Description:Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America, in which he chronicled the lives lived by the forgotten people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up both of the long-term, chronically poor, and the new-poor, the victims of a broken economy and a collapsed housing market. The people of the United States increasingly inhabit two economies. At the top, highly educated, highly skilled, professionals are in possession of an ever-greater proportion of the country’s wealth. At the bottom, an increasing number of undereducated, under-skilled, under-resourced, people are being condemned to lives of insecurity: either out of work or working jobs the pay for which is declining in real terms, many of them without access to even rudimentary social benefits pensions, health insurance, meaningful vacation time and so on.
The aim of The American Way of Poverty is to...