Fighting Poverty Inequality And Injustice

This important book brings together many of the leading contributors in the field and provides a compelling manifesto for change in social justice.

This important book brings together many of the leading contributors in the field and provides a compelling manifesto for change in social justice.

Both in religious and in secular culture there is an acute awareness that poverty, destitution, and misery should be eliminated, and that it is possible to achieve this goal. Despite this common aim, strategies for fighting poverty vary widely among the disciplines. This book interprets poverty in the light of Christian faith and ventures beyond the dual public-private model. Pope Francis has called on business leaders around the world to spread a new mindset in business that acknowledges the poor and the marginalized. In doing so, he deplores inequality and injustice. These concepts pose an intellectual challenge to Christian humanism, which the authors, leading scholars on the subject, take up. The book opens with a series of chapters on the economic dimensions of poverty, inequality, and injustice, and turns to the philosophical and theological aspects in its second part. Even though rigorously academic, the ideas in this book are transformative. The social market economy places the human person at the center of the economy, and it offers a model that can be implemented, under this or other names, in many parts of the world.

This important book makes a vital academic and political statement in the cause of social justice. It begins with an appreciation of the seminal contributions of Peter Townsend (1928-2009), and applies them to contemporary policy debates. It brings together many of the leading contributors to current debates in this field and provides a compelling manifesto for change for students and researchers in the social sciences, policy makers and practitioners, and everybody with an interest in creating a more equal and socially just society.

This is an innovative collection that brings together two issues that are not always related: measures to reduce poverty, and respect in practice for human rights. Most of the contributors are from Latin America--a region characterized by terrible human rights violations, and the co-existence of relative wealth alongside immense absolute inequality. Law, they argue, is no panacea for the intractable problem of poverty. Instead it can be an indispensable basis for social mobilization, which, in turn can be strengthened by socially engaged and critical social science. Paying particular attention to indigenous peoples, the contributors explore their struggles against poverty, and the relatively new notion of the right to development.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Poverty reduction is a central feature of the international development agenda and contemporary poverty reduction strategies increasingly focus on "targeting the poor", yet poverty and inequality remain intractable foes. The report seeks to explain why people are poor and why inequalities exist, As well as what can be done to rectify these injustices. it explores the causes, dynamics and persistence of poverty; examines what works and what has gone wrong in international policy thinking and practice; and lays out a range of policies and institutional measures that countries can adopt to alleviate poverty.

This report examines the links between inequality and other major global trends (or megatrends), with a focus on technological change, climate change, urbanization and international migration. The analysis pays particular attention to poverty and labour market trends, as they mediate the distributional impacts of the major trends selected. It also provides policy recommendations to manage these megatrends in an equitable manner and considers the policy implications, so as to reduce inequalities and support their implementation.