Main description: Throughout the world, politicians are dismantling state enterprises and heaping praise on private markets, while in the United States a new rhetoric of "citizen empowerment" links a widespread distrust of government to decentralization and privatization. Here Joel Handler asks...

Introduction -- The state of poverty : TANF recipients -- The response to poverty and inequality : the welfare state -- Demonizing the single-mother family : the path to welfare reform -- The welfare bureaucracy -- Work and the low-wage labor market : mothers and children -- Welfare reform and...