Few social scientists, and even fewer political scientists, have done as much to improve American life as James Q. Wilson, who died last week at age 80.

Has Barack Obama's Democratic party given up on winning the votes of the white working class? Thomas Edsall, the longtime Washington Post reporter now with the Huffington Post, thinks so.

This event has been postponed and will be rescheduled.

For years, it was a well-known joke that Brazil is the country of the future and always will be. Indeed, the notion that Brazil would have higher economic growth and lower unemployment rates than the United States would have been unthinkable...

The welfare reform of the 1990s was an unusual success for American social policy. By requiring more welfare mothers to work, reformers aimed to move them into jobs and reduce welfare rolls. Unexpectedly, reform was accompanied by a greater decline of caseloads--over 60 percent--that had previously been anticipated by research....

Since its inception in 1965, America's federally established official poverty rate (OPR) has been the single most important statistic used by policymakers and concerned citizens to evaluate success or failure in the nation's efforts to alleviate poverty. In his newly released examination of this widely quoted measure, The Poverty of...

First elected in 2002 and reelected by a landslide in 2006, Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva is renowned for expanding Brazil’s antihunger and antipoverty programs. Lula has been no less determined to enhance Brazil’s role as an international leader by pushing for the more prominent role of developing...

Washington lacks the statistical tools to assess--and thus address efficiently--the coming surge in need.

Eberstadt contends that the defects of the current poverty rate are not only severe but irremediable.