Product Description

This acclaimed book powerfully depicts a side of the welfare experience rarely seen, dispelling the myth that only an urban underclass -- the center of most policy debate -- struggles on welfare. Rank's juxtaposition of numbers and faces demonstrates that welfare recipients share much in common with the rest of the population.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1965132 in Books
• Published on: 1994-03
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.04 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 266 pages

From Library Journal
Rank, an associate professor at Washington University's George Warren Brown School of Social Work, believes that there will always be a need for public assistance but that the amount could be greatly minimized through a concerted effort to create jobs and good training programs; assure quality universal healthcare and accessible, affordable child care; reduce unwanted pregnancies; and make a positive investment in communities and services. Rank's ten-year study of public welfare, which included interviews with recipients, data sampling, research, and field work, convinced him that welfare clients share the same beliefs and values as the rest of us, do not aspire to the dole, and find themselves dependent because they lack such things as financial resources, marketable job skills, and reliable medical help. Enhanced by an appendix on methodology, this cogent, readable work is recommended for academic, professional, and informed general readers.
Suzanne W. Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology, Alfred
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Welfare is a complicated subject, and alternative welfare policies can be assessed well only by citizens who know how complicated it is. So we need scholarly--i.e., deeply informed--books on welfare, but such books often bore nonscholarly readers. Answering the questions, Why do people turn to welfare? What is it like to survive on welfare? and How can America improve its welfare delivery? Rank strives manfully, and to some extent successfully, to reach both scholar and general reader. Since his research base is restricted to a single rural, mostly white Wisconsin county, Rank doesn't convince us he has something to teach about inner-city welfare, but what he does teach, he teaches convincingly, ably marrying statistics and accounts of recipients' daily lives that would delight any old-fashioned realistic novelist. Furthermore, an illuminating historical chapter on U.S. and English welfare policies forcefully impresses upon us their cyclical nature; Clinton-like job retraining programs were first recommended in eighteenth-century London, and they didn't work. Well, maybe they were ahead of their time--and maybe not. Roland Wulbert

Review
Rank analyzes the several ways of interpreting poverty and the need for welfare, and provides an account of his research on what poor people actually do to make ends meet and how they think about it... Perhaps most poignant is that many of the people Rank spoke with work hard only to lose ground, yet maintain a strong belief in upward mobility and the American dream. New York Times After ten years of intensive study of public welfare programs and welfare recipients, Mark Robert Rank has written a thoughtful book about poor people and their lives... Rank argues that we have got it just about backward again. It turns out, he says, that a lot of assumptions about welfare are simply wrong. Chicago Tribune