Society

Raising the threshold

The World Bank’s poverty line is inaccurate and out of date – an error that obscures the feebleness of market solutions

Attrishu Bordoloi

How Kerala got rich

Fifty years ago it was one of India’s poorest states, now it is now one of the richest. How did Kerala do it?

Tirthankar Roy & K Ravi Raman

Poverty is not permanent

By understanding the pernicious myths surrounding poverty, we can make progress towards a lofty goal: dignity for all

Anirudh Krishna & Dirk Philipsen

Prosperity versus liberation

How Pentecostalism’s prosperity gospel replaced Catholic liberation theology in Latin American life

Elle Hardy

The southern gap

In the American South, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery. Pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy

Keri Leigh Merritt

The golden fuel

Asia’s rise to economic power and food security has been powered not by rice but by American maize, the ultimate flex-crop

Peter A Coclanis

A fairly fed world

Last year, 200 million children did not get enough to eat, yet it would be cheap and easy for the world to feed them all

Sharman Apt Russell

Toward a feminist criminal law

Mass incarceration means police and prisons are not simple allies for feminists who want a more just world

Aya Gruber

After slavery

Abolition in Africa brought longed-for freedoms, but also political turmoil, economic collapse and rising enslavement

Toby Green

The tyranny of work

Jobs have become, for so many, a relentless, unsatisfying toil. Why then does the work ethic still hold so much sway?

Jamie McCallum

Sociology’s race problem

Urban ethnographers do more harm than good in speaking for Black communities. They see only suffering, not diversity or joy

Robyn Autry

Kerala’s skilled hand-weavers struggle to survive the rising tides of modernity

12 minutes

The billionaire curse

Philanthropy is vital – but its mechanisms are as intricate and troubling as the baroque structures of high finance

Katharyne Mitchell

What economics look like in resource-rich yet poverty-stricken Madagascar

5 minutes

‘I know it looks barbaric.’ Can a fight club curb street violence?

9 minutes

How the poor became blessed

Greco-Roman gods had no interest in the poor nor was organised charity a religious duty. How was Christianity different?

Pieter van der Horst

Like the chemical process of osmosis, migration is unstoppable

Robert A Burton

African art in Western museums: it’s patrimony not heritage

Charlotte Joy

Engines of democracy

Society will be much improved by loosening the stranglehold of top universities on the education of elites. But how?

Jennifer M Morton