I’ve spent the last two decades reading, learning and writing about poverty and social policy. I’ve written two books on the topic (including, most recently, Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich off America’s Poor, along with countless articles. Along the way, I’ve read a host of books that have influenced my thinking and writing. I’ve learned about the evolution (and regression) of social policy throughout American history and how it intersects with politics. These books have also helped me understand why the national conversation on poverty has been stuck for decades.

As a “pragmatic progressive,” I’m deeply conscious that what’s achievable and what’s desirable are often vastly different things. But I also think progressives can work to shift the politics of what’s achievable in the direction of what’s ideal. That goal, however, requires a thorough understanding of public perceptions (and misperceptions) of poverty and the contours of the decades-long ideological tug-of-war over poverty’s causes and solutions.

If you’re relatively new to this subject and would like to learn more, here are 11 books that offer some crucial foundational knowledge about the arc of US social policy. Many of these are older works whose influence I think still reverberate today. I’ve also chosen some of these books for their impact and historical value, not because I agree with their viewpoint.

1. The Other America: Poverty in the United States, Michael Harrington. First published in 1962, this is the book that launched the War on Poverty in 1964. Though many books have since chronicled the lives of the poor, Harrington was the first to bring the world of poverty into the living rooms of middle-class Americans and to explain the systemic forces that push people into dire need. Harrington put a human face on poverty and galvanized Americans’ desire to act.

2. The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare, Michael Katz. Katz provides an essential primer on the politics of poverty and Americans’ attitudes toward the poor. He reaches back to colonial times to explain Americans’ enduring belief in poverty as an individual, moral failing versus the result of failures in governance and policy. (This is the myth that The Other America, for a while, punctured.) Though published in 1989, its underlying analysis is no less true today.

3. Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, Alice O’Connor. This provocative work shows how the field of “poverty studies” may have done more harm than good in understanding and fighting poverty. Technical analyses of poverty have reduced the problem to one of demographics, she argues, while the clinical language of social science has dehumanized the suffering experienced by poor Americans. Evaluations of specific “interventions,” meanwhile, reinforce the idea of poverty as a result of behavior, not of systems. A quick skim of current academic literature on poverty will provide helpful context before you tackle this work. (The working papers put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research are a good place to start.)

4. Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. Piven and Cloward posit a controversial idea in this book: That while welfare programs claim to be about ameliorating the lives of the poor, they are in truth a mechanism for social control. First published in 1971, the book proved prescient during the ‘80s and ‘90s when conservatives pushed through welfare reforms that required work and imposed increasing demands for “compliance” in exchange for benefits.


5. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Charles Murray. Published in 1984, this book served as the bible for conservative welfare “reformers” who sought to justify cuts to social welfare programs and eventually succeeded with welfare reform in 1996. Murray argued that welfare programs created disincentives for families to rise out of poverty, thereby perpetuating poverty rather than reducing it. Murray was also the author of The Bell Curve, which stoked further controversy for its ideas linking IQ with social class. Murray’s impact on US social policy has been far-reaching and destructive.


6. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, U.S. Department of Labor (aka “The Moynihan Report”). More than any other publication on this list, this landmark report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan has influenced public perceptions of poverty and poor Americans. Moynihan was among the first to introduce the pernicious idea that a “culture of poverty” kept people poor. He wrote about a “tangle of pathology” in poor black neighborhoods, for which he largely blamed the absence of fathers. Though well-intended, Moynihan’s work led to a racialized perception of poverty that elevated stereotypes over reality.

7. When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor, William Julius Wilson. In many ways a rebuke to Moynihan’s thesis of a “culture of poverty,” Wilson’s classic work examines how structural changes to the US economy as a result of globalization have destroyed both livelihoods and communities. Declines in manufacturing and other blue-collar work, Wilson argues, led to an epidemic of joblessness with catastrophic impacts.

8. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, Jonathan Kozol. An intellectual and literary heir to Michael Harrington, Kozol paints compelling and compassionate portraits of children living in the South Bronx – one of the poorest urban neighborhoods in America. Over the last 50 years, Kozol has produced innumerable outstanding books, including Death at an Early Age, which won the National Book Award in 1967 and is a towering classic on the impacts of educational segregation.

9. No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City, Katherine S. Newman. Newman’s book exploded the myths of low-wage work as low-skilled and undemanding and of low-wage workers as unmotivated and unambitious. In her meticulous study of more than 200 Black and Latino fast-food workers in Harlem, Newman documents the challenges these workers face, both on and off the job, and their aspirations to get ahead in a system determined to stymie their advancement. This book helped sparked badly needed national conversations on job quality and a living wage.

10. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg. Though not strictly about poverty and social policy book, Isenberg’s book provides crucial context for understanding the modern politics of poverty and economic resentment (and, by extension, the rise of Trumpism). Her book also provides a useful reminder that despite the racialization of poverty in recent decades, the majority of poor people in America are white.

11. The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin Friedman. Friedman’s argument in this book is simple, but profound: That social progress is more likely to happen in times of economic growth and middle-class prosperity. Both the War on Poverty and the Civil Rights of 1964, for instance, were enacted during an extraordinary era of post-war expansion, when ordinary people felt they could “afford” to be generous to low-income and minority Americans, Friedman argues. Recessions, in contrast, become periods of retrenchment, when Americans become more protective of their own economic security and less willing to support those less fortunate. Backed up by abundant research, Friedman’s book helps explain why so many Americans view investments in poverty reduction as a zero-sum enterprise. It’s also a warning to progressives that the political success of anti-poverty policies could depend on their inclusion in a broadly appealing economic agenda that lifts all boats.


No doubt this list omits many important books. Please don’t hesitate to reach out and leave a comment with your suggestions!