ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book talks about the theoretical framework by discussing the significance of money, credit and debtfare states. It focuses on the rationale behind the three case studies used to illustrate the poverty industry in the United States, the credit card industry, the student loan industry and the payday loan industry. The overall aim of the book: namely, to understand the capitalist nature of power and the paradoxes therein, which both constitute and reproduce the poverty industry. The book concludes by summarising the argument that has sought to reveal and explain the complex and contradictory roles played by debtfarism and the social power of money in the construction of the poverty industry in the United States and in Mexico. The lack of money, which often results in a state of indebtedness, also serves to intensify socio-economic inequalities while masking the underlying reasons for them.
