8 New Poverty Books Reshaping the Field in 2025

HowExpert Guide to Global Poverty unpacks the complex layers of poverty with a clear focus on both understanding and action. This guide lays out the historical, political, and economic roots of global poverty, supported by case studies that reveal regional differences and human impacts like health and education struggles. You’ll find chapters dedicated to economic theories, digital innovations, and corporate responsibility as tools to combat poverty, alongside practical steps for individual involvement. The book’s detailed exploration of intersectionality and mental health challenges offers a nuanced perspective that benefits activists, policymakers, and concerned citizens seeking a thorough grasp of global inequality.

Justin Mahwikizi offers a fresh lens on poverty by focusing on mindset, capital formation, and strategic use of systems like the courts. Drawing from six millennia of community history and thinkers like Plato and Thurgood Marshall, he challenges you to reconsider how poverty is maintained and overcome. The book teaches how to develop an achievement mindset, apply capital formation principles personally and communally, and treat legal disputes as opportunities to buy time and negotiate better outcomes. This approach suits anyone aiming to shift their financial trajectory or better understand systemic leverage within families and communities.

This tailored book explores the latest breakthroughs and emerging developments in poverty studies as of 2025. It delves into cutting-edge research and new discoveries, focusing on your specific interests and background to provide a deeply relevant learning experience. By concentrating on the most recent shifts in poverty understanding and solutions, the book reveals innovative approaches and fresh perspectives shaping the field today. It covers evolving economic, social, and policy dimensions of poverty with an emphasis on how new insights challenge traditional views. This personalized exploration ensures you engage with content that matches your goals and keeps you informed on the forefront of poverty research and responses.

Henry George challenges the conventional wisdom that poverty results from personal failings by tracing its roots to land speculation and monopolization, drawing on his own experience of hardship in 19th-century San Francisco. You’ll gain a nuanced understanding of how economic growth can paradoxically coincide with rising poverty, as George carefully balances moral and economic arguments. The book explores his proposal for taxing unimproved land value to curb speculation and redistribute wealth, a concept that influenced thinkers like Tolstoy and Einstein. If you want to grasp historical and economic perspectives on poverty and land policy, this book offers a thoughtful, if dated, framework that still sparks debate today.

Michael H. Morris and Susana C. Santos bring decades of expertise in entrepreneurship and social sciences to examine whether business ventures can truly lift people out of poverty. They delve into the complex nature of poverty through disadvantage theory and the capabilities framework, highlighting four key barriers that limit entrepreneurial success among the poor. You’ll learn why many ventures fall into a "commodity trap" with thin margins and how tailored support, community ecosystems, and policy changes can help break this cycle. This book suits anyone interested in the nuanced relationship between poverty and enterprise, especially policymakers, social entrepreneurs, and researchers seeking realistic pathways for economic improvement.

Walter Brueggemann and Conrad L. Kanagy challenge the common belief that poverty stems solely from individual choices, instead highlighting the biblical roots of systemic and structural causes. You’ll explore how longstanding social institutions, including the church, have often overlooked their role in perpetuating poverty. The book delves into the biblical concept of the Year of Jubilee, illustrating a vision for deep societal restoration beyond charity. If you want to understand poverty through a theological and social lens that calls for collective responsibility and neighborliness, this concise work offers a focused perspective worth your attention.

This tailored book explores emerging perspectives and innovative responses to poverty, focusing on the latest developments and research up to 2025. It examines the social, economic, and policy dimensions of poverty through a lens shaped by your unique interests and background, allowing you to engage deeply with the areas most relevant to you. The content reveals cutting-edge findings and future challenges, blending current knowledge with forward-looking insights. By addressing your specific goals, it offers a personalized pathway to understand and anticipate evolving poverty issues, making complex trends accessible and meaningful to your experience and aspirations.

James Mayfield’s work emerges from a hands-on approach to poverty alleviation in Nepal's Lamjung District, where his 12-step program focuses on empowering communities through good governance, transformative leadership, and gender equality. You’ll encounter detailed principles that link local government reform with grassroots enterprise development, illustrating how self-reliance can be fostered in extreme poverty settings. The story of Radhika Pariyar and her daughter provides a tangible example of these principles in action, showing the shift from despair to aspiration. This book suits those interested in practical social change frameworks rather than abstract theories, especially policymakers and development practitioners aiming for measurable community impact.

What if everything you knew about poverty was wrong? Anne Kim, a seasoned journalist, digs into the often overlooked corporate interests thriving within America’s poverty programs. You’ll gain an eye-opening understanding of how industries from bail bonds to health services profit from policies meant to aid the poor, including detailed investigations into sectors like housing and criminal justice. This book challenges you to reconsider structural inequality by exposing the tangled web of privatization and political influence fueling these profits. If you’re interested in the intersection of public policy and economic exploitation, this book will broaden your perspective with precise examples and investigative depth.

Unlike most poverty books that focus solely on economic factors, this work by social scientists Susan Crawford Sullivan, Stephen Offutt, and Shariq Ahmed Siddiqui explores the intersection of religion and poverty with fresh insight. You gain a nuanced understanding of how Christianity and Islam shape responses to poverty both in the US and globally, including how theology influences social services, philanthropy, and public policy. The authors blend existing research with original studies, making chapters on lived religion and faith-based movements particularly revealing. If your interest lies in the social dynamics of poverty and religion’s role beyond doctrine, this book offers a focused, research-driven perspective.