ABSTRACT
Poverty under one name or another has been a constant object of charitable and welfare activity in the United States during the industrial and postindustrial eras. Issues related to the effects of definitions of how we think about poverty and make policy to deal with it are covered in several important articles in Peter Townsend, ed., The Concept of Poverty. The concern with poverty apparent in the work of the scholars, and in the work of applied professionals such as social workers, has generally been manifest as a concern with those families who live below certain levels considered to be minimally adequate for subsistence. The concern with the problem of poverty is motivated by the many specific social problems which seem somehow related to the fact that there exists in the society a group of people removed from the accustomed affluence of average American life.
