Following the closure of the Webb Memorial Trust at the end of 2017, the Rethinking Poverty blog has been relaunched as Rethinking Poverty: The Webb Legacy. The aim is to make this a hub for discussions on eradicating poverty and creating a good society, a resource for all those working in the field. We will continue to publish blogs produced and commissioned by Rethinking Poverty, but we will also include more on other blogs, research, publications and events. We want to create and sustain the narrative on a good society, to help connect promising approaches, and, most importantly, to convene key people and initiatives.
Here we feature selective posts from the Rethinking Poverty blog.
While mainstream development practices are failing and problems of poverty, conflict and inequality endure, what alternatives are there that work? In this article on IDR Anshu Gupta talks about the importance of leveraging local agency in social change processes. By Anshu Gupta There’s a recent image that will remain etched in our collective memory for…
By Bassma Kodmani I started to highlight the sentences that inspired me, as I often do, with the intention of citing Barry Knight’s Rethinking Poverty in my own lectures or writings, but I found myself highlighting whole paragraphs. This book is much more than a book on poverty. It is about creativity and leadership, about power relations…
India is said to be the world’s second most unequal country, after Russia. Despite tremendous progress in reducing absolute poverty in the past two decades, and despite India’s promising economic growth, 97 per cent of the country would still be considered poor or low-income by global standards. What can developed countries with high levels of poverty like the UK learn…
By Jon Edwards The launch of Barry Knight’s book Rethinking Poverty has certainly acted as a catalyst for thinking and reflection. Although the emphasis in the book is on the crisis in direction in UK society, there is much that is relevant in the international arena. One of the core arguments – that neither the welfare state…
By Barry Knight Purpose of this paper This paper has two goals. The first is to learn from reactions to the publication of Rethinking Poverty given during a wide range of public meetings and in written reviews. The second is to develop a work programme to follow up the book taking account of what we have learned.…
By Lisa Jordon Before getting into the heart of the Rethinking Poverty dialogue I want to first say ‘thank you’ to Barry Knight and the Webb Memorial Trust for helping me understand Kim Kardashian. For those of you who missed this brilliant insight in Rethinking Poverty, the illumination can be found on page 56 in the philosophical conversation…
Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, has written for a long time about the failure of neoliberal economics and the resultant human suffering caused by the policies of austerity and terrible inequality. Barry Knight, in his new book Rethinking Poverty: What makes a good society?, offers a possible way forward from…