Poverty and inequality

This volume brings together leading public intellectuals-Amartya Sen, Martha C. Nussbaum, Francois Bourguignon, William J. Wilson, Douglas S. Massey, and Martha A. Fineman-to take stock of current analytic understandings of poverty and inequality. Contemporary research on inequality has largely relied on conceptual advances several decades old, even though the basic structure of global inequality is changing in fundamental ways. The reliance on conventional poverty indices, rights-based approaches to poverty reduction, and traditional modeling of social mobility has left scholars and policymakers poorly equipped to address modern challenges. The contributors show how contemporary poverty is forged in neighborhoods, argue that discrimination in housing markets is a profound source of poverty, suggest that gender inequalities in the family and in the social evaluation of the caretaking role remain a hidden dimension of inequality, and develop the argument that contemporary inequality is best understood as an inequality in fundamental human capabilities. This book demonstrates in manifold ways how contemporary scholarship and policy must be recast to make sense of new and emerging forms of poverty and social exclusion.

Contents @toc4:Contributors iii Preface and Acknowledgments iii @toc2:Chapter One. Introduction: The Conceptual Foundations of Poverty and Inequality Measurement 1 @tocca:David B. Grusky and Ravi Kanbur @toc2:Chapter Two. Conceptualizing and Measuring Poverty 000 @tocca:Amartya Sen @toc2:Chapter Three. Poverty and Human Functioning: Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements 000 @tocca:Martha C. Nussbaum @toc2:Chapter Four. From Income to Endowments: The Difficult Task of Expanding the Income Poverty Paradigm 000 @toca:Franois Bourguignon @toc2:Chapter Five. Social Theory and the Concept "Underclass" 000 @tocca:William J. Wilson @toc2:Chapter Six. Race, Class, and Markets: Social Policy in the 21st Century 000 @tocca:Douglas S. Massey @toc2:Chapter Seven. Dependency and Social Debt 000 @tocca:Martha A. Fineman @toc4:Notes 000 References 000 Index 000