Poverty Economics

Three of the nation’s top scholars ­– known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.

En este libro pionero, Karlan y Appel conjugan la economía del comportamiento con la investigación de campo. Llevan a sus lectores consigo por pueblos de todo el mundo–desde Ghana hasta Kenia pasando por Sudáfrica, la India y Filipinas, Perú y México–en los que la teoría económica choca con la realidad. Muestran que ciertos cambios en la banca, los seguros, la asistencia sanitaria, la educación junto con otras iniciativas que tienen en cuenta la irracionalidad humana pueden mejorar radicalmente el bienestar de la gente pobre en todo el mundo.

Food is a conduit for connection; we envision smiling families gathered around a table-eating, happy, content. But what happens when poverty, mental illness, homelessness, and addiction claim a seat at that table? In The Meth Lunches, Kim Foster peers behind the polished visions of perfectly curated dinners and charming families to reveal the complex reality when poverty and food intersect.

Who is the richest person in the world, ever? Does where you were born affect how much money you'll earn over a lifetime? How would we know? Why, beyond the idle curiosity, do these questions even matter? In The Haves and the Have-Nots, Branko Milanovic, one of the world's leading experts on wealth, poverty, and the gap that separates them, explains these and other mysteries of how wealth is unevenly spread throughout our world, now and through time.

In the span of a generation, oil-rich Venezuela spiraled into a dire state of economic collapse. Reporter Paula Ramón experienced the crisis firsthand as her middle-class family saw their quality of life deteriorate. Public services no longer functioned. Money lost its value. Her mother couldn’t afford to buy food, which was increasingly scarce. The once-prosperous country fell into ruin. Like many others, Ramón’s family struggled to survive each day in their beloved city, Maracaibo—until, one by one, they each made the unbearable choice to leave the home they love.

The promise that you can “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is central to the story of the American Dream. It’s the belief that if you work hard and rely on your own resources, you will eventually succeed. However, time and again we have seen how this foundational myth, with its emphasis on individual determination, brittle self-sufficiency, and personal accomplishment, does not help us. Instead, as income inequality rises around us, we are left with shame and self-blame for our condition.

Born to a mother consumed by drugs and raised by his grandmother in poverty on the South Side of Chicago, Gianno Caldwell saw firsthand how lawmakers from both parties have failed African-American voters on issues like poverty, welfare, and education. But as someone who beat the odds growing up under a fear-based mentality that limits what people can achieve, Caldwell believes there’s another way. In this groundbreaking audiobook, the Fox News analyst describes his personal journey while detailing a hopeful vision for a nation no longer beholden to identity politics.

Pulitzer Prize-winning economic journalist Steven Pearlstein argues that our thirty year experiment in unfettered markets has undermined core values required to make capitalism and democracy work. Thirty years ago, “greed is good” and “maximizing shareholder value” became the new mantras...

In Those Who Wander, Vivian Ho delves deep into a rising subculture that’s changing the very fabric of her city and all of urban America. Moving beyond the disheartening statistics, she gives voices to these young people - victims of abuse, failed foster care, mental illness, and drug addiction. She also doesn’t ignore the threat they pose to themselves and to others as a dangerous dark side emerges. With alarming urgency, she asks what can be done to save the next generation of America’s vagabond youth.

Successful change requires all voices and voters at the table to be heard and valued. The Bridges Out of Poverty model is an antidote to current divisiveness, facilitates dialogue and respect among stakeholders, and offers policy-level direction for elected officials. The authors’ goal is to provide a road map for coming together as individuals, institutions, and communities to help people get out of poverty and create communities, states, and indeed a country where everyone can live well.

In a bold challenge to the conventional wisdom of both liberals and conservatives, Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, looks at the reasons for poverty in America and offers a detailed agenda for increasing wealth, incomes, and opportunity. The author argues that conservative critiques of a “culture of poverty” fail to account for the structural circumstances in which the poor live, especially racism, gender discrimination, and economic dislocation. However, he also criticizes liberal calls for fighting poverty through redistribution or new government programs.

Examinando retórica, normas políticas, literatura popular y las teorías científicas a lo largo de 400 años, Nacny Isenberg rechaza las suposiciones sobre la sociedad libre de clases de Estados Unidos, donde la libertad y el trabajo duro te garantizan una verdadera movilidad social. Los blancos pobres miserables y sin tierra han existido desde la época del primer asentamiento colonial británico hasta los actuales "hillbillies".

From poverty and policing, homelessness and overrun prisons to Grenfell and hostile environments, Britain has long been failing those who need our help the most. There is arguably one unifying theme that links all these afflictions: proximity. Proximity is how close we are to the action and how that affects how we assess, relate to and address whatever that action happens to be. Almost every job requires a level of experience and training with the notable exception of the most powerful people in the country—our political class.

Millennials are the first generation in Ireland to be worse off than their parents. Trapped in a game of rental roulette, stuck living at home as adults, and many on the brink of homelessness, the Irish housing crisis has defined the lives of an entire generation—and it is set to continue. With housing costs in Ireland the highest in the EU, the property ladder has been kicked from under thousands. So how did we get here…and how do we break the cycle?

For decades, the Republican Party has been known as the party of the rich: arguing for “business-friendly” policies like deregulation and tax cuts. But this incisive political history shows that the current inequality crisis was also enabled by a Democratic Party that catered to the affluent. The result is one of the great missed opportunities in political history: a moment when we had the chance to change the lives of future generations and were too short-sighted to take it.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to How the Other Half Lives and learn about the conditions of abject poverty that the residents of the slums of New York at the end of the 19th century had to endure.

Thomas Piketty über soziale Ungleichtheit und globale Gerechtigkeit. "Das ist ja interessant, was Sie schreiben, aber können Sie es vielleicht auch kürzer sagen?" Diese Frage ist Thomas Piketty, der mit seinem umfangreichen Bestseller "Das Kapital im 21. Jahrhundert" eine internationale Debatte über die Ursachen sozialer Ungleichheit in Gang gebracht hat, oft gestellt worden. Piketty hat diese Bitten ernst genommen und das Ergebnis ist eine Weltgeschichte der sozialen Konflikte und Konstellationen und eine Lektion in globaler Gerechtigkeit.

한국은 전 세계가 놀랄 정도로 가파른 성장을 거듭해오며 선진국 반열에 들어섰다. 그러나 선진국 대한민국의 환호 뒤에는 수많은 사회적·경제적 약자의 희생이 놓여 있다. 문재인 정부의 공직자로 활동한 저자는 '사회권 보장'을 통해 그동안 소외돼온 약자층에 진 '빚'을 갚아야 한다고 주장한다. 그래야만 선진국 반열에 오르기 위해 '가불'했던 '빚'을 갚고 지속 가능한 선진국이 될 수 있다.

Since the Great Recession, most Americans' standard of living has stagnated or declined. Economic inequality is at historic highs. But inequality's impact differs by race; African Americans' net wealth is just a 10th that of White Americans, and over recent decades, White families have accumulated wealth at three times the rate of Black families. In our increasingly diverse nation, sociologist Thomas M. Shapiro argues, wealth disparities must be understood in tandem with racial inequities - a dangerous combination he terms "toxic inequality".

What can you get with 25 dollars and a dream? Adam Shepard graduated from college feeling disillusioned by the apathy around him and was then incensed after reading Barbara Ehrenreich's famous work Nickel and Dimed- a book that gave him a feeling of hopelessness about the working class in America. He set out to disprove Ehrenreich's theory-the notion that those who start at the bottom stay at the bottom-by making something out of nothing to achieve the American Dream.