Edward N. Wolff

I used this book as the primary text for an undergraduate-level "Economics of Poverty" course. Although I switched to Bradley Schiller's The Economics of Poverty and Discrimination in response to student feedback, I do still recommend this book for an appropriate audience.

One suitable audience is well-motivated upper-level undergraduates in economics and related disciplines. Although the text is too wordy (often restating the information in the tables at soporific length), it does contain a wealth of statistical information. There is also a nice balance between measurement issues, economic theory, and policy discussion. The only area where it falls short is in providing the tools to discuss the ethical dimension of policy. (I also must admit to some frustration with both mistakes and the general quality of the end-of-chapter exercises and instructor's manual.)

I also believe this text would be useful to graduate students in economics and, especially, related disciplines. The level of the presentation is too low to serve as the sole text for PhD-level economics courses, but Wolff does provide an extensive bibliography for each chapter, and the book could therefore serve as an excellent jumping-off point.

I hope to see improvements to future editions of this text that will make it worthy of "5 stars".… (mere)