” …three things have struck me with particular force: The first is the sheer loneliness of poverty; the fact that poverty pushes people to the psychological and physical margins of society—isolated from friends and relatives, pushed into dilapidated trailer parks, shanties, or ghettoized public housing, removed from banks and stores, transit systems and cultural institutions. The poor live on society’s scraps—a few dollars in government assistance or charity, donated food, thrift store clothes. They can afford neither transport to venture out of their communities, nor simple luxuries such as movies or a cup of coffee with friends in a café, to vary the routines of their daily lives. Embarrassed by their poverty, many told me that they have essentially withdrawn from all but the most necessary, unavoidable social interactions.”