Alice O’Connor, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History and Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up.
Poverty research has become caught up in a paradox of its own making—of diminishing insight into the problem of poverty amid more data about the poor.