Book Description
For the first time in over twenty-five years. the issue of poverty -- and our failure to deal with it -- is back at the top of the policy agenda and on the front page of the news. In this magisterial overview social historian Michael B. Katz, examines the ideas and assumptions that have shaped public policy from the sixties War on Poverty to the current war on welfare. Closely argued and lucidly written. The Undeserving Poor transcends the barriers that have channeled the American discussion of poverty and wealth into a narrow, self-defeating course, and points the way to a new, constructive approach to our major social problem.
Customer Reviews:
Sort of.......2001-03-08
In the United States in 1960 there was significant poverty. Twenty percent of the population had not seen a doctor and there were some areas in which people did not have enough to eat.
Kennedy and Johnson after him instituted programs aimed at combating these problems. The involved the development of a medical system for the poor and other programs aimed at increasing the disposable income of some of the poor. These programs were reasonably successful and dropped the infant mortality rate by 35% and pretty much ended hunger. The Democratic Party had never been a Labor or Socialist Party and the author suggests that these programs were in part a attempt to gain the black vote.
During the Nixon years it was briefly proposed to end administered welfare programs and to replace them by case payments for people whose income fell below a defined amount. The policy was a suggestion of Milton Friedman. The advantage of such a policy is that it is cheap to administer and gives the recipients more freedom. In the end this change was not enacted.
From that time on there has been tremendous pressure on welfare that over time has seen a reduction in the scope of programs. The American system is different to a large number of wealthy industrial countries. America has a social security system that provides assistance to the aged and some relief to the unemployed. For those who have not contributed to this scheme there exists "welfare" which provides targeted aid involving some income supplements in the form of food stamps and medical assistance. Welfare is limited to a narrow range of people generally single mothers. The payments are low and require the recipient to be in some paid employment.
This climaxed in the 1980's with the election of Reagan. America had been going through difficult economic times with foreign competition decimating the manufacturing sector. Surveys show that most workers who were displaced from manufacturing jobs never retained the wage levels they experienced before being made redundant. Most welfare dependants were black single mothers. It was easy to attack them as a group suggesting that their dependant position was based on their morals rather than anything else. The Democratic Party conceded the contest and made no attempt to argue for a just and fair society. At that time a number of nutty right wingers published a number of books suggesting that welfare was bad for the poor and should be abolished as a favor to them. These gave some semi intellectual justifications for what went on.
The book is very much a literature survey of the various periods. It has some figures and describes the mechanics of programs but basically describes texts that deal in general theories rather than facts. In reality it is a rather poor polemic rather than anything else. It is not the sort of thing which would challenge the belief of the right and it provides not the avalanche of statistical material which might get the uncommitted thinking. It is a book for the already converted. A far better book is "It takes a Nation" by Rebecca Blank.
Book Description
In response to a clear need by low-income people to gain access to the full range of financial services including savings, a growing number of microfinance NGOs are seeking guidelines to transform from credit-focused microfinance organizations to regulated deposit-taking financial intermediaries. In response to this trend, this book presents a practical "how-to" manual for MFIs to develop the capacity to become licensed and regulated to mobilize deposits from the public.
Transforming Microfinance Institutions provides guidelines for regulators to license and regulate microfinance providers, and for transforming MFIs to meet the demands of two major new stakeholders -regulators and shareholders. As such, it focuses on developing the capacity of NGO MFIs to mobilize and intermediate voluntary savings. Drawing from worldwide experience, it outlines how to manage the transformation process and address major strategic and operational issues inherent in transformation including competitive positioning, business planning, accessing capital and shareholders, and how to "transform" the MFI's human resources, financial management, MIS, internal controls, and branch operations. Case studies then provide examples of developing a new regulatory tier for microfinance, and how a Ugandan NGO transformed to become a licensed financial intermediary.
This book will be invaluable to regulators and microfinance NGOs contemplating institutional transformation and will be of tremendous use to donors and technical support agencies supporting MFIs in their transformation.
Book Description
In a remarkably concise, readable, and accessible format, John Iceland provides a comprehensive picture of poverty in America, He shows how poverty is measured and understood and how it has changed over time, as well as how public policies have grappled with poverty as a political issue and an economic reality. This edition has been updated and includes a new preface.
Customer Reviews:
Misleading.......2006-10-31
This is a very misleading book. There were many points that I would criticize, but it would take an entire book to do that. So I'll pick out three important issues and focus on those.
Issue One: Welfare and Out of Wedlock Childbirths
One example is the effect of welfare on out of wedlock childbirths. On page 59 Iceland criticizes the theory that welfare payments are responsible for increased rates of out of wedlock childbirths. Iceland points to the fact that inflation-adjusted welfare payments have declined, whereas out of wedlock childbirths have increased. But single mothers are available for other assistance programs such as food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid. When the full package of benefits is included, the total aid available to single mothers has kept up with inflation.
On page 136 Iceland cites Robert Moffit's 1992 research showing that welfare has only caused a slight increase in out of wedlock childbirths. But after other researchers such as Mark Rosenzweig and the economists Jeff Grogger and Stephen Bronars found a large connection, Moffit reexamined the issue. His more thorough methodology and found that welfare did cause a significant increase in out of wedlock childbirths. Moffit reported this in 1998. Why did Iceland mention his 1992 research but not his 1998 research?
Issue Two: The Color of Poverty
One problem is that Iceland documents the fact that poverty statistics show that most of the poor are white. On page 38 he criticizes the fact that most media reports tend to show pictures of blacks when discussing poverty, thus creating a false perception. But as Iceland discusses, most poverty is short term, usually from a divorce, a death, or a lost job. On page 49 he mentions that black children make up a majority of the long term poor.
I would submit that when people think about poverty they think about long term poverty, not brief poverty spells. Like it or not, Americans have to grapple with the fact that entrenched, generational poverty is disproportionately black.
Issue Three: Cause of Poverty
The biggest problem with the book is its analysis of the cause of poverty. It concludes that out of wedlock childbirths are a minor cause relative to the inequality embedded in a free market, capitalist society. But the way it reaches that conclusion is through a statistical analysis in which possible causes are each treated as independent variables to see which explains the greatest amount of poverty.
But supporters of the theory that poverty is caused by out of wedlock childbirths do not blame the out of wedlock birth in itself. After all, college educated single mothers show that an out of wedlock childbirth is not necessarily a ticket to poverty. The problem is the lost opportunity in terms of the chance of graduating high school and college. Page 422 of the bipartisan policy book The New World of Welfare documents the fact that while most out of wedlock childbirths happen to women in their 20's, half of all *first* out of wedlock childbirths happen to women in their teens (fortunately this is on the decline). This is early enough to interfere with the mother's education, and makes it much more likely that she will drop out, or not go to college. The lesson is that the other factors that cause poverty, such as education, are dependent upon family breakdown. They are not independent variables, and any statistical analysis that treats them as though they were independent will come up with flawed results.
There is another problem. Even if Iceland is correct that out of wedlock childbirths do not cause poverty, the research of Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur in their landmark book Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps documents the fact that children of single mothers are more likely to drop out of school, abuse drugs, suffer from depression or low self-esteem, have lower lifetime earnings, and are more likely to have out of wedlock children themselves. Furthermore, only about half of this gap can be attributed to poverty itself. Fatherlessness is an independent contributing factor.
I would instead recommend that interested readers check out The New World of Welfare edited by Rebecca Blanks and Ron Haskins. It is a bipartisan collection of essays on welfare and poverty representing the left and right. It is interesting that none of the "liberal" contributors disagreed with the "conservative" claim that family breakdown is an important cause of poverty. And on the other side, none of the "conservatives" disagreed with the liberal claim that although welfare reform has been successful, there have been some women who are worse off. The liberal theory could be put this way: "family breakdown is an important cause of poverty, but we need to find a way to both provide aid *and* fix the family." The only differences are on policy prescriptions, not analysis. It is a refreshing bit of consensus in an otherwise acrimonious debate. I would also recommend Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality by Thomas Sowell and The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families by James Wilson.
Academic affair depicting poverty in charts and graphs.......2005-06-19
John Iceland has taken a devout stab at analyzing poverty in the United States from an academic standpoint. In fact, this book is obviously a publishable doctoral dissertation clocking in at a scant 152 pages of readable text with the rest covering footnotes and references. Sure looks like a dissertation to me.
Its not that this book is bad, it's just fails to put a face on poverty. One can read the book and gather big picture analysis of the trend in American poverty and discover fodder for debating the policy issue, but one through reading the book doesn't come to know the poverty-stricken people any better. To do that through reading would require picking up a copy of "The Working Poor," by David Shipler or "Getting nickled and dimed in America," by Barbara Ehrenreich. Iceland's work reaches out to academics and policy-makers and helps them to understand poverty measures, characteristics of the poverty population (through statistics albeit), causes of poverty, and effect of poverty policy. Though, it's readable I would think it only reaches those who are students of poverty and not to the hearts and minds of the average American.
Go elsewhere for engaging books to help you understand the challenges of those living in poverty. But by all means pick up Iceland's "Poverty in America," if you have a term paper to write, are looking for data to back-up policy positions, or need to mine the issue and work in a service field to those in poverty. Iceland points out that relative poverty thrives in the United States today due to low wages and lack of wise public support programs. Though we are the land of plenty, many people still suffer, not gaining any benefit of living in a wealthy nation. It gives cause for thought.
--MMW
Book Description
Two out of every three people in the world live on less than two dollars a day. This is a grim statistic but hundreds of millions of people are breaking free from poverty with the help of grass-roots programs and organizations funded by regular people here and abroad. In Ending Global Poverty, Stephen Smith gives readers the tools they need to help people overcome poverty and to determine what organizations are most effective in fighting it. Smith takes readers to rural areas and urban slums for a close-up view of innovative and effective programs that are making a real difference. The book also describes how companies and foreign investors could play a constructive role in addressing the problem, offering guidelines and suggestions. This book is a vital resource for anyone who wants practical advice about how to make a difference.
Book Description
For the past twenty years this book has been distinguished by its relevant coverage, tight organization, multidisciplinary perspective, and timeliness. The ninth edition preserves these qualities while incorporating new reference material. A three=part organization covers the dimensions of poverty and inequality, causes of poverty, and policy options. For social workers, welfare professionals, and job counselors.
Customer Reviews:
This book is just a glossary of terms.......2007-07-12
When I ordered this review book, I was expecting an outline of important facts from each chapter. However, all the book turned out to be was a glossary of bolded terms. The right side of every page has lines to write your own notes, if you like doing that. But the book description that is on Amazon is definitely off-putting. In no way will this "review book" help you alone. You'd be better off saving the $13 by using the glossary in the actual text book.
Getting Knowlegde.......2000-03-29
This is a relly good book for students to understand more about poverty and discrimination in the American society. I will recommended to anyine who is intereted about issues such as welfare poverty and so on. I think you wil enjoy this book.
Book Description
The low-income population represents a valuable market segment within the utility service territory. Forty-seven million individuals live near poverty, occupying over 35 million households. Together, these households represent 28% of the $159 billion U.S. home energy market. This book illuminates the interaction between poverty and the public utility. Building upon established approaches, Kevin trips the alarm by asking industry participants to carefully consider fresh prospectives. Social workers, regulators, program managers, corporate executives, and even the general public will find common ground within the content of this work.
• Speak the language of corporate executives • Raise shareholder value through charitable giving • Reduce operating expenses through community-based outsourcing • Spur targeted growth within your service territory • Realize success by funding for your initiatives
Customer Reviews:
First of the Trilogy.......2007-04-23
Although I was a Peace Corps volunteer I did not read this in preparation of my service (although I wish I had). I was drawn to this book after reading a friend's copy of Moritz's "Farm on the River of Emeralds" which was such an excellent book I wanted to read more of Moritz's writing. I was not disappointed by "Living Poor". As referred to in the subtitle this is a chronicle of Moritz's experience joining the Peace Corps and traveling to Ecuador where he spends most of the next four years working with the people of Rio Verde, a village on the Pacific Coast near Esmeraldas.
I think "Farm on the River of Emeralds" is a better literary work and reflects the development of Moritz as a writer as well as his enriched experience over time in Ecuador. This did not reduce my enjoyment and appreciation of "Living Poor". This is a book that reveals poverty as deeply and as powerfully as Rohinton Mistry's novel on India, "A Fine Balance".
Moritz is an excellent observer of people and writes of their appearance, mannerism, and background with portrait accuracy but also with humor and sensitivity. I remember a description of a woman in the village that was feared by all the families. She was a bruja, a witch that could cast spells and control people with her "brews of secret leaves". Moritz meets and describes her..."She had great square teeth, strong and yellow, and her smile was like some aristocratic but fading French countess right out of Proust. She was in her sixties but her hair was still dark and tied in two teenaged pigtails; they stuck out wildly from out beneath a limp and incredibly well used straw hat, the top of which was broken and hinged. When you talked to her on the beach and a breeze was blowing the top of the hat kept opening and closing mysteriously, as though it was trying to send you a secret message without..her seeing."
I did not read Moritz as having a dark perspective as mentioned by some previous reviewers here. He is just very honest, perhaps a little self depreciative but very capable of showing the struggles, joy and humor of the people of this little village in Ecuador. I now consider him one of my favorite authors and very much look forward to reading "Farm on the River Emeralds" again and his last book about his life in Ecuador "The Saddest Pleasure".
Awesome book!.......2007-04-06
A great read. It was so hard to put down. Doing Americorps, I could definitely relate. This will definitely be one of my all time favorites.
Peace Corps Experience.......2006-06-25
My Peace Corps experience was quite different from Mr. Thomson's on the surface. I went to an Arabic country in Africa as opposed to a South American Country. I was in my 20s as opposed to late 40s. My training was in country and quite different. I was a teacher instead of a farmer and lived in a large metropolitan city.
However, having said all that there were several times I thought"Whoa!" this is exactly what happened to me! And this is something that no non-PCV would ever understand.
For example, he described the emotional feeling he had from living in Equador similar to the feeling of first falling in love except that this feeling was constant. I had that feeling about Morocco and I STILL have it to this day 30 years later.
He doesn't sugar coat the experience either and describes the hardships of which there were many. Underlying these descriptions were a message that they made him a better person. Ah, how I can relate.
Excellent book and I highly recommend it.
Master writer, big heart, great humor, old shoe, the real thing..........2005-06-23
This remains one of my favorite books of all time...it's survived four library donations in the past 30 years...
Tried to find Thomsen before he died, unfortunately could not...not sure he ever knew he was a great author...hope others got to him with that snippet of info and that he died happy...
He nailed the peace corps...gave it the best it ever had from any of us...i love the man and wish we had more like him...
His other one is good too..........2003-04-30
I'm in the process of getting my hands on Living Poor, but also highly recommend Thomsen's book "The Farm on the River of Emeralds." Where 'Living Poor' sounds like it has more of an ex-pat spin on it, "The Farm" focuses more on his on personal experiences, observations, and self-questioning in running a farm with his Ecuadorian business partner, Ramon. Very interesting.
Book Description
In this book, Nicolas Van de Walle identifies 26 countries that are extremely poor and grew little if at all in the 1990s. His sample excludes North Korea and countries where civil war explains some of their failure to grow (Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tajikistan and others). The 26 countries have limited infrastructure and human capital and the small size of their markets deter private savings and investment. Aid was meant to help overcome these problems, and these countries received a lot. Yet they have failed to grow. What is wrong? Is foreign aid a solution or part of the problem? What changes might make aid more effective? Given these countries require the financial and technical resources of the West, why haven't aid programs made a difference?
Van de Walle blames their economic failure mostly on the venality and incompetence of their political leadership. He analyzes the contradictions and tensions faced by the aid community in poorly run countries, providing a sobering analysis of the perverse effects of aid where the politics is all wrong. Too often, resources provided by foreign aid keep the wrong government in office, and undermine adoption of economic as well as political reforms. Bad government combined with aid, in short, hurts poor countries - and particularly the poorest people in those countries. Despite good intentions, little progress has been made in implementing announced "reforms" of the aid business itself. A constituency for reform is lacking, in the donor countries and in the recipient countries, where those in power benefit from the status quo.
Book Description
With more than a billion people now living on less than a dollar a day, and with eight million dying each year because they are simply too poor to live, most would agree that the problem of global poverty is our greatest moral challenge. The large and pressing practical question is how best to address that challenge. Although millions of dollars flow to poor countries, the results are often disappointing.
In Making Aid Work, Abhijit Banerjee--an "aid optimist"--argues that aid has much to contribute, but the lack of analysis about which programs really work causes considerable waste and inefficiency, which in turn fuels unwarranted pessimism about the role of aid in fostering economic development.
Banerjee challenges aid donors to do better. Building on the model used to evaluate new drugs before they come on the market, he argues that donors should assess programs with field experiments using randomized trials. In fact, he writes, given the number of such experiments already undertaken, current levels of development assistance could focus entirely on programs with proven records of success in experimental conditions.
Responding to his challenge, leaders in the field--including Nicholas Stern, Raymond Offenheiser, Alice Amsden, Ruth Levine, Angus Deaton, and others--question whether randomized trials are the most appropriate way to evaluate success for all programs. They raise broader questions as well, about the importance of aid for economic development and about the kinds of interventions (micro or macro, political or economic) that will lead to real improvements in the lives of poor people around the world. With one in every six people now living in extreme poverty, getting it right is crucial.
Book Description
For most of its history, America has been fighting a vicious war that cannot be won: a war against its own poor. In this incisive new book, Herbert J. Gans probes the socioeconomic, psychological, and political reasons why better-off Americans seek to indict millions of poor citizens as members of an "undeserving underclass." Although he analyzes the legitimate fears and hostility that generate this stigma, he mounts a compelling argument that the "underclass" actually functions as a scapegoat for ills in American society that have nothing to do with the behavior of the poor. Many of these ills are economic, and as more jobs are "downsized," a number of the newly jobless people will be driven into the ranks of the "underclass." The book ends with a set of imaginative economic policy ideas for an America that may never again be able to supply enough decent jobs for everyone.
Customer Reviews:
Bite the bullet truth.......2007-07-30
Truth does exist and Mr. Gans is one who sees it. Forget about greed, selfishness, and vacuous pursuits of bling and more bling. Mr. Gans tells us what we must do to raise our country from the filth of conservatism. I wonder if Mr. Gans carries in his mind the image of a little girl picking through a garbage dump to eat while the rich play games on their yachts. His book says he does.
Terrific Book Connecting The Underclass With Public Policy!.......2001-02-10
Professor Herbert Gans is an esteemed and reputable sociologist who first gained prominence with his absorbing study of the effect of urban renewal in the metropolitan Boston area for ethnic Americans in "The Urban Villagers" in the early 1960s, and also for his interesting description of the rise of suburbia in "The Levittowners". In the decades since Gans, now a professor at Columbia University, has gained a reputation as a careful, deliberate and thorough sociological investigator in a number of other notable studies and articles. With this recent book he now explores the nature of the connections between the rise of the permanent underclass as an entity in late 20th century American society and the kinds of federal, state, and local public policy that have facilitated the rise of the underclass and led to its establishment as a permanent feature of contemporary society.
Thus, although this book is fairly brief, it is extremely well written and contain a virtual cornucopia of vital facts related to the nature of the human beings that comprise the underclass as well as how public policy feeds into the nature of the social, economic and political dilemma the members of the impoverished lower reaches of our society are afflicted with. Regardless of the professional tone to the language Professor Gans so skillfully employs, the reader can immediately sense the degree of empathy and compassion this bespectacled and now elderly academic holds for the human beings he is writing about. While tracing the history of the poor in this country, he illustrates how they have come to be stigmatized and blamed for their situation, a clear case of what fellow academic William Ryan described in detail in the now classic book, "Blaming The Victim". Indeed, many more affluent Americans find such labels convincing, and by not recognizing that such ignorance makes for public policy that turns such self-serving nonsense into a self-fulfilling reality, have contributed to the staggering dimensions of the social problem.
In what is easily the most frightening portion of the book, Gans shows how the existence of the underclass serves the more affluent sectors of the society, in a multitude of ways not only facilitating the passing on of social myths that continue to afflict the poor but also passing on the degree to which the rest of us seem to be collectively deaf, dumb, and blind to the consequences of such a labeling process. Poor people have their social functions, and many of these serve the interests of the more affluent while at the same time exacerbating the problems of the poor. In this respect, more enlightened public policy can serve to ameliorate these wrongs and aid individual human beings caught in the grinding grip of ignorance and poverty.
Not surprisingly, Gans focuses on the critical importance of providing jobs to help such individuals rise to more full participation in the society, and warns that without such active governmental intervention, the problems now afflicting the lower reaches of society may find their way into a much wider sector of society, and that many middle Americans may find themselves slipping as they strive to maintain their place in a rapidly changing social, economic, and political environment. What we now bravely call a technological revolution was once referred to in less glowing terms as 'automation', and at that time it was better understood by the average working person to have many more negative connotations for them in terms of their ability to gain and keep themselves employed than seems to be true in today's hyped-up world of media bally-hoo. Gans is warning us of more stressful times to come, and asks us to reconsider our priorities to become more fully human. As John Kennedy once said, if we cannot save the millions who are less fortunate, then surely there is little hope for the few who are rich. Perhaps it is in our own interests as citizens and as human beings to begin to behave more responsibly.
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General
| Poverty
| Current Events
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
The War Against the Poor: The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy
Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare
Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass
In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America
The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy
