ISBN: 1568589557 9781568589558

Category: Social Science / Poverty & Homelessness

Page count: 368

<b>Selected as A Notable Book of the Year by <i> The New York Times Book Review</i></b><br><br> Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book <i>The Other America</i>, in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor -- the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm.<br><br><i>The American Way of Poverty</i> shines a light on this travesty. Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows and, ultimately, suggests ways for moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. Exploring everything from housing policy to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky lays out a panoramic blueprint for a reinvigorated political process that, in turn, will pave the way for a renewed War on Poverty.<br><br> It is, Harrington believed, a moral outrage that in a country as wealthy as America, so many people could be so poor. Written in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, in an era of grotesque economic extremes, <i>The American Way of Poverty</i> brings that same powerful indignation to the topic.