Table of Contents:
  • Origins: poverty and social science in the era of progressive reform
  • Poverty knowledge as cultural critique: the Great Depression
  • From the Deep South to the dark ghetto: poverty knowledge, racial liberalism, and cultural "pathology"
  • Giving birth to a "culture of poverty": poverty knowledge in postwar behavioral science, culture, and ideology
  • Community action
  • In the midst of plenty: the political economy of poverty in the affluent society
  • Fighting poverty with knowledge: the Office of Economic Opportunity and the analytic revolution in government
  • Poverty's culture wars
  • The poverty research industry
  • Dependency, the "underclass," and a new welfare "consensus": poverty knowledge for a post-liberal, postindustrial era
  • The end of welfare and the case for a new poverty knowledge.