contexts. In the second section, Siegel examines global and regional efforts in the present century intended to further the implementation of the right to employment. He traces the development of international cooperation and examines the reasons for the limited accomplishments, including a lack of consensus about the effectiveness of public policies; the politicization and strongly ideological nature of the international debates; and the turf and policy struggles within and among the highly influential intergovernmental organizations and national governments.

This volume assembles the major papers discussed at an international workshop on poverty monitoring to evaluate poverty indicators and poverty monitoring systems in order to increase attention to poverty issues and improve policies to alleviate poverty.;Major areas covered include the measurement of poverty trends, the usefulness of poverty indicators, whether or not structural adjustment policies affect more traditional measures to combat poverty, rapid policy evaluation for vulnerable groups and how international agencies can deal with poverty monitoring issues.;Rolph van der Hoeven is the author of "Planning for Basic Needs: A Soft Option or a Solid Policy?", co-author of "Basic Needs in Development Planning", and co-editor of "World Recession and Global Interdependence" and "Africa's Recovery in the 1990s". Other works by Richard Anker include "Sex Inequalities in Urban Employment in the Third World", "Women's Participation in the Labour Force: A Methods Test for Improving its Measurements", "Economic-Demographic Relationships and Employment in Kenya" and "Fertility Determinants in Developing Countries".

"An analytic overview of the history of social welfare and juvenile justice in Boston..[Schneider] traces cogently the origins, development, and ultimate failure of Protestant and Catholic reformers' efforts to ameliorate working-class poverty and juvenile delinquency."
--"Choice"

"Anyone who wants to understand why America's approach to juvenile justice doesn't work should read In the Web of Class."
--Michael B. Katz, University of Pennsylvania

Poverty is spreading. There are now as many people living in absolute poverty - almost a billion in the rural Third World alone - as lived on the entire planet only a century ago. Yet poverty continues to be shrouded in mystery.

Consider that: Four-fifths of the world's poor live in rural areas; About 340 million people worldwide are currently chronically ill from malnutrition; Over 500 million do not get enough calories to do a full day's labor; At a time when enough grain is being produced to provide everyone in the world with twice the daily minimum caloric requirements, global hunger is at an all-time high; Half again as many rural women - almost 600 million - live in absolute poverty today as did 20 years.

In an effort to call special attention to this urgent problem, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a United Nations agency that has approved more than 300 development programs in almost 100 countries and is considered the world's foremost authority on issues of rural poverty, and New York University Press are proud to be present "The State of World Rural Poverty." In the tradition of the World Development Report and World Resources, The State of World Rural Poverty, offers the first comprehensive look at the economic conditions and prospects of the world's rural poor. Certain to become the definitive source of data and analysis as well as an invaluable policy guide to issues involving development and poverty in underdeveloped nations, this volume incorporates research from all over the world.

Experts review the leading social policy scholarship from the past year in this comprehensive volume. Published in association with the Social Policy Association, this volume addresses current issues and critical debates throughout the international social policy field. This annual review is essential reading for students and academics in social policy, social welfare and related disciplines.

In the mid-eighteenth century in France, the royal authorities launched a new campaign to sweep beggars from the streets, pinning their hopes on the creation of a uniform royal network of lock-ups in which anyone found begging might be detained. In this study, Adams probes the accomplishments and the failings of these so-called depots de mendicite, as seen by critics of the experiment (including learned judges and influential spokesmen of the provincial Estates) and as seen by those responsible for its success: the provincial intendants, the royal engineers, the doctors, the inspectors, the contractors, and various givers of advice. He shows how the debate--both internal and external--over the operation of the depots contributed to the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment and the Revolution. The resulting web of reasoning and empirical data gave support to Montesquieu's principle that the state owes every one of its citizens "a secure subsistence, suitable food and clothing, and a manner of life that is not contrary to good health."

This book deepens the understanding of the broader processes that shape and mediate the responses to climate change of poor urban households and communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Representing an important contribution to the evolution of more effective pro-poor climate change policies in urban areas by local governments, national governments and international organisations, this book is invaluable reading to students and scholars of environment and development studies.

Half a century after the launch of the War on Poverty, its complex origins remain obscure. Battle for Bed-Stuy reinterprets President Lyndon Johnson's much-debated crusade from the perspective of its foot soldiers in New York City, showing how 1960s antipoverty programs were rooted in a rich local tradition of grassroots activism and policy experiments. Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn neighborhood housing 400,000 mostly black, mostly poor residents, was often labeled "America's largest ghetto." But in its elegant brownstones lived a coterie of home-owning professionals who campaigned to stem disorder and unify the community. Acting as brokers between politicians and the street, Bed-Stuy's black middle class worked with city officials in the 1950s and 1960s to craft innovative responses to youth crime, physical decay, and capital flight. These partnerships laid the groundwork for the federal Community Action Program, the controversial centerpiece of the War on Poverty. Later, Bed-Stuy activists teamed with Senator Robert Kennedy to create America's first Community Development Corporation, which pursued housing renewal and business investment. Bed-Stuy's antipoverty initiatives brought hope amid dark days, reinforced the social safety net, and democratized urban politics by fostering citizen participation in government. They also empowered women like Elsie Richardson and Shirley Chisholm, who translated their experience as community organizers into leadership positions. Yet, as Michael Woodsworth reveals, these new forms of black political power, though exercised in the name of poor people, often did more to benefit middle-class homeowners. Bed-Stuy today, shaped by gentrification and displacement, reflects the paradoxical legacies of midcentury reform.

This book is about the poor and the constraints of social and economic relationships within which they are trapped. Such constraints have diminished their social and political capacity to be able to escape from poverty. In their case, therefore, neither the provisions of public policy nor specific development stimulus are enough. Initially, and for a limited period, what they need are socially concerned individuals and organizations to mobilise them and target them for development.;In the long run, however, their self-development can come only through their own self-involvement. As such this book concentrates on the poor, and the actual nature of their disadvantages, rather than on the abstract notions of poverty.