Poorly Understood

Mark Robert Rank is currently the Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. He is widely recognized as one of the foremost experts on issues of poverty, inequality, and social justice. He has been the recipient of many awards, and his research has been reported in a wide range of media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and NPR.Lawrence M. Eppard is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Shippensburg University. His areas of research include poverty, economic inequality, and racial inequities. He has recently published the book Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality (with Rank and Bullock), and is currently working on a book for Oxford University Press tentatively titled On Inequality and Freedom.Heather E. Bullock is Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She also serves as the director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Social Enterprise, and Participatory Governance. Her areas of interest include the social psychological dimensions of economic inequality, as well as identifying the attitudes and beliefs that predict support for anti-poverty policies. She has published her research across a wide range of academic journals and is the author of two award winning books.

• Chapter 1: IntroductionSection I: Who Are the Poor?Chapter 2: Most Americans Will Experience PovertyChapter 3: The Poor Tend to Live Outside of Impoverished Inner CityChapter 4: Poverty Spells Are Short but FrequentChapter 5: Whites Comprise the Largest Racial Group Experiencing PovertySection II: Why Is There Poverty?Chapter 6: Hard Work is Not SufficientChapter 7: Raising Education and Skill Levels Will Not Solve Poverty AloneChapter 8: Decision Making is Constrained for Those With Fewer ResourcesChapter 9: Poverty is PreventableSection III: What Is the Cost of Poverty?Chapter 10: America's Poor Are Worse Off than ElsewhereChapter 11: The Economic Cost of Poverty Is EnormousChapter 12: The Moral Ground to View Poverty Is InjusticeSection IV: Does Welfare Work?Chapter 13: The U.S. Welfare State is MinimalChapter 14: Welfare Fraud is ScarceChapter 15: Government Programs Can Reduce PovertySection V: How Extensive Is Inequality?Chapter 16: The U.S. is No Longer a Land of Upward Mobility and Opportunity Chapter 17: The Playing Field is UnevenChapter 18: Inequality MattersSection VI: Pulling It TogetherChapter 19: Why Do the Myths Persist?Chapter 20: Reshaping Social PolicyChapter 21: Creating ChangeAppendix: Further Readings and ResourcesNotesAcknowledgements

Poor Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty attempts and, in many ways, succeeds at being the magnum opus of introductions to modern American poverty studies. In a well-written, straightforward, and data-forward approach, Mark Robert Rank, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock manage to synthesize decades of poverty research toward relinquishing several of America's most coveted myths about social stratification.