ABSTRACT
Poverty puts the lives of hundreds of millions of people in peril each and every day. In the so-called developing world alone, the World Bank estimates that about 1.2 billion people live in “absolute poverty,” struggling to survive on less than one dollar a day (Bright, 2003). Although industrialized societies are not as desperate, poverty exists there as well. Even in the United States, one of the richest societies that has ever existed, millions are mired deep in poverty.
