Poverty Economics

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.

Nobody who works hard should be poor in America, writes Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.

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.

A vital call to disrupt systemic forces that impoverish families and to reimagine accessible higher education, empowering parents to thrive in college and at home From the former teen mom and award-winning founder of Generation Hope, a nonprofit committed to expanding education access for young...

The author of The Hospital asks: Can one challenged city show the way to restore faith in government and reimagine the nation’s future? Chester, PA, a majority Black city just south of Philadelphia, is plagued by gun violence, decrepit infrastructure, a hospital at risk of closing, and a scary...

Like Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and Alexander Masters’ Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage - an intimate portrait of an invisible man. Mohammed Ashraf studied biology in college, and after college he learned how to repair television sets, cut suit lengths, and slice chicken. He has lived in Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Surat, and Patna, but this evening he is stoned on a street in Sadar Bazaar, in North Delhi. The morning shall bring hangovers, whiskey breakfasts, and possibly answers to the lingering questions that haunt Ashraf.

Warum unsere Gesellschaft Arbeitslose verachtet und sie dennoch braucht. Faul. Ungebildet. Desinteressiert. Selber schuld. Als Kind von zwei Langzeitarbeitslosen weiß Anna Mayr, wie falsch solche Vorurteile sind. Früher schämte sie sich, dass ihre Eltern keine Jobs haben. Heute weiß sie, dass unsere Gesellschaft Menschen wie sie braucht: als drohendes Bild des Elends. In ihrem kämpferischen, thesenstarken Buch zeigt Mayr, warum wir die Geschichte der Arbeit neu denken müssen und wie eine Welt aussehen könnte, in der wir die Elenden nicht mehr brauchen, um unseren Leben Sinn zu geben.

Nearly 40 million people in the United States live below the poverty line - about $26,200 for a family of four. Low-income families and individuals are everywhere, from cities to rural communities. While poverty is commonly seen as a personal failure, or a deficiency of character or knowledge, it's actually the result of bad policy. Public policy has purposefully erected barriers that deny access to basic needs, creating a society where people can easily become trapped - not because we lack the resources to lift them out, but because we are actively choosing not to.

Did you know that over 600 million people live on less than $2 a day? Nearly 10 percent of the global population struggles to survive 24 hours at a time. Eradicating extreme poverty may seem simple, but it's very complex.

Coming of Age in the Other America shows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility. Drawing from 10 years of fieldwork with parents and children who resided in Baltimore public housing, sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin highlight the remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who hailed from the nation's poorest neighborhoods and show how the right public policies might help break the cycle of disadvantage.

In this groundbreaking treatise, best-selling author and economist Ravi Batra identifies the roadblocks to world economic prosperity and what we need to do to overcome them. Batra takes on falling minimum wages, corporate scandals, rocketing oil prices, and many of the other crises facing the world economy. He offers an expansive, optimistic vision of how the international community can address them and bring about something historically unprecedented: true global economic prosperity.

Many Americans take comfort and convenience for granted. We eat at nice restaurants, order groceries online, and hire nannies to care for kids. Getting Me Cheap is a riveting portrait of the lives of the low-wage workers—primarily women—who make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and without public aid.

"A clarion call to address this most unjust blight upon the American landscape. Madrick has provided a valuable service in presenting a highly readable and cogent argument for change."--Mark R. Rank, The Washington Post By official count, more than one out of every six American children live...

This critical account of the fair trade movement explores the vast gap between the rhetoric of fair trade and its practical results for poor countries, particularly those of Africa. In the Global North, fair trade often is described as a revolutionary tool for transforming the lives of millions across the globe. The growth in sales for fair trade products has been dramatic in recent years, but most of the benefit has accrued to the already wealthy merchandisers at the top of the value chain rather than to the poor producers at the bottom.

The poor die sooner. Blacks die sooner. And poor urban Blacks die sooner than almost all other Americans. David Ansell has spent nearly four decades as a doctor at hospitals serving some of the poorest communities in Chicago, and has witnessed firsthand the lives behind these devastating statistics. In

The Death Gap, he gives a grim survey of these realities, drawn from observations and stories of his patients.

On an average day in America, seven young people aged 19 or under will be shot dead. In Another Day in the Death of America, award-winning Guardian journalist Gary Younge tells the stories of the lives lost during the course of a single day in the United States. It could have been any day, but Younge has chosen November 23, 2013. Far from a dry account of gun policy in the United States or a polemic about the dangers of gun violence, the book is a gripping chronicle of an ordinary but deadly day in American life.

A provocative critique of the pieties and fallacies of our obsession with economic growth We live in a society in which a priesthood of economists, wielding impenetrable mathematical formulas, set the framework for public debate. Ultimately, it is the perceived health of the economy which...

Since the early days of the American republic, political thinkers have maintained that a grossly unequal division of property, wealth, and power would lead to the erosion of democratic life. Yet over the past thirty-five years, neoconservatives and neoliberals alike have redrawn the tenets of American liberalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in our current mainstream political discourse, in which the politics of economic inequality are rarely discussed.