Urban Poverty and the Underclass - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Urban Poverty and the Underclass write by Enzo Mingione. This book was released on 2008-09-15. Urban Poverty and the Underclass available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Over the last two decades "poverty" has moved centrestage as an issue within the social sciences. This volume, edited by one of Europe's foremost sociologists, aims to assess the debates surrounding poverty and the responses to it, exploring the ways in which the various socio-political systems and welfarist regimes are being radically transformed. The essays examine how such change is effected by failing welfare programmes and enervating social structures such as family and community which once would have provided mechanisms of social stability. The first part of the book provides reflections on urban poverty; the second part discusses the widely debated idea of an "underclass" and its meanings in Europe and in the USA, and the final part draws on concrete empirical analyses to examine the patterns of poverty thoughout Western Europe. This volume will be of first-rate importance to all serious students of politics, sociology, geography, public policy, youth and community studies, social policy and American studies.
The Greatest of Evils
The Greatest of Evils - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Greatest of Evils write by Joel A. Devine. This book was released on . The Greatest of Evils available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The debate on persisting poverty in the United States, somewhat dampened for the past decade, has now been fully rekindled. Devine and Wright have entered that debate with an analysis that is both quantitative and qualitative, informed on the one side by urban ethnography and steeped in official statistics and relevant data on the other. The result is an incisive and cogently documented narrative account leading to policy recommendations for a new president and a new era. In The Greatest of Evils, Devine and Wright develop three principal themes. First they argue that poverty is by no means monolithic: each subgroup within the population in poverty tends to have different problems. Secondly, the so-called "underclass" within the poverty population represents a new and especially corrosive development, one that cannot be analyzed in traditional terms nor dealt with in traditions ways. Thirdly, the War on Poverty of the Sixties was not the unmitigated disaster that so many have come to believe, and offered a boldness of vision that today's poverty policies tend to lack. In exploring these themes, the authors show how the social and economic costs of poverty-related problems exceed what it will cost to find remedies that address the underlying causes of residual poverty.
Improving Poor People
Improving Poor People - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Improving Poor People write by Michael B. Katz. This book was released on 1997-04-02. Improving Poor People available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. "There are places where history feels irrelevant, and America's inner cities are among them," acknowledges Michael Katz, in expressing the tensions between activism and scholarship. But this major historian of urban poverty realizes that the pain in these cities has its origins in the American past. To understand contemporary poverty, he looks particularly at an old attitude: because many nineteenth-century reformers traced extreme poverty to drink, laziness, and other forms of bad behavior, they tried to use public policy and philanthropy to improve the character of poor people, rather than to attack the structural causes of their misery. Showing how this misdiagnosis has afflicted today's welfare and educational systems, Katz draws on his own experiences to introduce each of four topics--the welfare state, the "underclass" debate, urban school reform, and the strategies of survival used by the urban poor. Uniquely informed by his personal involvement, each chapter also illustrates the interpretive power of history by focusing on a strand of social policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: social welfare from the poorhouse era through the New Deal, ideas about urban poverty from the undeserving poor to the "underclass," and the emergence of public education through the radical school reform movement now at work in Chicago. Why have American governments proved unable to redesign a welfare system that will satisfy anyone? Why has public policy proved unable to eradicate poverty and prevent the deterioration of major cities? What strategies have helped poor people survive the poverty endemic to urban history? How did urban schools become unresponsive bureaucracies that fail to educate most of their students? Are there fresh, constructive ways to think about welfare, poverty, and public education? Throughout the book Katz shows how interpretations of the past, grounded in analytic history, can free us of comforting myths and help us to reframe discussions of these great public issues.
Greatest of Evils
Greatest of Evils - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Greatest of Evils write by Joel A. Devine. This book was released on 1993. Greatest of Evils available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
The "Underclass" Debate
The "Underclass" Debate - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The "Underclass" Debate write by Michael B. Katz. This book was released on 2018-06-05. The "Underclass" Debate available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Do ominous reports of an emerging "underclass" reveal an unprecedented crisis in American society? Or are social commentators simply rediscovering the tragedy of recurring urban poverty, as they seem to do every few decades? Although social scientists and members of the public make frequent assumptions about these questions, they have little information about the crucial differences between past and present. By providing a badly needed historical context, these essays reframe today's "underclass" debate. Realizing that labels of "social pathology" echo fruitless distinctions between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, the contributors focus not on individual and family behavior but on a complex set of processes that have been at work over a long period, degrading the inner cities and, inevitably, the nation as a whole. How do individuals among the urban poor manage to survive? How have they created a dissident "infrapolitics?" How have social relations within the urban ghettos changed? What has been the effect of industrial restructuring on poverty? Besides exploring these questions, the contributors discuss the influence of African traditions on the family patterns of African Americans, the origins of institutions that serve the urban poor, the reasons for the crisis in urban education, the achievements and limits of the War on Poverty, and the role of income transfers, earnings, and the contributions of family members in overcoming poverty. The message of the essays is clear: Americans will flourish or fail together.
