Poverty and Inequality
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This volume brings together leading public intellectuals—Amartya Sen, Martha C. Nussbaum, François 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.
"This impressive collection of essays brings together well-known economists, sociologists, and philosophers to discuss the pressing problems of inequality and poverty. Kanbur and Grusky recognize that these timely and difficult issues can only be dealt with by marshalling the intellectual power of our best minds, looking at poverty through the lens of multiple disciplines."—Joseph E. Stiglitz
"...I highly recommend this book. It is essential reading for anyone studying occupational segregation, and valuable for scholars in a range of fields including gender studies, work, social inequality, and comparative-historical sociology."--Canadian Journal of Sociology Online
