Wealth, Poverty and Politics

Wealth, Poverty and Politics
Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2016-09-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0465096778

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In Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Thomas Sowell, one of the foremost conservative public intellectuals in this country, argues that political and ideological struggles have led to dangerous confusion about income inequality in America. Pundits and politically motivated economists trumpet ambiguous statistics and sensational theories while ignoring the true determinant of income inequality: the production of wealth. We cannot properly understand inequality if we focus exclusively on the distribution of wealth and ignore wealth production factors such as geography, demography, and culture. Sowell contends that liberals have a particular interest in misreading the data and chastises them for using income inequality as an argument for the welfare state. Refuting Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, and others on the left, Sowell draws on accurate empirical data to show that the inequality is not nearly as extreme or sensational as we have been led to believe. Transcending partisanship through a careful examination of data, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics reveals the truth about the most explosive political issue of our time.

Relational Poverty Politics

Relational Poverty Politics
Author: Victoria Lawson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2018-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0820353124

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This collection examines the power and transformative potential of movements that fight against poverty and inequality. Broadly, poverty politics are struggles to define who is poor, what it means to be poor, what actions might be taken, and who should act. These movements shape the sociocultural and political economic structures that constitute poverty and privilege as material and social relations. Editors Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood focus on the politics of insurgent movements against poverty and inequality in seven countries (Argentina, India, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, Singapore, and the United States). The contributors explore theory and practice in alliance politics, resistance movements, the militarized repression of justice movements, global counterpublics, and political theater. These movements reflect the diversity of poverty politics and the relations between bureaucracies and antipoverty movements. They discuss work done by mass and other types of mobilizations across multiple scales; forms of creative and political alliance across axes of difference; expressions and exercises of agency by people named as poor; and the kinds of rights and other claims that are made in different spaces and places. Relational Poverty Politics advocates for poverty knowledge grounded in relational perspectives that highlight the adversarial relationship of poverty to privilege, as well as the possibility for alliances across different groups. It incorporates current research in the field and demonstrates how relational poverty knowledge is best seen as a model for understanding how theory is derivative of action as much as the other way around. The book lays a foundation for realistic change that can directly attack poverty at its roots. Contributors: Antonádia Borges, Dia Da Costa, Sarah Elwood, David Boarder Giles, Jim Glassman, Victoria Lawson, Felipe Magalhães, Jeff Maskovsky, Richa Nagar, Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, LaShawnDa Pittman, Frances Fox Piven, Preeti Sampat, Thomas Swerts, and Junjia Ye.

The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty

The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty
Author: David Brady
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 937
Release: 2016
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199914052

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The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty builds a common scholarly ground in the study of poverty by bringing together an international, inter-disciplinary group of scholars to provide their perspectives on the issue. Contributors engage in discussions about the leading theories and conceptual debates regarding poverty, the most salient topics in poverty research, and the far-reaching consequences of poverty on the individual and societal level.

Rich Democracies, Poor People

Rich Democracies, Poor People
Author: David Brady
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2009-08-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199888922

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Poverty is not simply the result of an individual's characteristics, behaviors or abilities. Rather, as David Brady demonstrates, poverty is the result of politics. In Rich Democracies, Poor People, Brady investigates why poverty is so entrenched in some affluent democracies whereas it is a solvable problem in others. Drawing on over thirty years of data from eighteen countries, Brady argues that cross-national and historical variations in poverty are principally driven by differences in the generosity of the welfare state. An explicit challenge to mainstream views of poverty as an inescapable outcome of individual failings or a society's labor markets and demography, this book offers institutionalized power relations theory as an alternative explanation.

The Myth of Marginality

The Myth of Marginality
Author: Janice E. Perlman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1976
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520039520

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Worlds Apart

Worlds Apart
Author: Cynthia M. Duncan
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2015-01-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0300210515

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First published in 1999, Worlds Apart examined the nature of poverty through the stories of real people in three remote rural areas of the United States: New England, Appalachia, and the Mississippi Delta. In this new edition, Duncan returns to her original research, interviewing some of the same people as well as some new key informants. Duncan provides powerful new insights into the dynamics of poverty, politics, and community change. "Duncan, through in-depth investigation and interviews, concludes that only a strong civic culture, a sense among citizens of community and the need to serve that community, can truly address poverty. . . . Moving and troubling. Duncan has created a remarkable study of the persistent patterns of poverty and power."—Kirkus Reviews "The descriptions of rural poverty in Worlds Apart are interesting and read almost like a novel."—Choice

Poverty Knowledge

Poverty Knowledge
Author: Alice O'Connor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2009-01-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400824745

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Progressive-era "poverty warriors" cast poverty in America as a problem of unemployment, low wages, labor exploitation, and political disfranchisement. In the 1990s, policy specialists made "dependency" the issue and crafted incentives to get people off welfare. Poverty Knowledge gives the first comprehensive historical account of the thinking behind these very different views of "the poverty problem," in a century-spanning inquiry into the politics, institutions, ideologies, and social science that shaped poverty research and policy. Alice O'Connor chronicles a transformation in the study of poverty, from a reform-minded inquiry into the political economy of industrial capitalism to a detached, highly technical analysis of the demographic and behavioral characteristics of the poor. Along the way, she uncovers the origins of several controversial concepts, including the "culture of poverty" and the "underclass." She shows how such notions emerged not only from trends within the social sciences, but from the central preoccupations of twentieth-century American liberalism: economic growth, the Cold War against communism, the changing fortunes of the welfare state, and the enduring racial divide. The book details important changes in the politics and organization as well as the substance of poverty knowledge. Tracing the genesis of a still-thriving poverty research industry from its roots in the War on Poverty, it demonstrates how research agendas were subsequently influenced by an emerging obsession with welfare reform. Over the course of the twentieth century, O'Connor shows, the study of poverty became more about altering individual behavior and less about addressing structural inequality. The consequences of this steady narrowing of focus came to the fore in the 1990s, when the nation's leading poverty experts helped to end "welfare as we know it." O'Connor shows just how far they had traveled from their field's original aims.

Why Americans Hate Welfare

Why Americans Hate Welfare
Author: Martin Gilens
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2009-05-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226293661

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Tackling one of the most volatile issues in contemporary politics, Martin Gilens's work punctures myths and misconceptions about welfare policy, public opinion, and the role of the media in both. Why Americans Hate Welfare shows that the public's views on welfare are a complex mixture of cynicism and compassion; misinformed and racially charged, they nevertheless reflect both a distrust of welfare recipients and a desire to do more to help the "deserving" poor. "With one out of five children currently living in poverty and more than 100,000 families with children now homeless, Gilens's book is must reading if you want to understand how the mainstream media have helped justify, and even produce, this state of affairs." —Susan Douglas, The Progressive "Gilens's well-written and logically developed argument deserves to be taken seriously." —Choice "A provocative analysis of American attitudes towards 'welfare.'. . . [Gilens] shows how racial stereotypes, not white self-interest or anti-statism, lie at the root of opposition to welfare programs." -Library Journal

People, Poverty, and Politics

People, Poverty, and Politics
Author: Thomas H. Coode
Publisher:
Total Pages: 290
Release: 1981
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

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This book examines the impact of the Great Depression on Pennsylvania, covering, in addition to politics, such topics as social and physical deprivation, black housing, labor conflict, relief, and the revival of the United Mine Workers of America. Illustrated.