With representatives from different disciplines stressing the central importance of freedom in analyzing poverty and emphasizing some important policy issues, this book offers a view of poverty that will orient research in directions previously neglected, and help those in charge of implementing poverty reduction policies.

This anthology constitutes an important contribution to the interdisciplinary debate on poverty measurement and alleviation. Absolute and relative poverty—both within and across state boundaries—are standardly measured and evaluated in monetary terms. However, poverty researchers have highlighted the shortfalls of one-dimensional monetary metrics. A new consensus is emerging that effectively addressing poverty requires a nuanced understanding of poverty as a relational phenomenon involving deprivations in multiple dimensions, including health, standard of living, education and political participation. This volume advances the debate on poverty by providing a forum for philosophers and empirical researchers. It combines philosophically sound analysis and genuinely global research on poverty's social embeddedness. Next to an introduction to this interdisciplinary field—which links Practical Philosophy, Development Economics, Political Science, and Sociology—it contains articles by leading international experts and early career scholars. The contributors analyse the concept of poverty, detail its multiple dimensions, reveal epistemic injustices in poverty research, and reflect on the challenges of poverty-related social activism. The unifying theme connecting this volume's contributions is that poverty must be understood as a multidimensional and socially relational phenomenon, and that this insight can enhance our efforts to measure and alleviate poverty.

Poverty is a paradoxical state. Recognizable in the eld for any sensitive observer who travels in remote rural areas and urban slums and meets marginalized people in a given society, poverty still remains a challenge to conceptual formalization and to measurement that is consistent with such formalization. The analysis of poverty is multidisciplinary. It goes from ethics to economics, from political science to human biology, and any type of measurement rests on mathematics. Moreover, poverty is multifaceted according to the types of deprivation, and it is also gender and age speci c. A vector of variables is required, which raises a substantial problem for individual and group comparisons necessary to equity analysis. Multidimension- ity also complicates the aggregation necessary to perform the ef ciency analysis of policies. In the case of income poverty, these two problems, equity and ef ciency, have bene ted from very signi cant progress in the eld of economics. Similar achievements are still to come in the area of multidimensional poverty. Within this general background, this book has a very modest and narrow-scoped objective. It proposes an operational methodology for measuring multidimensional poverty, independent from the conceptual origin, the size and the qualitative as well as the quantitative nature of the primary indicators used to describe the poverty of an individual, a household or a sociodemographic entity.

The aim of this paper is to draw attention to 'missing dimensions' of poverty data - dimensions that are of value to poor people, but for which we have scant or no data. Amartya Sen frames development as the process of expanding the freedoms that people value and have reason to value. Although the most widely-known measure of human development includes income, longevity, and education, many have argued that people's values, and consequently multidimensional poverty, extends beyond these domains. In order to advance these multiple areas, it is at times necessary to conduct empirical studies using individual or household-level data on multiple dimensions of poverty. A critical barrier for international analyses of multidimensional poverty is that few or no high-quality indicators are available across countries and respondents in key domains that are deeply important to poor people and of potentially critical instrumental importance.

The early returns from Census 2000 data show that the United States continued to undergo dynamic changes in the 1990s, with cities and suburbs providing the locus of most of the volatility. Metropolitan areas are growing more diverse—especially with the influx of new immigrants—the population is aging, and the make-up of households is shifting. Singles and empty-nesters now surpass families with children in many suburbs. The contributors to this book review data on population, race and ethnicity, and household composition, provided by the Census's "short form," and attempt to respond to three simple queries: —Are cities coming back? —Are all suburbs growing? —Are cities and suburbs becoming more alike? Regional trends muddy the picture. Communities in the Northeast and Midwest are generally growing slowly, while those in the South and West are experiencing explosive growth ("Warm, dry places grew. Cold, wet places declined," note two authors). Some cities are robust, others are distressed. Some suburbs are bedroom communities, others are hot employment centers, while still others are deteriorating. And while some cities' cores may have been intensely developed, including those in the Northeast and Midwest, and seen population increases, the areas surrounding the cores may have declined significantly. Trends in population confirm an increasingly diverse population in both metropolitan and suburban areas with the influx of Hispanic and Asian immigrants and with majority populations of central cities for the first time being made up of minority groups. Census 2000 also reveals that the overall level of black-to-nonblack segregation has reached its lowest point since 1920, although high segregation remains in many areas. Redefining Urban and Suburban America explores these demographic trends and their complexities, along with their implications for the policies and politics shaping metropolitan America. The shifts discussed here have significant influence

Despite endorsements of the concept of sustainable development and the linking of sustainable development with the Millennium Development Goals, progress towards the eradication of poverty has been disappointing. The underlying principles of sustainable development need to be more critically and actively applied to both poverty reduction and biodiversity conservation. While recognizing the need for better integration of poverty reduction and conservation objectives by both developmental and conservation agencies, particular attention is paid to the reasons why conservation should do better in contributing to long-term sustainable development and more immediately to poverty reduction.

Poverty is a serious problem in the United States, more so than commonly imagined, and more so than in other industrialized nations. Most Americans adhere to an individualistic perspective: they believe poverty is largely the result of people being deficient in intelligence, determination, education, and other personal traits. Poverty and Power, Fourth Edition challenges this viewpoint, arguing that poverty arises from the workings of four key structural systems—the economic, the political, the cultural, and the social—and ten obstacles to economic justice, including unaffordable housing, inaccessible health care, and racial and gender discrimination. The author argues that a renewed war on poverty can be successful, but only through a popular movement to bring about significant change in the workings of American economic, political, and cultural institutions. New to this Edition Enhanced conversation on why the cultural theory of poverty has such a strong appeal to the American public develops students’ critical thinking skills (Chapter 3) New segment on the influence of job seekers’ physical appearance on hiring decisions showing that success is not simply a matter of education, skills, and training (Chapter 4) New data on the “job availability problem” explains in detail why the monthly headline unemployment number is misleading, and new content on the 2021 upsurge of quits on the part of American workers portrays efforts on the part of ordinary people to improve their lives (Chapter 5) New content on how corporations have become increasingly assertive political players explores the dramatic increase in corporate lobbying efforts, the rise of billionaire political activists, and the creation of a powerful conservative political infrastructure in the United States (Chapter 6) Greater attention to racially segregated and resource-deprived Black communities covers the extraordinary hardships experienced by the residents of these areas, while a new section on the geographical isolation of the affluent discusses how isolation affects wealthy people’s beliefs and perceptions about poverty and what policies they deem acceptable (Chapter 8)