Mark Robert Rank is a sociologist and associate professor in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, Saint Louis.

Rank analyzes the several ways of interpreting poverty and the need for welfare, and provides an account of his research on what poor people actually do to make ends meet and how they think about it... Perhaps most poignant is that many of the people Rank spoke with work hard only to lose ground, yet maintain a strong belief in upward mobility and the American dream. New York Times After ten years of intensive study of public welfare programs and welfare recipients, Mark Robert Rank has written a thoughtful book about poor people and their lives... Rank argues that we have got it just about backward again. It turns out, he says, that a lot of assumptions about welfare are simply wrong. Chicago Tribune