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Books |
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Generosity: Virtue in the Civil Society
by Tibor R. MacHan
The virtue of generosity is a spontaneous, though rationally cultivated, disposition of persons to extend their help to others who can use and deserve it. As with other virtues, generosity presupposes that persons can make free choices as to how they will act. Its full flourishing in a community requires, furthermore, that the rights to liberty of action are fully respected and protected. Contending, as some do, that generous conduct may be elicited by coercive measures or prohibitions laid down against trade -- e.g., so as to encourage blood donations -- is wrongheaded. Coerced "generosity" is not virtous and removing the option to trade also does violence to the conditions required for virtous generosity. In their eagerness to provide for the needy, some thinkers make public policy proposals that destory the human capacity for virtous generosity. Only if men and women are left free -- that is, if they live in civil society -- can they be expected to act as they should, including generously, when that is appropriate. Tibor R. Machan --This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title. Solving the New Inequality
Generosity: Virtue in the Civil Society |
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The Truly Disadvantaged
William Julius Wilson, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)
"The Truly Disadvantaged should spur critical thinking in many quarters about the causes and possible remedies for inner city poverty. As policy makers grapple with the problems of an enlarged underclass they--as well as community leaders and all concerned Americans of all races--would be advised to examine Mr. Wilson's incisive analysis."
The Truly Disadvantaged |
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Articles |
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Solving the New Inequality
Richard B. Freeman
Over the past two decades, income inequality in the United States has massively increased. This jump owes to the unprecedentedly abysmal earnings experience of low-paid Americans, income stagnation covering about 80 percent of all families, and an increase in upper-end incomes. The rise in inequality-greater than in most other developed countries-has reversed the equalization in income and wealth we experienced between 1945 and 1970. The United States has now cemented its traditional position as the leader in inequality among advanced countries.
http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR21.6/freeman.html |
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Equality and Responsibility
John E. Roemer
International political events of the last fifteen years indicate deep popular skepticism about the egalitarianism of the welfare state: the latest dramatic example, for Americans, may be the Republican sweep in the recent congressional elections. The reasons for this skepticism are complex, but they are partly philosophical. Many people associate egalitarianism, and the policies of the welfare state in particular, with a rejection of individual responsibility. They accuse the modern welfare state of being a "Nanny State," which seeks to take care of citizens -- ministering to their needs, indemnifying them against all major harms, and relieving them of any personal responsibility to make their lives go well.
In this essay I aim to answer this charge. I will present a form of egalitarianism founded on the idea of equality of opportunity -- the prevailing conception of social justice in western liberal democracies.
http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR20.2/roemer.html |
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Poverty and Power
James Jennings
A new war on poverty is heating up in American cities. James Jennings introduces the guiding idea -- community empowerment -- and Shepard Barbash, Charlotte Kahn, and Ernesto Cortés report on what's happening in Atlanta, Boston, and San Antonio. For more than 20 years, urban poverty in this country has been getting worse. And as the spring 1992 rebellions in Los Angeles and several other cities underscored, social welfare policies have failed to arrest this deterioration. They have neither strengthened the social infrastructure of neighborhoods, nor ensured opportunities for socio-economic mobility for vast and growing numbers of poor Americans, especially blacks and Latinos. Faced with these failures of politics and policy, people in a number of American cities are pursuing new strategies for fighting urban poverty. Originally published in the June/September 1994 issue of Boston Review.
http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR19.3/Jennings.html |
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The Other Underclass
by Nicholas Lemann, December 1991
Most people think of inner-city poverty as a black phenomenon. But it is also alarmingly high among Puerto Ricans, the worst-off ethnic group in the country--even though Puerto Rico itself has made great progress against poverty and there is a growing Puerto Rican middle-class on the mainland. The term "Hispanic" which is used to describe Spanish-speaking American ethnic groups--mainly Mexican-Americans, but also Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and immigrants from other Latin American countries--may wind up having only a brief run in common parlance. It has been in official governmental use for only a few years; the Census Bureau did not extensively use the term "Hispanic" until the 1980 census. Now it faces two threats: First, although most Hispanic groups are comfortable with the term, another name, "Latino," is gaining favor, especially on campuses, because it implies that Latin America has a distinctive indigenous culture, rather than being just a step-child of Spain. Second, the very idea that it is useful to try to understand all Americans with Spanish-speaking backgrounds as members of a single group tends to crumble on examination.
The Other Underclass |
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The Return of Inequality
by Thomas Byrne Edsall, June 1988
The great bulk of Americans are losing economic and political power, while the affluent are gaining both. This is not a recipe for social comity.
Social imagination often lags behind social fact. Long after farming had ceased to be the premier American occupation, for example, we thought of ourselves as a nation of farmers, and the small town still serves as a touchstone of Americanness. This essay will explore a similar lag between a picture in our minds and a quantifiable social reality--a phenomenon that challenges an image of America that is about as true to our condition as those Norman Rockwell Sunday Evening Post covers that move us to nostalgia. The phenomenon is not poverty. Our mental picture already has a place for that. Poverty has a claim on our moral sense; it stirs our beneficence and concern.
The Return of Inequality |
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The Unfinished War
by Nicholas Lemann December 1988
A product of the conflicting ambitions of the men who shaped it, the War on Poverty was ill-fated--but its fate need not be that of all anti-poverty programs. "In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won," Ronald Reagan said last year, in one of the one-sentence pronouncements he has sometimes made to the press while walking across the White House lawn to his helicopter. Most people would probably agree with him. There is a widespread perception that the federal government's efforts to help the poor during the sixties were almost unlimited; that despite them poverty became more severe, not less; and that the reason poverty increased is that all those government programs backfired and left their intended beneficiaries worse off.
The Unfinished War |
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ROSA LEE'S STORY
In 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, Rosa Lee Cunningham's grandparents and parents gave up their North Carolina sharecropping life for an uncertain journey north. Rosa Lee is the link between past and present, between a world that has disappeared and the one that her children and grandchildren face today in Washington. Her life story spans a half-century of hardship in blighted neighborhoods not far from the majestic buildings where policy-makers have largely failed in periodic efforts to break the cycle of poverty.
ROSA LEE'S STORY |
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Links/Websites |
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The Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP)
The Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) is a national, university-based center for research into the causes and consequences of poverty and social inequality in the United States. It is nonprofit and nonpartisan.
http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/irp/aboutirp.htm |
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The Urban Institute Issue Focus - Families Who Left Welfare: Who Are They and How Are They Doing?
By Pamela Loprest
Three years after the enactment of federal welfare reform, the rolls have fallen dramatically and most former welfare recipients are working. A new study from the Urban Institute's Assessing the New Federalism project offers the first national picture of welfare leavers and how they fare. Other reports on poverty and welfare.
The Urban Institute Issue Focus - Families Who Left Welfare: Who Are They and How Are They Doing? |
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Deepening Democracy in a Fragmented World
Politics matter for human development. Reducing poverty depends as much on whether poor people have political power as on their opportunities for economic progress. Democracy has proven to be the system of governance most capable of mediating and preventing conflict and of securing and sustaining well-being. By expanding people's choices about how and by whom they are governed, democracy brings principles of participation and accountability to the process of human development.
http://www.undp.org/hdr2002/ |
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