Despite becoming a global economic force, why does India win so few Olympic medals and have so many people living in poverty? Why have opportunities not become available more broadly? How can growing individuals assist with the task of building a growing economy? Krishna presents a refreshingly unusual perspective of emergent realities, drawing on the stories of everyday lives, of people like you and me and those less privileged. Through decades-long investigations, living in villages and slum communities, the author presents eye-opening details of missed opportunities and immense untapped talent that can be harnessed, with tremendous consequences for equity and growth. Offering possible solutions for inequality and those in need, The Broken Ladder is a comprehensive and fascinating account of development strategies in a fast-growing, yet largely agrarian, developing economy.

"Disciplining the Poor" lays out the underlying logic of contemporary poverty governance in the United States. The authors argue that poverty governance - how social welfare policy choices get made, how authority gets exercised, and how collective pursuits get organized - has been transformed in the United States by two significant developments. The rise of paternalism has promoted a more directive and supervisory approach to managing the poor. This has intersected with a second development: the rise of neoliberalism as an organizing principle of governance. Neoliberals have redesigned state operations around market principles; to impose market discipline, core state functions - from war to welfare - have been contracted out to private providers. The authors seek to clarify the origins, operations, and consequences of neoliberal paternalism as a mode of poverty governance, tracing its impact from the federal level, to the state and county level, down to the differences in ways frontline case workers take disciplinary actions in individual cases. The book also addresses the complex role race has come to play in contemporary poverty governance.

Encountering Poverty challenges mainstream frameworks of global poverty by going beyond the claims that poverty is a problem that can be solved through economic resources or technological interventions. By focusing on the power and privilege that underpin persistent impoverishment and using tools of critical analysis and pedagogy, the authors explore the opportunities for and limits of poverty action in the current moment. Encountering Poverty invites students, educators, activists, and development professionals to think about and act against inequality by foregrounding, rather than sidestepping, the long history of development and the ethical dilemmas of poverty action today.

This book explores the changing spatial distribution of the United States of America's poorest and most affluent counties over the 30 years from 1980 to 2010. While overall rates of poverty have changed somewhat during this period, the geography of counties where affluence and poverty rates are the highest have also shifted as economic fortunes wax and wane. The spatial understanding of poverty and affluence is an important dimension of addressing the complex economic and social contexts within which poverty occurs, and which vary substantially depending on several factors. While there has been significant focus on poverty in the United States, including some analysis of its spatial characteristics, since the 1960s there has been relatively little research on the concomitant geography of affluence. The geographies of poverty and affluence analyzed in this book give a view of spatial economic segregation. Spatial aspects of both the poorest and most affluent counties are focused on, as well as the changing gap and relative geographies between rich and poor over three decades.

A survey in 1776 recorded almost 2,000 parish workhouses operating in England, while the number in Wales was just nineteen. The New Poor Law of 1834 proved equally unattractive in much of Wales - some parts of the country resisted providing a workhouse until the 1870s, with Rhayader in Radnorshire being the last area in the whole of England and Wales to do so. Our image of these institutions has often been coloured by the work of authors such as Charles Dickens, but what was the reality? Where exactly were these workhouses located - and what happened to them? People are often surprised to discover that a familiar building was once a workhouse. Revealing locations steeped in social history, Workhouses of Wales and the Welsh Borders is a comprehensive and copiously illustrated guide to the workhouses that were set up across Wales and the border counties of Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. It provides an insight into the contemporary attitudes towards such institutions as well as their construction and administration, what life was like for the inmates, and where to find their records today.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness: first recognized together in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, these are the focus of the Social Question. In 1942 William Beveridge called them the "giant evils" while diagnosing the crises produced by the emergence of industrial society. More recently, during the final quarter of the twentieth century, the global spread of neoliberal policies enlarged these crises so much that the Social Question has made a comeback. The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century maps out the linked crises across regions and countries and identifies the renewed and intensified Social Question as a labor issue above all. The volume includes discussions from every corner of the globe, focusing on American exceptionalism, Chinese repression, Indian exclusion, South African colonialism, democratic transitions in Eastern Europe, and other phenomena. The effects of capitalism dominating the world, the impact of the scarcity of waged work, and the degree to which the dispossessed poor bear the brunt of the crisis are all evaluated in this carefully curated volume. Both thorough and thoughtful, the book serves as collective effort to revive and reposition the Social Question, reconstructing its meaning and its politics in the world today.

In Downeast, Gigi Georges follows five girls as they come of age in one of the most challenging and geographically isolated regions on the Eastern seaboard. Their stories reveal surprising truths about rural America and offer hope for its future. "It's almost impossible not to care about these fierce young women and cheer for their hard-won successes" (Kirkus) in this "heartfelt portrait" and "worthy tribute" (Publishers Weekly). Nestled in Maine's far northeast corner, Washington County sits an hour's drive from the heart of famed and bustling Acadia National Park. Yet it's a world away. For Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie-five teenage girls caught between tradition and transformation in this remote region-it is home. Downeast follows their journeys of heartbreak and hope in uncertain times, creating a nuanced and unique portrait of rural America with women at its center. Willow lives in the shadow of an abusive, drug-addicted father and searches for stability through photography and love. Vivian, a gifted writer, feels stifled by her church and town, and struggles to break free without severing family ties. Mckenna is a softball pitching phenom whose passion is the lobster-fishing she learned at her father's knee. Audrey is a beloved high school basketball star who earns a coveted college scholarship but questions her chosen path. Josie, a Yale-bound valedictorian, is determined to take the world by storm. All five girls know the pain and joy of life in a region whose rugged beauty and stoicism mask dwindling populations, vanishing job opportunities, and pervasive opioid addiction. As the girls reach adulthood, they discover that despite significant challenges, there is much to celebrate in "the valley of the overlooked." Their stories remind us of the value of timeless ideals: strength of family and community, reverence for nature's rule, dignity in cracked hands and muddied shoes, and the enduring power of home. Revealed through the eyes of Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie, Downeast is based on four years of intimate reporting. The result is a beautifully rendered, emotionally startling, and vital book. Downeast will break readers' hearts yet offer them hope, providing answers to what the future may hold for rural America.

Invisible Britain: Portraits of Hope and Resilience reveals untold stories from people who have been left out of the media narrative and left behind by government policy. Featuring the work of accomplished documentary photographers, the book presents people speaking in their own words to create a narrative showing how an unprecedented world of austerity, de-industrialisation and social upheaval is affecting us all.

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

"I can think of no one more fitting to provide the broad perspective on the City's health system, as well as a specific analysis of the current state of affairs." --James R. Tallone, Jr., President, United Hospital FundFor the three decades since passage of Medicare and Medicaid, health care service to the American people has expanded. Relatively few studies have assessed the extent to which access to health care have actually improved for specific groups, such as the poor and the middle class. This book is an in-depth assessment of the extent to which Medicare and Medicaid have met expectations of citizens. New York City is the focus because of its long-standing commitment to provide essential health care to all citizens irrespective of ability to pay, its hospital system composed of voluntary and public sectors, and its vast governmental and private funding.

Founded in Toronto in 1968, the Praxis Corporation was a progressive research institute mandated to spark political discussion about a range of social issues, such as poverty, homelessness, anti-war activism, community activism and worker organization. Deemed a radical threat by the Canadian state, Praxis was put under RCMP surveillance. In 1970, Praxis's office was burgled and burned to the ground. No arrests were made, but internal documents and records stolen from Praxis ended up in the hands of the RCMP Security Service. All this occurred as Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government shifted away from social spending and poverty reduction towards the economic regime of austerity and neoliberalism that we have today. In When Poverty Mattered, Paul Weinberg combines insights gleaned from internal government documents, access to information requests and investigative journalism to provide both a history of radical politics in 1960s Canada and an illustration of misdeeds and dirty tricks the Canadian government orchestrated in order to disrupt activist organizations fighting for a more just society.

There was a time when America's poor faced a stark choice between access to social welfare and full civil rights--a predicament that forced them to forfeit their citizenship in exchange for economic relief. Over time, however, our welfare system improved dramatically. But as Chad Alan Goldberg here demonstrates, its legacy of disenfranchisement persisted. Indeed, from Reconstruction onward, welfare policies have remained a flashpoint for recurring struggles over the boundaries of citizenship.
"Citizens and Paupers" explores this contentious history by analyzing and comparing three major programs: the Freedmen's Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the present-day system of workfare that arose in the 1990s. Each of these overhauls of the welfare state created new groups of clients, new policies for aiding them, and new disputes over citizenship--conflicts that were entangled in racial politics and of urgent concern for social activists.
This combustible mix of racial tension and social reform continues to influence how we think about welfare, and "Citizens and Paupers" is an invaluable analysis of the roots of the debate.

Beggars, outcasts, urchins, waifs, prostitutes, criminals, convicts, madmen, fallen women, lunatics, degenerates-part reality, part fantasy, these are the grotesque faces that populate the underworld, the dark inverse of our everyday world. Lurking in the mirror that we hold up to our society, they are our counterparts and our doubles, repelling us and yet offering the tantalizing promise of escape. Although these images testify to undeniable social realities, the sordid lower depths make up a symbolic and social imaginary that reflects our fears and anxieties-as well as our desires. In Vice, Crime, and Poverty, Dominique Kalifa traces the untold history of the concept of the underworld and its representations in popular culture. He examines how the myth of the lower depths came into being in nineteenth-century Europe, as biblical figures and Christian traditions were adapted for a world turned upside-down by the era of industrialization, democratization, and mass culture. From the Parisian demimonde to Victorian squalor, from the slums of New York to the sewers of Buenos Aires, Kalifa deciphers the making of an image that has cast an enduring spell on its audience. While the social conditions that created that underworld have changed, Vice, Crime, and Poverty shows that, from social-scientific ideas of the underclass to contemporary cinema and steampunk culture, its shadows continue to haunt us.

The Poverty Law Canon takes readers into the lives of clients and lawyerswho brought critical poverty law cases in the United States. These casesinvolved attempts to establish the right to basic necessities, as well asefforts to ensure dignified treatment of welfare recipients and to haltadministrative attacks on federal program benefit levels. They alsoconfronted government efforts to constrict access to justice, due process,and rights to counsel in child support and consumer cases, social welfareprograms, and public housing. By exploring the personal narratives thatgave rise to these lawsuits as well as the behind-the-scenes dynamicsof the Supreme Court, the text locates these cases within the socialdynamics that shaped the course of litigation. Noted legal scholarsexplain the legal precedent created by each case and set the case withinits historical and political context in a way that will assist students andadvocates in poverty-related disciplines in their understanding of theimplications of these cases for contemporary public policy decisions inpoverty programs. Whether the focus is on the clients, on the lawyers, oron the justices, the stories in Poverty Law Canon illuminate the centrallegal themes in federal poverty law of the late 20th century and the rolethat racial and economic stereotyping plays in shaping American law.

In Development as Freedom Amartya Sen explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence millions of people living in the Third World are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedoms and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms' to the unfree citizens. Freedom, Sen persuasively argues, is at once the ultimate goal of social and economic arrangements and the most efficient means of realizing general welfare. Social institutions like markets, political parties, legislatures, the judiciary, and the media contribute to development by enhancing individual freedom and are in turn sustained by social values. Values, institutions, development, and freedom are all closely interrelated, and Sen links them together in an elegant analytical framework. By asking 'What is the relation between our collective economic wealth and our individual ability to live as we would like?' and by incorporating individual freedom as a social commitment into his analysis Sen allows economics once again, as it did in the time of Adam Smith, to address the social basis of individual well-being and freedom.

We are, all of us, intimately familiar with inequalities. Whether finding somewhere to live, walking in the street, following the news, negotiating international travel, or in our working and personal lives, subtle and crude hierarchies shape our lived experience. How the other half lives contributes detailed, multidisciplinary, and qualitative explorations of the everyday social and spatial realities of inequality, drawing new lines from Manchester to Milan, from Brighton to Bologna. Uniquely structured as a series of oppositions between peaks and troughs, with each chapter focusing on a specific subject, including: housing, urban design, place-making, the state, cultures of inequality, and transnational mobility. This book is a resource to navigate an unequal world, oriented around three key understandings of inequality as contingent, intersectional, and interrelated. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced inequalities -- .

'This book flips your world upside down. Daniel Markovits argues that meritocracy isn't a virtuous, efficient system that rewards the best and brightest. Instead it rewards middle-class families who can afford huge investments in their children's education ... Frightening, eye-opening stuff' The Times, Books of the Year Even in the midst of runaway economic inequality and dangerous social division, it remains an axiom of modern life that meritocracy reigns supreme and promises to open opportunity to all. The idea that reward should follow ability and effort is so entrenched in our psyche that, even as society divides itself at almost every turn, all sides can be heard repeating meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we think we are. But what if, both up and down the social ladder, meritocracy is a sham? Today, meritocracy has become exactly what it was conceived to resist: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Upward mobility has become a fantasy, and the embattled middle classes are now more likely to sink into the working poor than to rise into the professional elite. At the same time, meritocracy now ensnares even those who manage to claw their way to the top, requiring rich adults to work with crushing intensity, exploiting their expensive educations in order to extract a return. All this is not the result of deviations or retreats from meritocracy but rather stems directly from meritocracy's successes. This is the radical argument that The Meritocracy Trap prosecutes with rare force, comprehensive research, and devastating persuasion. Daniel Markovits, a law professor trained in philosophy and economics, is better placed than most to puncture one of the dominant ideas of our age. Having spent his life at elite universities, he knows from the inside the corrosive system we are trapped within, as well as how we can take the first steps towards a world that might afford us both prosperity and dignity.

Each year, millions of people die from poverty-related causes. In this groundbreaking and thought-provoking book, Gwilym David Blunt argues that the only people who will end this injustice are its victims, and that the global poor have the right to resist the causes of poverty. He explores how the right of resistance is used to reframe urgent political questions: is illegal immigration a form of resistance? Can transnational social movements, such as the indigenous rights movement, provide the foundations for civil resistance to global poverty? If peaceful resistance fails, is armed struggle justified? Do people living in affluent states have a responsibility to help even if it requires them to break the law? Giving clear historical examples and engaging with fields including philosophy, international law, history, and international political studies, this volume addresses real-world issues from terrorism to activism. It will be important for anyone interested in applied philosophy and global injustice.

Around 1.4 billion people presently live in extreme poverty, and yet despite this vast scale, the issue of global poverty had a relatively low international profile until the end of the 20th century. In this important new work, Hulme charts the rise of global poverty as a priority global issue, and its subsequent marginalisation as old themes edged it aside (trade policy and peace-making in regions of geo-political importance) and new issues were added (terrorism, global climate change and access to natural resources). Key updates for the new edition: evaluation of the post-2015 Development Agenda and the Rio+20 exploration of how Colombia and Brazil are pushing a sustainability agenda as a Southern perspective to challenge the aid focus of OECD post-MDGs interests examination and discussion of the gradual shift of power and influence to the BRICs and emerging regional powers (Indonesia, Turkey, South Africa) but the lack of change in global institutions exploration of Russia's lack of participation in the development agenda The first book to tackle the issue of global poverty through the lens of global institutions; this fully updated volume provides an important resource for all students and scholars of international relations, development studies and international political economy.

Wastelands is an exploration of trash, the scavengers who collect it, and the precarious communities it sustains. After enduring war and persecution in Kosovo, many Ashkali refugees fled to Belgrade, Serbia, where they were stigmatized as Gypsies, consigned to slums, sidelined from the economy, and subjected to violence. To survive, Ashkali collect the only resource available to them: garbage. Vividly recounting everyday life in an illegal Romani settlement, Eirik Saethre follows Ashkali as they scavenge through dumpsters, build shacks, siphon electricity, negotiate the recycling trade, and migrate between Belgrade, Kosovo, and the European Union. He argues that trash is not just a means of survival: it reinforces the status of Ashkali and Roma as polluted Others, creates indissoluble bonds to transnational capitalism, enfeebles bodies, and establishes a localized sovereignty.

Despite a constitutional right to food, a comprehensive social security structure, being a net exporter of agricultural products and maintaining a rising GDP, freedom from hunger remains a pipedream for millions of South Africans. With a constant surge in food prices, the availability of sustenance is often seriously threatened for all of South Africa's population. While the underprivileged majority residing in townships often demonstrate their discontent for poor service delivery on the streets, they rarely channel this strategy into taming food inflation. This study seeks to understand this irony and examine ways in which this trend could be reversed. Proposing a compelling argument for food activism, Bright Nkrumah suggests ways of mobilising disempowered groups to reclaim this inherent right. Presented alongside historical and contemporary case studies to illustrate the dynamics of collective action and food security in South Africa, he draws from legal, social and political theory to make the case for 'activism' as a force for alleviating food insecurity.

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.

Footwork is an original street-corner ethnography drawing on the themes of urban regeneration, lost space and the 24-hour city. From the rough sleeping homeless to street drinkers and sex workers, it shows how urban modernisation, development and austerity politics impact the hidden lives of people living and working on the streets. To create this anthropology of the modern British city, Footwork follows the work of a team of outreach workers in Cardiff, tasked to look out for the homeless and others similarly vulnerable, harried and exposed. Tom Hall's fieldwork study encompasses aspects of urban geography, care work and street-level poverty, violence and isolation, this book reveals the stories of the vulnerable and isolated - people living in the city we often choose to ignore.

This book brings together interdisciplinary perspectives with the aim of broadening understandings of poverty. It contains both empirical and conceptual chapters, including those by local researchers, on a range of topics highlighting the relationship between poverty and sustainability. It cover themes such as: changes in the environment that pose an existential risk to humans; new concepts in tourism development that consider it as one of the key contributors in the prosperity and well-being of all stakeholders; natural, social and economic aspects of human behaviour and environmental sustainability; the impact of global warming on human well-being; immigration and integration policies and analyses of public discourse on migrants; and overconsumption and its impact on sustainable development. It will be a helpful resource for students and researchers of environmental management, tourism, global justice and sustainable development.

This book presents a multidimensional, psychosocial and critical understanding of poverty by bringing together studies carried out with groups in different contexts and situations of deprivation in Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay, Nicaragua and Spain. The book is divided in two parts. The first part presents studies that unveil the psychosocial implications of poverty by revealing the processes of domination based on the stigmatization and criminalization of poor people, which contribute to maintain realities of social inequality. The second part presents studies focused on strategies to fight poverty and forms of resistance developed by individuals who are in situations of marginalization.The studies presented in this contributed volume depart from the theoretical framework developed by Critical Social Psychology, Community Psychology and Liberation Psychology, in an effort to understand poverty beyond its monetary dimension, bringing social, cultural, structural and subjective factors into the analysis. Psychological science in general has not produced specific knowledge about poverty as a result of the relations of domination produced by social inequalities fostered by the capitalist system. This book seeks to fill this gap by presenting a psychosocial perspective with psychological and sociological bases aligned in a dialectical way in order to understand and confront poverty. Psychosocial Implications of Poverty - Diversities and Resistances will be of interest to social psychologists, sociologists and economists interested in multidimensional studies of poverty, as well as to policy makers and activists directly working with the development of policies and strategies to fight poverty.