Poverty And Inequality

This volume brings together leading public intellectualsAmartya Sen, Martha C. Nussbaum, Francois Bourguignon, William J. Wilson, Douglas S. Massey, and Martha A. Finemanto 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.

David B. Grusky is Professor of Sociology and incoming Director of the Program on Inequality at Stanford University. His recent books include Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men (Stanford 2004) and Mobility and Inequality (Stanford 2005). Ravi Kanbur is T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University.