Poverty is never treated simply as lacking money, itt is also made into a moral identity: evidence of deficient culture, failed character, disordered family life or insufficient adaptation to respectable society. 

Chaim I. Waxman examines how these explanations become attached to poor people and then reproduced by the policies supposedly designed to help them. Moving between cultural and situational theories, Waxman considers education, crime, mental illness, welfare and social class to ask where the “problem” of poverty is being located. Is deprivation produced by the values of the poor, by the material structure of poverty, or by institutions that recognise middle-class behaviour as normal and everything else as failure? His sharpest point is that theory is not politically innocent: how poverty is described determines whether policy attempts to redistribute resources, reform institutions or rehabilitate the allegedly defective poor.

Published in 1977, the book belongs to an important period of argument over the “culture of poverty,” but its central critique remains horribly durable. It is useful not simply as a history of welfare theory, but as an account of how inequality is converted into stigma—and stigma then offered back as an explanation for inequality. 

First edition paperback, Pergamon Press, 1977. Covers rubbed and creased with edge wear; clean internally and firmly bound.