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The plight of New York City's poor has been an ever-present problem. Their rapid increase accompanied New York's accelerated growth during the post-Revolutionary years. This condition, in turn, imposed new responsibilities for public welfare upon the municipal government. Public provisions for the relief of poverty in New York began with a provincial poor law of 1665-one year after the British assumed control of the colony. This measure and succeeding legislation of the colonial period, based upon the principles of the Elizabethan poor laws, made local communities responsible for their own poor and stipulated that taxation would be the source of relief funds. The economic and social dislocations produced by the American Revolution imposed obvious strains upon New York's local welfare system. Each year thousands of others came to depend on public outdoor relief and the city's charitable societies. As the number of publicly supported paupers rose, so did municipal expenditures for poor relief, which soon became the most costly item in the city's annual budget.

This study addresses itself to the problems of "cultural difference" through a semantic feature analysis of the lexicon of the hard-core poor. The hard-core poor are an internally organized, often highly resourceful, deviant subculture, the members of which do not share common societal values and do not wish for social mobility. They have their own ideology concerning the middle-class striver, considering him "sick" and his values inimical. Although other types of slum residents appear to lack integrated social systems for surviving in conditions of economic marginality, the hard-core poor do not. Their neighbors refer to them as "the self-contained society." They have developed their own adaptive institutional forms, including those for religious expression, economic survival, and social aid. This subculture has its own economic strata (not all of the hard-core group are economically poor), as well as its own elites, its own methods of communication, and highly efficient system maintenance and group insulation mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the poor people's cave, in China. This cave is five to six feet high, seven to eight feet wide, and twenty to thirty feet long, had been shared for many generations by several poor families. The occupants of the cave were those who had been reduced to abject poverty because of the exploitation by landlords and rich peasants. Since the liberation, the poor people's cave has been preserved as historical evidence of the exploitation of peasants by the landlord class. It has been completely restored and preserved by the Hsiao-sung Production Brigade of the Kao-ho Commune in Chtang-ch'ih hsien as a tool for the class education of young people. Early on the morning of May 5, 1943, a man of medium stature was helping an old woman along on her way from the temple of the local deity to the poor people's cave in northwestern Hsiao-sung Village. A little over thirty, with an emaciated face, the man carried a broken earthen vessel in his hand and shabby quilt on his shoulder.

The availability of the mass media, or at least the potential for widespread use of them, is one of the major factors that makes the development setting of today's poor countries radically different from that of the developed countries a century ago. This has been widely recognized and has led to attempts to integrate communications factors into general theories of development. It has resulted in what may be called positive, negative, and neutral orientations or theories, that are held implicitly and sometimes simultaneously by media scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the article reporting the results of study commissioned by the United Nations Department Economics and Social Affairs regarding the low cost rural housing in Asia and South-East Asia. Accordingly, the study was focused on the living conditions of families belonging to lower income groups. The result showed that domestic economies of Asian countries visited, cannot support the necessary cost of programs aimed at alleviating poverty and development of urban and rural housing. Researchers, however, recognized some promising projects in countries visited and efforts of the government in dealing with the housing of families.

The article discuses about the important roles of science and technology in raising living standards. In this report, the author emphasizes the practical problems of science and development, particularly on the intensity of world poverty. The author also indicated the need for a world supermarket in science and technology, a comprehensive display of what science and technology can achieve in raising living standards and to what cost. With this crucial stage of counsel and advice, the author recommended to seek the technical knowledge and the idealism of scientists.

This article presents the abstract of a paper which examined the pauperization theory. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, moral degradation at the opposite pole, for instance, on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. Absolute pauperization is a composite of these six factors. In fact, the history of labor conditions can be divided into periods which are, to a certain extent, characterized by the development of the various factors determining the standard of living. Before the industrial revolution, there is no general process of absolute pauperization, just as other laws of capitalist development are not yet effective, for example, the law of over-production cycles. Increasing slavery is to be found in the fact that whole families are pressed into factory work. Up until 1900, there is no improvement as to hours of work for home and agricultural workers. Probably, for all workers employed by the national capital combined, less misery. On the other hand, the agony of toil has undoubtedly increased partly because of a rise of the intensity of work at home, or because of terrible working conditions in colonies. Slavery--forced labor in colonies--has increased, though the pressure to put one's children into factories has undoubtedly eased .Brutality and moral degradation outside the colonies declined undoubtedly, however it increased in the colonies.

The article presents information on a handbook on the technology of sheep-herding. This handbook reverses the traditional moral and political hierarchy that elevated literary amateurism above the pursuit of technical skill. The author remarks that for four generations, his ancestors herded sheep for landlords, and each generation was so poor that there was not a single tile to cover the roof and not a single plot of land to stand on. His grandfather used to be a husky fellow, but because he herded sheep for a landlord, his back became hunched, and he was afflicted with many ailments. He coughed a good deal and would spit up half a bowl of saliva mixed with blood. The author's father herded sheep for landlord Chiang Kuei-sheng, but after a year of hardships, he could no longer support his aged and bed-ridden grandfather. The author's family had to beg from relatives and friends and borrow from here and there in order to raise forty strings of cash to give to the landlord Chiang Kuei-sheng.

The article focuses on the condition of poor miners in China. When miner Wang Man-hsi, who had just reached the age of sixty, returned to his home, the young people vied with each other to greet him, and surrounded him in the house. The newly painted parlor had been redecorated by the young people. Pointing to a side lantern used by miners in the old society that was hanging on the wall, a mischievous youth jokingly commented to his mother. Everybody laughed after hearing the comment. Old man Man-hsi, who was then sitting in his chair, jumped up, and taking the side lantern in his hands, said that in the old society, when miners went down into the shaft, they used two kinds of lanterns. The haulers used a lantern which was put on the head, and it was called a head lantern, the coal cutters used the lantern hung on the colliery wall, and it was called a side lantern. These lanterns burned vegetable oil, and rags were used as wicks. After his parents' death, his brother became dependent on him. Some of the uncles who used to work in the mine with his father would sometimes give them some money and grain.

This article presents information regarding the experience of the author. Every time it rained there were leaks in his thatched roof. He and his family were busy rolling up their mats and preventing their pillows from getting wet, but nothing kept dry. In the confusion, his grandmother usually started complaining about his father. At that time, his father often got together with some of his poor friends. Often he did not come back until midnight. They did not know what he was up to. As soon as someone called him from the yard, he hurried off. This added much to his mother's worries. She feared something would happen. Yang Chen-kang had said that he wanted to arrest the culprit. When in fact the culprit was Yang Chen-kang himself. His father and his friends had aroused his suspicion. Her heart was overflowing with the death of her husband and her son, but she could not even tell the world. Yang Chen-kang's house was located in the southern part of Ch'ao-lao-an Village. The big sentry tower attached to his house could be seen from afar.