Little is known about the ways in which the elites perceive the poor, especially in those
societies where poverty is most prevalent. The poor are dependent on the elites, but the
elites are also affected by the poor: their presence creates negative external effects in the
lives of the elites (threats such as crime, contagion, pollution, vagrancy and rebellion) but
they also represent opportunities for the established strata (as potential workers, soldiers
and, more recently, as consumers and voters). Members of the elites cannot ward off these …

In the course of the last century, fully equipped welfare states emerged throughout western
Europe and in North America, but with a few exceptions similar developments did not take
place elsewhere, in Asia, Latin America or Africa. This is, of course, first of all a consequence
of the lower levels of per capita income in those countries. But if the societies of the
'South'and of the 'East'were compared to those in the 'West'(or the North), not today but, say,
fifty or a hundred years ago, many have now achieved levels of industrialization, of …