The No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty (No-nonsense Guides) - Tapa blanda

"'The No-Nonsense Guides are the most accessible and enjoyable means for people with hurried lives to find out how the world really works"-George Monbiot, environmental campaigner and author of Captive State; 'The No-Nonsense Guides target those topics that a large army of voters cares about, but that politicos evade."-The Independent; 'A splendid new series of pocketable guides to issue politics... rigorously clear.'-The Guardian"

At the turn of the new millennium, the United Nations determined that world poverty would be halved by 2015. International agencies are all committed to "poverty abatement". The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have renamed their structural adjustment policies "poverty reduction strategies". But can this work? No, argues Jeremy Seabrook, not if we fail to understand the meaning of poverty. Drawing on testimonies from around the world, as well as on the hard facts, he challenges the assumption that wealth overcomes poverty, and demonstrates that the opposite of "poor" is not "rich" but "self-reliant". Appealing passionately for a shared sense of "sufficiency", he gives verbal snapshots of people's lives to show how poverty shifts, changes and endures in response to the growth of wealth.