Beginning this year, federal payment recipients will receive their government benefits through electronic funds transfer (EFT)-- what most of us call direct deposit.
In 1774 Mexico City leaders created the Mexico City Poor House-the centerpiece of a bold experiment intended to eliminate poverty and impose a new work ethic on former beggars by establishing a forcible internment policy for some and putting others to work.
After the Second World War, the idea that local community action was indispensable for the alleviation of poverty was broadly embraced by US policymakers, social scientists, international development specialists, and grassroots activists.
The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy.
"e;Political clientelism"e; is a term used to characterize the contemporary relationships between political elites and the poor in Latin America in which goods and services are traded for political favors.
This collection of essays challenges long-entrenched ideas about the history, nature, and significance of the informal neighborhoods that house the vast majority of Latin America's urban poor.
In Give a Man a Fish James Ferguson examines the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa, in which states make cash payments to their low income citizens.
In The Space of Boredom Bruce O'Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom.
First published in 1989 by The University of Alabama Press, Poor but Proud was met with critical acclaim and awarded the 1990 Lillian Smith prize in nonfiction, as well as being named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book.
Since the end of the Cold War, increasing numbers of people have been forced to leave their homes as a result of armed conflict, internal strife, and systematic violations of human rights.
For the past three decades, the federal government has targeted the poorest areas of American cities with a succession of antipoverty initiatives, yet these urban neighborhoods continue to decline.
A Brookings Institution Press and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation publicationThis book is based on a simple concept: no one is in a better position to hold a government accountable than those it governs.
Fifty years after Oscar Lewis's famous depiction of five Mexican families caught in a "e;"e;culture of poverty,"e;"e; Caroline Moser tells a very different story of five neighborhood women and their families strategically accumulating assets to escape poverty in the Ecuadoran city of Guayaquil.
A "e;well researched and vigorously written"e; account of social activism, radical politics, and the failed War on Poverty in 1960s Appalachia (Journal of American History).
In Two Sports Myths and Why They're Wrong, authors Rodney Fort and Jason Winfree apply sharp economic analysis to bust a couple of the most widespread urban legends about professional athletics.
With the failure of market reform to generate sustained growth in many countries of the Global South, poverty reduction has become an urgent moral and political issue in the last several decades.
Is popular anger about rising inequality propelling China toward a "e;social volcano"e; of protest activity and instability that could challenge Chinese Communist Party rule?
Media are incorporated into our physical environments more dramatically than ever before - literally opening up new spaces of interactivity and connection that transform the experience of being in the city.
Soulja Boy, Justin Bieber, and Tavi Gevinson are hardly representative of typical youth experiences, but their origins highlight many of the realities of youth doing independent creative work.
