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  • Poverty in America: A Handbook
  • Eva Fodor
Poverty in America: A Handbook. By John Iceland. University of California Press, 2003. 206 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $19.95.

I wish I had access to this book last year when I taught an undergraduate course on poverty! John Iceland's Poverty in America would have been the perfect background material for my classes as it would be similarly useful were one to teach about social inequalities in the United States, or American society in general. It is comprehensive, easily accessible, up-to-date, and has a vast reference section for those who want even more detail. It could serve as a textbook for upper level undergraduate or graduate courses, or as a reference book for instructors trying to construct undergraduate lectures. It is an intelligent, balanced, and carefully research handbook, which should have been published a long time ago. [End Page 440]

Iceland's book provides a lot of useful empirical information on poverty: head counts and poverty gaps, changes over time in aggregate levels and the dynamics of the individual experience of poverty, the composition and the geographic distribution of the poor, the shape, the cost, and the efficiency of social policy measures targeting the poor, as well international comparisons of poverty levels and gaps. Much of this information is available in other books or online, but Iceland presents them and explains their significance in a persuasive, logical and easily accessible way. What makes this book unique, however, is his consideration of the social construction of poverty through the discussion of changes (and variations) in poverty measures and his careful analysis of the causes of the persistence of high poverty rates.

A whole chapter (chapter 3) is devoted to the discussion of the measurements of poverty and this is one of the highlights of the book. Not only does Iceland review the different ways in which poverty may be assessed — absolute, relative, subjective measures, social exclusion and hardship indicators, etc. — but he also points out the strengths and weaknesses of each measurement. The comparison of the level of poverty in the U.S. using three of the income related indicators and the international comparisons through both absolute and relative poverty measures highlights the underlying argument about the constructed nature of poverty and poverty statistics and the role of governments, social scientists, and the general public in defining what it means to be poor. Rarely do we see such an empirically rich discussion of this idea. Iceland also makes a good case for the quasi-relative poverty measures which have become popular recently.

The chapter on the evaluation of the weight of possible factors which correlate with changes in poverty rates, such as the growth in per capita income, changes in family structure, and overall economic prosperity, also merits praise. Iceland uses sophisticated statistical methods to make his point but presents the results of the decompositions through easily understandable graphs, which shouldn't scare even the most math-phobe undergraduate. His argument about the primacy of income growth and the relatively small significance of family structure explaining changes, or lack thereof, in poverty rates is original and well supported. It is perhaps odd to find a whole chapter (chapter 6) devoted to the presentation of in-depth, original research in a handbook/textbook type work. Yet, I found this an excellent idea because this chapter might provide students with a glimpse at how information about poverty is gained and how sociological data analysis could be meaningfully carried out and presented. Thus it serves not only the purpose of presenting the results but also the process and methodology of research on poverty.

Although the emphasis in the book is on empirical data, Iceland presents a number of theories explaining poverty or evaluating the plight of the poor. While the very brief discussion of Marx and Weber is somewhat simplistic and even perhaps unnecessary, the careful and straightforward presentation of a [End Page 441] number of mid-range theories, such as the culture of poverty argument, the discussion of the declining significance of race, trickle-down economics, as well as theories of gender and racial segregation and discrimination, is exemplary.

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