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David Grusky
Gavin Jones
David Grusky, a professor of sociology, discusses why reducing poverty is in the collective interest, and Gavin Jones, a professor of English, discusses how literature can provide us with an emotionally resonant and complex understanding of poverty .
Poverty and the hyper-moral American
By David Grusky
How much should we care about the fate of the poor and starving? The claim that we care too little has been a staple of religious and left-leaning political commentary around the globe. However popular this claim already is, it will likely become yet more popular as the financial crisis and impending recession serve to increase worldwide poverty. It is useful in this context to examine whether the conventional case for caring about poverty is as compelling as it could be.
The truths of poverty in fiction
By Gavin Jones
Only in imaginative literature can we fully understand the problems of poverty and inequality. This statement may seem strange, counterintuitive at best. Surely poverty is a material condition, a position in the social structure. And literary texts: Are they not aesthetic artifacts, retreating by their nature into the privacy of the imagination? Only in this retreat from the tactile and the statistical, I contend, can we approach the complexity of poverty as an ideological formation, or understand the inner life of being poor—the tangled web of emotion and behavior that gets brushed too easily from social study.
This feature was originally published in the Stanford Report.
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