Social Poverty

In this groundbreaking treatise, best-selling author and economist Ravi Batra identifies the roadblocks to world economic prosperity and what we need to do to overcome them. Batra takes on falling minimum wages, corporate scandals, rocketing oil prices, and many of the other crises facing the world economy. He offers an expansive, optimistic vision of how the international community can address them and bring about something historically unprecedented: true global economic prosperity.

Since the early days of the American republic, political thinkers have maintained that a grossly unequal division of property, wealth, and power would lead to the erosion of democratic life. Yet over the past thirty-five years, neoconservatives and neoliberals alike have redrawn the tenets of American liberalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in our current mainstream political discourse, in which the politics of economic inequality are rarely discussed.

In the works for more than twenty years, Interstate 69 has been both eagerly anticipated as an economic godsend and the center of a firestorm of protests by local environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, anarchists, and others who question both the wisdom of building more highways and the merits of globalization. Part history, part travelogue, Interstate 69 chronicles the last great highway project in America, introducing the people who have worked tirelessly to build it or stop it from being built, and the many places it would change forever.

White Americans have long been comfortable in the assumption that they are the cultural norm. Now that notion is being challenged, as white people wrestle with what it means to be part of a fast-changing, truly multicultural nation. Facing chronic economic insecurity, a popular culture that reflects the nation’s diverse cultural reality, a future in which they will no longer constitute the majority of the population, and with a Black president in the White House, whites are growing anxious.

When Rodney Mason, an ex-con drug dealer from Newark's rough South Ward, was shot and paralyzed, he vowed to turn his life around. A former high-school pitching ace with a 93-mph fastball, Mason decided to form a Little League team to help boys avoid the street life that had claimed his youth and mobility. Predictably, the players struggle but through the fists and tears, lopsided losses and rare victories, this bunch of misfits becomes a team, and in doing so gives the community something to root for.

Floss's parents are divorced, and she divides up her week, spending five days with her mum, her new step-dad and her baby half-brother. The other two days Floss spends with her dad, helping him to run his greasy spoon cafe. But their simple arrangement is thrown into disarray when Floss's mum decides to move to Australia. Making the difficult decision to stay at home, Floss moves in permanently with her dad and they muddle along happily together, surviving on chip butties and enjoying visits to the local funfair.

Jonathan Kozol's books have become touchstones of the American conscience. Unlike his previous books, however, Ordinary Resurrections is almost entirely narrative and takes us into the fascinating details of daily life as he has lived it with young children who befriended him over the course of several years. Like Amazing Grace, this book describes the children of New York's South Bronx, but it is a markedly different book in mood and vantage point.

It is 1998, and Richard Stearns’s heart is breaking as he sits in a mud hut and listens to the story of an orphaned child in Rakai, Uganda. His journey to this place took more than a long flight from the United States to Africa. It took answering God’s call on his life, a call that hurtled him out of his corner office at Lenox - America’s finest tableware company - to this humble corner of Uganda. This is a story of how a corporate CEO faced his struggle to obey God, whatever the cost, and his passionate call for Christians to change the world by actively living out their faith.

Hearing impaired and way too smart for her West Bronx high school, Tamika Mik Sykes copes by reading lips and selling homework answers. She's a tough girl who never gets close to anyone, until she meets Fatima, a teenage refugee who sells newspapers on Mik's block.

Coming of Age in the Other America shows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility. Drawing from 10 years of fieldwork with parents and children who resided in Baltimore public housing, sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin highlight the remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who hailed from the nation's poorest neighborhoods and show how the right public policies might help break the cycle of disadvantage.

Can money buy high-quality education? Studies find only a weak relationship between public school funding and educational outcomes. In The Money Myth, W. Norton Grubb proposes a powerful paradigm shift in the way we think about why some schools thrive and others fail. The greatest inequalities in America's schools lie in factors other than fiscal support. Fundamental differences in resources other than money explain the deepening divide in the success of our nation's schoolchildren.

In this powerful and culminating work about a group of inner-city children he has known for many years, Jonathan Kozol returns to the scene of his prize-winning books Rachel and Her Children and Amazing Grace, and to the children he has vividly portrayed, to share with us their fascinating journeys and unexpected victories as they grow into adulthood. For nearly 50 years Jonathan has pricked the conscience of his readers by laying bare the savage inequalities inflicted upon children for no reason but the accident of being born to poverty within a wealthy nation.

De meeste experts zijn het erover eens dat de Great Divergence ergens in de 18de en 19de eeuw ontstond, toen voor het eerst in de geschiedenis van de wereld in Groot-Brittannië en in een aantal andere Europese landen moderne economische groei optrad. Tot op dat moment was het verschil tussen arme en rijke samenlevingen altijd relatief gering geweest, aangezien wereldwijd armoede normaal was. Met de Great Divergence werd het westen veel rijker dan de rest van de wereld, met uitzondering van Japan.

On a cold March day in 1893, 26-year-old nurse Lillian Wald rushed through the poverty-stricken streets of New York’s Lower East Side to a squalid bedroom where a young mother lay dying -abandoned by her doctor because she could not pay his fee. The misery in the room and the walk to reach it inspired Wald to establish Henry Street Settlement, which would become one of the most influential social welfare organizations in American history.

America is broken. You don't need a fistful of statistics to know this. Visit any city, and evidence of our shattered social compact will present itself. From Appalachia to rural Texas, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest stretches to unimaginable chasms. In Tales of Two Americas, some of the literary world's most exciting writers look beyond numbers and wages to convey what it feels like to live in this divided nation. Their extraordinarily powerful stories, essays, and poems demonstrate how boundaries break down when experiences are shared.

Tired of being poor, Steven’s father, Corey, is certain that preaching the Word of the Lord is the way to fame and fortune. So father and son take off in their dilapidated truck, with a stolen Bible and a leaky army tent, for a whirlwind tour of small Texas towns. At first, few people come to see the new tent preacher - but each day Corey’s confidence and charisma grow. Soon their fortune is growing, too, especially when they start performing bogus healings. For the first time, they can afford luxuries like expensive hotel rooms, meals in fancy restaurants, even a slick new bike for Steven.

Born into poverty in a crime-ridden town and unaware of his Ojibwe heritage, John Eric Aslin’s earliest memories are of a harrowing childhood rife with abuse. This troubling upbringing led him to an adolescence full of crime, when at 21 he was sentenced to life in prison for an accidental death. Thirty-six years later, he’s still behind bars, and almost a senior citizen. This heartbreaking account explores the life of John Aslin, painting a poignant and eye-opening picture of the struggles he faced during his upbringing, and the unfortunate hardships that led him to crime.

At age 14, I ran away, but not from home - because I never had one to begin with. At school I participated in every sport, club, and after-school activity, so that when the other kids finally left, I could settle in for the night by my locker. I spent my childhood dealing with gangs, drugs, violence, and my mother's mental illness, but the real enemy was always poverty.

True prosperity - thriving economically - is possible for all humanity, but common myths prevent us from achieving it. The primary barrier to prosperity is not in language, culture, religion, race, natural resources, or geography. The far greater obstacle is the systemic and individual corruption on the part of leaders who are free to steal without punishment.

One hundred percent of our homeless guests enjoy full medical coverage, shelter, food, and transportation within one week! Homeless neighbors come to us “in crisis” and quickly move along a path of self-sufficiency and a continuum of care in multiple areas (i.e., employment, housing, education, mental health, etc.) that build self-esteem and view each as an asset, not a liability. How did a small town (Ashland, Oregon) address its big problem? This audiobook tells you “how”.