Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Luxuries once reserved for the wealthy are now middle class mainstays, as households remodel their kitchens, tool around town in their spanking new sport utility vehicles, and generally live the good life. It describes the experience of the privileged minority that is doing spectacularly well. Shifting Fortunes completes the picture. All we need to worry about is the absolute level of material well-being.
Economic growth is the solution, they say, to the problems of poverty and low incomes.
There are two flaws to this popular view. First, growth no longer has the magical quality of benefiting everyone in recent years, growth has actually been associated with the immiseration of a whole group of workers. And second, the idea that the distribution of income is irrelevant is not supported by the scholarly evidence. Health, well-being and satisfaction appear to be heavily influenced by the ways in which economic resources, prestige and social position are distributed. The reasons may not turn out to be so very complicated.