The following is an excerpt from our March issue:

By: Jonathan Lindberg

There are really two kinds of books on poverty. The first are stories of sympathy. These books are meant to pull on the heartstrings. They come with pictures and usually offer guilt. There are protests, there are cries for utopia, but these studies offer little substance when it comes to actually dealing with poverty. The second approach is one of numbers. Poverty is a problem of economics. Forget the individual. The key to eliminating poverty is basic economics applied properly.

The End of Poverty, which was reviewed in these pages (09/05) falls into the second category. Despite its utopian title, economist Jeffery Sachs acknowledges poverty can never be eliminated. Still, with economics-done-right, extreme poverty (the one-billion souls in this world that live on less than one-dollar a day) can be greatly reduced. It is a book worth reading.

However, neither approach seems to tell the whole story. Either the individual is ignored, or they are elevated to the station of sainthood.

How the Other Half Lives (reprinted Barnes & Noble Books, 242 pages), written by New York Tribune reporter Jacob Riis during the height of the New York tenement epidemic of the late nineteenth century, offers a relevant look at the problem of poverty that is neither utopian nor cold. For this reason alone, the book is still read, though the tenements have disappeared. The book has recently been released in an updated edition, complete with introduction and notes.

The brilliance of Riis is his ability to remain detached from his characters, while at the same time deeply involved in their plight. Riis was the first to use images to heighten the feeling on poverty. However, his pictures (published in the new edition) are not syrupy and manufactured. They are raw. Riis was famous for refusing to give money to the begging poor. However, Riis was also known for providing food for children of families that were packed into suffocating tenements.

The man, like the poverty around him, was a study in paradoxes.

However, Riis understood the problem of poverty in a way which few are able. Poverty is more than a problem of economics; poverty is a problem of society. To put it blunt, poverty is our problem. It is this feeling, above all else, that emerges from his writings