Review: Breaking the Poverty Cycle <i>The Human Basis for Sustainable Development</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BREAKING THE POVERTY CYCLE The Human Basis for Sustainable Development Susan Pick and Jenna Sirkin New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 336pp. $49.95 cloth ISBN 978-0-19-538316-4Poverty is one of most loaded concepts in social sciences. Scholars have tried to define and measure it in many ways, most of which faU short of problem's multifaceted reality. Susan Pick and Jenna Sirkin's Breaking Poverty Cycle is a welcome addition to this debate. The book focuses on efforts of Mexican Institute of Family and Population Research, whose foundation in 1984 was inspired by Robert Hartman's theories on human values, Martin Fishbein's work on psychosocial development, and Amartya Sen's capability approach. In her preface, Pick offers a snapshot of problems that underlie persistent poverty in Mexico. In a series of interviews with women from one of Mexico City's poorest shantytowns, Pick discovered a lack of responsibility. The women thought that they did not and could not control circumstances of their lives, a syndrome that is widespread in Mexican society among both individuals and institutions.Drawing on Sen's capability approach to development, authors examine framework for enabling empowerment, which aims to promote inner responsibility by emphasizing personal and intrinsic empowerment. The framework challenges prevailing Mexican norms of fatalism, sexism, and paternalism by promoting an agency culture (44). It tries to encourage people to move beyond these social barriers to realize their fuU potential. Pick and Sirkin endeavour to show how enabling individuals to enhance their capabilities, and thus their potential, can have an effective and sustainable impact in combating poverty (xiii). Without this agentoriented view of development through expanding choice and freedoms, they argue, development is limited because individuals find it difficult to participate in societies in which they live (10).The framework laudably aims to reorient governmental and civU society programs toward encouraging personal and intrinsic empowerment, but this approach cannot work everywhere. It is unclear, for instance, how it might apply to authoritarian regimes or hyper-patriarchal societies. Pick and Sirkin argue that the ideal conditions for development occur when governments and institutions create opportunities rather than exercise their power only to establish constraints or facilitate assistance-based aid (168). But they pay less attention than they should to ways in which broader societal context can constrain opportunities for individuals to empower themselves. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".