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AbstractIn this paper, I explore the ideal of self-cultivation as it confronts the holders of power and our practice and understanding of ethics and aesthetics. I begin with the field of social development as an illustrative case of field of power that is in urgent need of a reconstructive and transformative practice of self-development. I take the ethical deliberations in the field of development, that is, development ethics as an exemplar of ethical reflection today, and look at aesthetics through the contemporary quest of and reflections on self-cultivation. Then, I discuss the challenge of recognizing the face of the other that the radical alterity of poverty presents to the quest for freedom, exercise of power and the ideal of self-cultivation. Through a dialogue with the face of the other, I wish in this paper to move from a self-congratulatory view of freedom as an assertion of one's rights to the terrain of what Emmanuel Levinas calls "difficult freedom", and reiterate the imperative of responsibility that knocks at our door — an imperative that disturbs our slumber and urges for a "permanent wakefulness" in us.The mission of development ethics is to keep hope alive. By any purely rational calculus of future probabilities, the development enterprise of most countries is doomed to fail. Poor classes, nations, and individuals can never catch up with their rich counterparts as long as they continue to consume wastefully and to devise ideological justifications for not practicing solidarity with the less developed. Only some transcultural calculus of hope, situated beyond apparent realms of possibility, can elicit the creative energies and vision which authentic development for all requires.

Starting with a brief review of why all post‐industrial societies tend to be inegalitarian, this paper develops two main themes: (1) how the idea that people are individually responsible for their own fates reduces poverty but impedes redistribution, and (2) how both the loose ties of individuals to their societies and the selective nature of their empathy and pity for others reduces compassion for the poor, making redistribution unlikely. The first theme is elaborated through psychological research on dispositional versus circumstantial attributions, showing their effects on the widely shared belief in a just world and more generally on the prevailing theory of the justice of deserts. The attribution‐affect‐action model is used to show how dispositional attributes evoke either anger or pity for victims and, if anger, then unwillingness to help. The development of the second theme shows how people divorce their own fates from those of their nations, how the basic tendency to favor the familiar and similar limits support for redistribution, how converting concern regarding deprivations of the self to concern for (fraternal) deprivation of people like the self excludes those who most need help, how envy fails to lead to redistribution, and finally, how people's ideas of the privileged and the disadvantaged reflect market values and often mark the poor and the different as overprivileged.

This paper examines the relationship between occupation and different types of human capital—skills, education, ability and health. Summary statistics of our panel data from the Ghana Household Worker Survey strongly suggest that height and health vary by occupation. Our regression results show that after controlling for age, gender and movement out of jobs, the self-employed are the most likely to have at least one day of illness (a health shock) in the past year. However, conditional on having at least one day of illness, the self-employed have the lowest expected number of days ill. On the other hand, evidence that large firm workers have longer illnesses than other workers, perhaps reflecting their better employment circumstances that allow more time off when sick, cautions against the use of days of illness as a measure of health that is unbiased by occupational choice. We also investigate labour market outcomes and find that the number of days ill does not affect the labour supply decision. Controlling for entry into the labour force, however, days of illness does have a significant negative impact on earnings, especially if it exceeds 30 days. Our analysis suggests that changes in health and changes in occupation are strongly correlated; understanding the causal links in this relationship should be the focus of future work.

This article studies poverty among self-employed businesspeople in a rich country, Belgium. Existing research on self-employment income, compared with income of employees, has made clear that self-employed have a higher probability of falling in the lowest income groups and that there is a distinct self-employment effect. Our findings for Belgium show that approximately one quarter of those who are self-employed in their main occupation are living below the poverty line. We also confirm findings reported in the literature that income distribution among self-employed people is very unequal. It appears from our qualitative findings that poverty among self-employed businesspeople is something distinct from other forms of poverty. Several factors can cause self-employed businesspeople to end up in poverty. As a result, poverty is a multifaceted problem. Policy recommendations are formulated to prevent and combat poverty among self-employed businesspeople.

AbstractObjectivePoverty and material hardship have both been linked to negative health outcomes in later life. Yet, limited research investigates their combined associations with health. We examined the mediating role of material hardship in the association between poverty and self‐rated health.MethodsUsing data from the Understanding America Study, we estimated binary and ordered logistic regression models of self‐rated health, including indicators of hardship and income‐to‐poverty ratios for adults aged 50 years or older (N = 2862).ResultsWe found that the association between income poverty and self‐rated health was mediated by indicators of material hardship among those with incomes between two and four times the official poverty threshold.ConclusionInterventions to improve health in later life would benefit from efforts to assess and alleviate hardship, with attention to those in the middle range of the income distribution who have income too high to qualify for needs‐based supports while still being at risk of experiencing hardship.

The self-help groups movement emerged as an important strategy for achieving financial inclusion, contributing to inclusive growth, and generating social capital in order to address larger issues like poverty eradication and women empowerment. SHGs provide micro loans to women member, which helps them to become self-dependent. It is also helped to mobilize savings making them create their status in society and it has helped to slowly eliminate poverty and make women self-dependent. This study highlighted the role of SHGs in poverty eradication and women empowerment. The present study made use of the secondary data from the Planning Commission Reports, NABARD annual reports and State of the Sector Report 2013. The data collected for the research are analyzed with the help of simple statistical techniques such as AGR, CAGR and percentages. Multiple Regression analysis, Paired test and ANOVA test has been used to test the hypotheses. The study shows there was enormous increase in the amount of subsidy given by government to SHGs. With that, the annual repayment of the loan also shows positive trend. Further, the study revealed that SHGs help the deprived section of people to come out from the poverty trap and through that social and economic empowerment.