Today’s poverty-related book of the day is First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics by Graham Riches. Here is the overview: “Hunger and undernutrition are widespread in many advanced capitalist societies. Hunger is now publicly acceptable despite undermining common standards of human decency and abrogating the basic right of people to adequate food as […]
Author Archives: Scott Hughes
Poverty Book of the Day: Growing Up Empty
I have decided to start a book of the day series on this blog. Each day for the rest of the month, I intend to make a post about a poverty-related book that interests me. I have not read any of these books yet. (If I had, I would have already posted about them when […]
Global Food Crisis Now an Emergency
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today, “The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions.” Rising prices have already raised the costs of the WFP’s current operations from $500 million to $755 million. I assume the inflation comes from the rising price of energy, which has risen from increased demand […]
Getting Young People More Involved in Activism
Throughout my unprofessional studies of history and geopolitics, I have come to the conclusion that young people tend to start, push and lead the most effective and positive social movements. For example, consider the hippies, yippies, and such in the United States, namely in the 60s and 70s. I believe young people tend to have […]
Poverty Causes Teen Sex Problems
Today, I just started reading the book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex by Judith Levine. Not being specifically about poverty, Levine argues in the book that sex is not necessarily harmful to minors, and that trying to keep children ignorant about sex and puritanically abstinent often backfires. So far, I […]
80 Percent of Poor Americans Work
I just read a good article by Wendi C. Thomas in which she says that 80 percent of poor Americans have jobs. The article contains some personal anecdotes about a few poor people. And it aims to help dispel the myth that poor people are lazy and do not want better for themselves. Wendi C. […]