Thinking about Poverty

Thinking about Poverty provides a critical understanding of poverty in the global context: how global structures affect people in Australia and the way policy-makers respond. In the midst of waning public interest, the book fills an important gap in the current public discourse on poverty and covers: the extent of poverty and unprecedented wealth and income inequality across the world, including Australia; why neoliberalism remains at the heart of mainstream global discourse and continues to shape public policy; how a deregulated and speculative global economy creates massive private and public debt, undermining the real economy, employment and wage growth; why neoliberalism still influences national governments to implement further privatisation, deregulation and other neoliberal policies which implement corporate tax cuts, and re-distribution of wealth and income upwards, while at the same time reducing welfare provisions that exacerbate poverty, social disadvantage and inequality; the pivotal role and importance of the welfare state to alleviate some of the excesses of neoliberal capitalism; individualised and structural theories that try to explain the existence of poverty.