Poverty Research and Policy for the Post-Welfare Era

The “end of welfare as we know it” constitutes an important challenge for poverty research, shifting the focus away from once-dominant themes of dependency and toward the reality of widespread “working poverty.” The literature reviewed in this chapter points in the direction of a reformulated research agenda, built around issues of inequality, political economy, and stratification by gender, race, class, and place. It also calls into question the traditional distinction between welfare and working poor, as well as the notion of an isolated underclass existing apart from the social and economic mainstream. Finally, it points to the need to broaden a policy discourse that has been narrowly fixated on welfare and on changing the behavior of the poor. A real anti-poverty agenda would focus instead on the elements of mainstream political economy and culture that continue to produce widespread economic inequality.