The Poverty Paradox: Review
By Mark Robert Rank The titular paradox is poverty in the USA, the largest and one of the richest countries in the world. Compared to other rich countries the USA has much more and worse poverty than almost any other. Professor Rank dissects the causes and has some suggestions, few if any of which would fly with the modern Republican Party. Rank proposes what he calls the structural vulnerability hypothesis. That means that political policies and economic circumstances punish the poor and make it harder to escape poverty. Bad schools and bad neighborhoods promote poverty and make it hard to escape. The US ranks high on the inequality scale and low on the social mobility scale. Rank argues that a major driver of poverty in the US is blame the victim thinking, the idea that if persons are poor, it is their own fault. Much poverty can be traced to lack of social capital: education, other saleable skills, disability, poor health, or access to employment opportunities. U