£9.99
This book looks back at the struggle to rid the country of poverty and asks if the struggle is worth it. What would a poverty free country be like if we could overcome the obstacles which impede progress?
Julia Unwin is chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust. She is an influential author and commentator on public policy.
Julia Unwin’s book Why Fight Poverty? asks a provocative question. Calls to end poverty date back centuries. Even in prosperous modern times, despite the huge transformation of society, poverty has persisted. The challenge is getting harder because of changes in society, family structures and community patterns – and because of the negative emotions about poverty within a welfare state. The recent crisis seems set to leave us with an economy in which some may never work and there is little public sympathy for the poor. This book looks back at the struggle to end poverty and asks if it has been worth it. What would a poverty-free country be like? Julia Unwin concludes that we urgently need to resolve poverty, because it is costly, wasteful and risky, but that we can only create a strong, shared understanding of poverty and how to end it when we recognize that ‘they’ are people like ‘us’.
This book outlines the tragic waste poverty represents and why fighting it should be a top political priority. Although people differ over what causes poverty and how to reduce it, campaigners on all sides of the debate can learn something from the passionate contribution Julia Unwin offers in Why Fight Poverty? — Christian Guy, Director, The Centre for Social Justice
In this powerful and hard-hitting book, Julia Unwin challenges those who believe our current levels of poverty in the UK are acceptable and inevitable. Simplistic understandings of poverty coupled with our current attitudes and prejudices are blocking effective reform and human lives are wasted as a result. Unwin shows we can tackle this through a new social contract but only if we commit together to long-term and consistent solutions. An excellent book which will make a major contribution to help tackle the root causes of poverty in the UK today. — Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York
This book makes a powerful case that we can eliminate poverty if we want to. It challenges widely held misconceptions of the poor. Everyone, of all shades of opinion, should read this and then work out how they can help to repair our fractured society. — Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger DBE, Senior Rabbi, West London Synagogue
A hugely important book, adding a new and vital dimension to the poverty debate. — Mary Riddell, columnist and political interviewer for the Daily Telegraph
Click the link below to listen to Julia Unwin being interviewed by Romesh Vaitilingam at the Festival of Economics.
Trade is being weaponized – and this isn’t good. As politicians on both sides of the Atlantic raise the stakes, trade is increasingly a tool of coercion to achieve strategic influence. This book looks at the risks for us all as trade becomes an instrument of foreign policy, and shows how politicians could turn things around.
The gap between important real-word problems and the workhorse mathematical model-based economics being taught to students has become a chasm. This book examines what economists need to bring to their jobs, and the way in which economics education in universities could be improved to fit them better for the real world.
Trade is no longer just the ships, planes and lorries that move the goods we buy around the world or the services we consume either physically or digitally. This book examines the US, Chinese and Russian approaches to `strategic trade’ and argues that Europe must adapt or lose out.
This book sets out the principles that could underpin a strategic policy for transport. Instead of focusing piecemeal on trying (and failing) to get from place to place ever faster, we need to think about how and where we want the economy to develop, and about how new the digital technologies can help achieve this.
