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's painter Hector Poleo, born in 1918. Tough, hard-working, laconic, the Andino is a product of his bleak moun- tain habitat, which figures prominently in Venezuelan history, first as the road to the mythical kingdom of Eldorado, later as the country's chief coffee-growing region and home to Venezuela's caudillos (strong men).
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Venezuela stands out among its Latin American neighbors. On a continent beset by dictatorships and periodic coups, Venezuela boasts more...

Gucci, Pierre Cardin, and Yves Saint Laurent. The supermarkets boast, among other items, Kraft mayonesa, Cheez Whip pimentdn, and Colgate dental crema. Affluent Venezuelans have also taken a liking to imported Scotch. In 1980, they pur- chased 1.8 million cases of the whiskey, making them the world's Number One per capita consumers. At Christmas, fir trees are flown in from Canada. Mercedes Benz sedans are a fa- miliar sight on downtown streets.
Not surprisingly, the cost of living in Caracas has...

Jacob Riis of the courtyard at 22 Buxter Street, Manhattan, about 1890. The poor in the slums, Riis wrote, "are the victims, not the masters, of their environment; and it is a bad master."
No one disputes that poverty exists in America. But how serious is the problem? Who are the poor? Why are they poor? Are there more poor people than there used to be? On such questions there is little agreement. Budget director David Stockman contends that failure to count the value of noncash benefits...

a combination of factors, including industrialization, population growth, and the blossoming of social science, Western governments, led Great Britain, began looking at poverty afresh and experimenting with new strategies for ameliorating the condi- tion of the poor.
As Gertrude Himmelfarb points out in The Idea of Poverty (Knopf, 1983), the half centuries on either side of 1800 were times of ferment in social theory. In the preindustrial England of 1750, poet Thomas Gray could speak of the "short...