How do you measure poverty? What are the effects of poverty? What can we do to prevent poverty? Learn about poverty and its many faces around the world and to start thinking about what you can do about this global social problem.

"[The author] takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup...

Delly Porter enjoys the feel of soft dirt beneath her feet as she walks to and from school, but after a classmate makes her feel ashamed of having no shoes she learns that her parents and others, too, see value in things that do not cost money.

Epdf available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence In our society, a wealthy minority flourish, while around one-fifth experience chronic poverty and many people on middle incomes fear for their futures. Social policy has failed to find answers to these problems and there is now a demand for a new narrative to enable us to escape from the crisis in our society. With the aim of ending poverty, this book argues that we need to start with the society...

EPDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND license. The perpetuation of poverty across generations damages lives. It weakens social cohesion and the economy and undermines environmental sustainability. This book examines why poverty is carried on from one generation to the next and what needs to be done to eradicate it. This book draws on a wide variety of sources and academic disciplines (social sciences, economics, law, community development,...

"Social scientists have repeatedly uncovered a disturbing feature of economic inequality: people with larger incomes and better education tend to lead longer, healthier lives. This pattern holds across all ages and for virtually all measures of health, apparently indicating a biological dimension of inequality. But scholars have only begun to understand the complex mechanisms that drive this disparity. How exactly do financial well-being and human...

"Because I was bad in my last life." "Because Allah has willed it." "Because the rich do nothing for the poor." "Because the poor do nothing for themselves." "Because it is my destiny." These are just some of the answers to the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asks in cities and villages around the globe: "Why are you poor?" In the tradition of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, writer Vollmann struggles to confront poverty...