ABSTRACT
The thesis of this book is that poverty is deep-seated in many rich and not only poor countries and seems destined to get worse in both groups of countries unless scientific means are mobilised to fully explain current trends, and international action is taken collaboratively to counter them. If poverty is to be fully understood so that it can be defeated or reduced, myopic and piecemeal preoccupation with particular cultural and regional meanings of the word, arising from misconceived theory and ideology, has to be relinquished. Instead, ‘poverty’ has to be given scientifically acceptable universal meaning and measurement. It has also to be explained primarily in terms of the huge influence of international developments — the policies of international agencies and global corporations and the institutions of the world's economy and trade — on social class and on style as well as conditions of life in every country. All of this applies to poverty in a wide variety of rural and urban areas of the United States, Ethiopia, India, France and the United Kingdom no less than it does to the most wretched areas of the cities of New York, Addis Ababa, Calcutta, Marseilles and Manchester.
