An understanding of personal debt requires an understanding of the complex social systems that produce poverty. By drawing upon international perspectives, this book investigates why more and more people are in debt, why it is causing so much mental distress and exactly who is benefiting from what has become the world's number one growth industry.

Drawing on extensive research and national survey data, sociologist Donald I. Warren here presents an in-depth analysis of the Middle American Radicals, who they are, what they believe, the major targets of their grievances, and the likelihood of their political mobilization. The evidence indicates that as many as one in five Americans shares the Radical Center perspective, including people who outwardly seem to have very little in common by way of economic, occupational, or education status. Of particular significance are the findings concerning potential support for the various presidential candidates and for a third national political party.

The urban poor suffer many problems beyond pressing financial concerns, including those involving housing, health, and family relationships. Social welfare agencies struggle to cope with the enormity of need presented by individuals and families. The providers frequently lack a framework to guide their priorities and the delivery of services. This volume, based on the authors' close and extensive collaboration with New York's Lower East Family Union, affords a substantive, insightful, and effective approach not only to defining the services needed but also to the delivery thereof. It also examines the cognitive and emotional states which the clients bring as they seek help. Means are provided for establishing priority of needs, assessing the value of preventive services, and formulating family-specific service responses. Potential family dissolution and implicit child welfare concerns are viewed as especially critical and receives extensive constructive discussion.

Stressed, poverty-level families often approach helping agencies in a nearly exhausted condition. The needs of such clients can only be answered, and the last straw avoided, if the agencies are structured to identify the most immediate needs and to supply the understanding, supportive relationship, and the requisite practical assistance. This book, with its extensive base of experience, guides the process wisely. It offers informed hope that the awful conditions of the urban poor can be ameliorated through better planned and effective service delivery, and caring interventions.

If we are becoming increasingly disconnected from our local communities, are there implications for health, well being and happiness, particularly for people on low incomes? This book looks at the interplay between poor people, poor communities and poor health, with a particular focus on social networks as key linkages.

By combining history with sociology, Rothstein presents a new way of looking at state-supported schools. He describes the pauper schools of the early 1800s and shows how they became the foundation for the common schools that followed. Compulsory education sought to alleviate urban crime while assimilating the immigrants who flocked to our shores in each generation. In the late 19th century, the militaristic schools became more bureaucratic and set in their ways in spite of the new thinking in education represented by John Dewey. Rothstein shows how Dewey was taught in college but that Thorndike was followed in the public schools. The high school was an attempt to meet the changing needs of the Industrial Revolution. After recapitulating the foundational history of American public schools, Rothstein examines the psychological effects of martinet teaching methods on students' self-perception and performance. A stunning new (old) perspective on American education.

Research on poverty in rich countries relies primarily on household income to capture living standards and distinguish those in poverty, and this is also true of official poverty measurement and monitoring. However, awareness of the limitations of income has been heightening interest in the role that non-monetary measures of deprivation can play. This book takes as starting-point that research on poverty and social exclusion has been undergoing a fundamental shift towards a multidimensional approach; that researchers and policy-makers alike have struggled to develop concepts and indicators that do this approach justice; and that this is highly salient not only within individual countries (including both Britain and the USA) but also for the European Union post-enlargement. The difficulties encountered in applying a multidimensional approach reflect limitations in the information available but also in the conceptual and empirical underpinnings provided by existing research.
The central aim of this book is to contribute to the development of those underpinnings and productive ways of employing non-monetary indicators of deprivation. It will appeal to readers from diverse disciplinary perspectives, especially those concerned with substantive issues and policy implications. In addressing this audience it also provides a non-technical account of recent developments in the rapidly expanding academic literature, serving as a guide to those who wish to explore it in greater depth. The book maps out the current landscape and the best way forward, concluding by offering a critical evaluation of the EU's 2020 poverty reduction target.

Is food aid the way of the future? What are the prospects for integrated public policies informed by the right to food? First World Hunger Revisited investigates the rise of food charity and corporately sponsored food banks as effective and sustainable responses to increasing hunger and food poverty in twelve rich 'food-secure' societies.

The author examines the moral, methodological, and practical problems that arise from poverty measurement. He establishes a methodological framework for analyzing poverty conceptions and measures, and concludes with concrete recommendations regarding both the procedures for and substance of future global poverty measurement.

Written from a political and historical perspective, this book addresses the treatment of poverty by the Catholic Church from the beginning of the industrial revolution--about 1800--to the present. Its emphasis is on the Third World, particularly Latin America. Werner Levi studies the Church's differing approaches to dealing with the problem of poverty and the political consequences these approaches have had upon the relations between the Vatican and regional governments. The book also focuses on the controversy surrounding Liberation Theology, as both poverty and Liberation Theology play a large part in Latin American politics.

By comparing broadly similar situations of poverty in 19th century Europe and 20th century Latin America, Levi reaches the conclusion that, in its reluctance to go beyond rhetoric in dealing with poverty, the church may lose the loyalty of its Third World constituency in much the same way as it lost the loyalty of the labor movement in the 19th century. The book examines Pope John Paul II's progressivism in dealing with poverty and the similarities between the socialist leanings of the Pope's speeches and the Liberation Theologian's writings. Levi points out, however, that the Pope's progressivism is not shared by the Vatican officialdom. This thought provoking, well researched book will appeal to students and scholars of theology and church history, as well as political scientists and sociologists dealing with religion and the social problem of poverty.

Was there a notion of childhood for the labouring classes, and was it distinctive from that of the elite? Examining pauper childhood, family life and societal reform, Levene asks whether new models of childhood in the eighteenth century affected the treatment of the young poor, and reveals how they and their families were helped through hard times.

Seekings and Nattrass explain why poverty persisted in South Africa after the transition to democracy in 1994. The book examines how public policies both mitigated and reproduced poverty, and explains how and why these policies were adopted. The analysis offers lessons for the study of poverty elsewhere in the world.

As a history of family life in the squatter settlements of Rio de Janeiro from the 1940s to the 1960s, this study shatters the myth of household disorganization said to be the norm among the urban poor. Using quantitative evidence, field reports by social workers, newspaper accounts, and the recollections of the squatters themselves, the study dissects household structure, economic activity, living standards, and political participation among the one million "favelados" (squatters) living in Rio by 1960, singling out three favelas for comparative analysis. "Favelados" prized family life, and most succeeded in holding their households together against daunting odds. Shantytowns provided residence close to the workplace, and some were erected literally in the shadow of the construction projects where the squatters worked. Indeed, the location and economic activity of the surrounding neighborhood largely determined the ability of the favela to survive. As squatters became an important part of the city work force, they mobilized to put pressure on the authorities to provide collective services like water and electricity.

"Public Utilities and The Poor" examines an often-neglected aspect of utility policy: the development of new policy directions for utility assistance to the low-income and the elderly. It focuses on the shift in utility assistance policy-making from the federal to the state, local, and neighborhood levels and on the resulting opportunity among private utilities for leadership in developing local programs. In addition, the authors propose that steps be taken to open up the policy-making process to make sure that all groups with a stake in the outcome are included.

Policing Urban Poverty provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging analysis of the policy implications of social problems for the welfare state in general and the police service in particular, through an examination of the relationship between discourses on urban poverty, crime and disorder in Britain and America. Drawing on extensive empirical evidence, the book adds to the sociological and historical analyses of these issues by considering their practical relevance at different times and in different places for police policy-makers. Throughout history the police have been charged with the difficult task of peace-keeping and crime-fighting in poor communities, with potentially calamitous consequences when things go wrong. Senior police officers have argued that successive governments have not provided adequate support and guidance to assist them in their attempts to be tough on crime and its causes.

Global poverty continues to be a major problem, one that has received much attention and resources for the last 60 years. The developed countries, international institutions such as the World Bank and United Nations, various aid agencies, and civil society have contributed trillions of dollars to fight poverty yet there are more poor today than there were a decade ago. In this hard-hitting polemical Karnani demonstrates what is wrong today's approaches to reducing poverty. He proposes an eclectic approach to poverty reduction that emphasizes the need for business, government and civil society to partner together to create employment opportunities for the poor arguing that the only way they will ever be truly lifted out of poverty is to create jobs that provide financial support for entire local communities in developing nations.

World Poverty provides an authoritative and balanced examination of the many facets of world poverty and the policy issues surrounding it. World Poverty: A Reference Handbook provides an authoritative overview of world poverty as it stands today. Economic expert Geoffrey Gilbert offers a balanced examination of the controversies and policies surrounding world poverty and addresses such fundamental issues as the definition of poverty and the construction of indicators and indices. In clear terms, this reference work sheds light on spatial patterns of poverty around the globe; the quality of health, food, shelter; and the commitments of the international community. Issues of special interest such as globalization, effectiveness of foreign aid, corruption, and goals for poverty reduction are presented from diverse angles. As with all volumes in the series, this essential reference includes biographical profiles, pivotal documents, and detailed listings of organizations and resources. Annotated timeline of significant events, conferences, and declarations, dating from the 8th century to the present Diverse biographical sketches of key individuals, including Jeffrey Sachs and James Wolfensohn

50 years ago, World Bank President Robert McNamara promised to end poverty. Alleviation was to rely on economic growth, resulting in higher incomes stimulated by Bank loans processed by deskbound Washington staff, trickling down to the poorest. Instead, child poverty and homelessness are on the increase everywhere. In this book, anthropologist and former World Bank Advisor Glynn Cochrane argues that instead of Washington's "management by seclusion," poverty alleviation requires personal engagement with the poorest by helpers with hands-on local and cultural skills. Here, the author argues, the insights provided by anthropological fieldwork have a crucial role to play.

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.

White working class areas are often seen as entrenched and immobile, threatened by the arrival of 'outsiders'. This major new study of class and place since 1930 challenges accepted wisdom, demonstrating how emigration as well as shorter distance moves out of such areas can be as suffused with emotion as moving into them. Both influence people's sense of belonging to the place they live in. Using oral histories from residents of three social housing estates in Norwich, England, the book also tells stories of the appropriation of and resistance to state discourses of community; and of ambivalent, complex and shifting class relations and identities. Material poverty has been a constant in the area, but not for all residents, and being defined as 'poor' is an identity that some actively resist.

With six essays exploring different aspects of economic growth, poverty, inequality and social security, this book offers a critical perspective on India's development experience since independence. Incisive and empirically rich, the book opens up new vistas in development discourse and informs current policy debates.

Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 22 begins with papers of widespread interest on the impact of the Great Recession. The first paper addresses the impact of "asset meltdown" on the wealth of the US middle class, with disparate racial and ethnic impacts. The second studies poverty and inequality in the US in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The next topic is on the evolution of poverty and inequality in the world. One paper proposes a new methodology to measure global poverty and inequality, while the second analyzes the importance of considering not only the desperately poor but also those just above the subsistence level. Great interest for inequality researchers lies on the use of wealth data. Two approaches to this issue are presented. Firstly, several papers study wealth inequality directly. Secondly, a paper uses annuitized wealth data to augment the income measure of economic well-being. An emerging field in the study of economic well-being is the use of self-reported status and perceptions data. Three papers employ this type of data, investigating happiness inequality, perception of income inequality, and the existence of a "Great Gatsby Curve" for job mobility.

In recent years China has achieved impressive economic growth, and also made remarkable progress in human development. However, contemporary China is still faced with the great challenge of widespread poverty. This not only constitutes a barrier against China's pursuit of sustainable economic growth, but also poses a potential threat to China's attempts to construct a harmonious society in the future. This book, written by three renowned poverty-reduction experts under the aegis of the China Development Research Foundation - one of China's leading think-tanks - and drawing on the research of over twenty of China's top scholars in this field, examines China's efforts to eliminate poverty through development. It analyses all of the key issues, providing a review of China's past record in poverty alleviation, comparing this with the experiences of other countries, identifying the new characteristics and trends in poverty in recent years, and discussing the factors responsible. It assesses the objectives and success of the poverty alleviation policies adopted by the Chinese government in a comprehensive way, and puts forward suggestions for policy makers. Overall, this book is a valuable account of China's own thinking on its problems of poverty, and the best ways to tackle it and achieve sustainable economic development.