One of the ugliest aspects of life in America today is the appalling level of poverty—and the failure of our government to do anything meaningful about it. As sociologist Matthew Desmond makes clear in Poverty, By America, a single action by Congress and the President could easily generate the...
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A debate has been raging for years within that rarefied global community that earns its keep from the business of what we Americans call “foreign aid.” The term is faintly pejorative. (Those who favor international engagement typically call the field “official development assistance.”) And much of...
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Poverty went largely unrecognized by the American public before the publication in 1962 of Michael Harrington’s The Other America. The book captured the attention of the Kennedy Administration and probably influenced the thinking that led to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Since that...
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The emergence of new nations out of a colonial past was one of the most significant developments of the 20th Century—if not the most important of all. Their uneven struggle to attain the comforts and possibilities of life to be found in Europe, North America, and Japan continues to loom large in...
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In an even reasonably rational world, In Their Own Hands would serve as the Bible for development professionals and the basic textbook for students, philanthropists, faith-based activists, and business executives who aspire to improve the lives of poor people. Though this book advocates a...
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This book is full of surprises. In The Tyranny of Experts, the author of the seminal book The White Man’s Burden drills down into the history of economic development around the world in search of its causes. What he finds has little to do with any of the factors bandied about among...
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Students of poverty in America have searched for its roots in many areas, including racism, culture, genetics, personal responsibility, and social policy. Taxes, by contrast, have received little attention. In Taxing the Poor, Katherine S. Newman and Rourke L. O’Brien respond to this...
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Has the human race made progress since the days when all our lives were nasty, brutish, and short? Some might think this question patently silly, since it would appear to answer itself. But Angus Deaton finds in it a point of entry into his inquiry on “health, wealth, and the origins of...
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Some microfinance is extremely beneficial to the poor, but it is not the miracle cure that its publicists would have you believe. Microfinance has been hijacked by profiteers, and we need to reclaim it for the poor. The problem is not with a few rogue operators, alas, but with systemic flaws that...
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As I’ve dug more deeply into the subject of global poverty in the course of writing The Business Solution to Poverty with Paul Polak, it has become increasingly clear to me that truly understanding how today’s glaring inequities have come about requires extensive knowledge in a wide array of...
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A review of Pharmacy on a Bicycle: Innovative Solutions for Global Health and Poverty, by Eric C. Bing and Marc J. Epstein. @@@@ (4 out of 5). A leading global health authority and an eminent management professor explain how recent developments make it possible to deliver effective healthcare to the billions of the world’s poor now living in often-remote rural areas.
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A review of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo seek a pragmatic path between the extreme positions advanced by economists Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly. Sachs advocates massive foreign aid. Easterly asserts it does more harm than good.
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A review of Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day, by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, Orlanda Ruthven. @@@@ (4 out of 5). This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of global poverty.
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A review of Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere, by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble. @@@ (3 out of 5). Here is the book that C. K. Prahalad should have written instead of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.
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The Top 10 Books on the Economics of Poverty. A suggested reading list to provide a foundation for understanding development, aid, and poverty from the Stanford Social Innovation Review
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A review of Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, by Paul Polak. @@@ (3 out of 5). Dr. Polak interweaves the story of International Development Enterprises, the nonprofit he founded three decades ago, and the principles that guide it with that of one Nepalese family who moved from poverty into the middle class.
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A review of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Boo focuses on the experiences of two slum families, one consisting of 11 Muslim immigrants from India’s north who have built a business as garbage-brokers, the other family whose matriarch is affiliated with Shiv Sena, one of the most extreme and violent anti-Muslim political parties in India.
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More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century. More girls are killed in this routine ‘gendercide’ in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth...
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There’s a little something for just about everybody in Si Kahn’s delightful little memoir, Creative Community Organizing. In the space of a couple of hours of reading, you can gain a front-row seat on history from the vantage-point of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating...
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Strength in What Remains is the story of Deogratias,” as the author writes (more succinctly than I could) in a post on Amazon.com, “a young man from the central African nation of Burundi. In 1993, through no fault of his own, he was forced onto a terrifying journey, a journey that...
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Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.