However, the greatest cost of job interviews is not the wasted time of the interviewer, it is the fact that they are poor at identifying how effective applicants will be if they are hired, and they can easily lead to lawsuits.

FORBES: Job Interviews: Users Beware

Do high schools lower standards, as Jackson Toby avers, reasoning that high standards are not needed since almost anyone can go to college, no matter how poor financially or academically they are?

FORBES: For Whom the Pell Tolls

Some find it hard to cope with the emphasis on drumming up jobs and with the discretion they are given over how hard to chivvy the poor to work.

ECONOMIST: Where Wisconsin goes, can the world follow?

The Department for International Development (DfID) is successfully getting money to poor people, but needs to focus more on how cost-effectively they are delivered.

BBC: Viewing guide: The pick of the week ahead in Parliament

These people are extremely poor, so you have to ask how they can afford to travel large distances, camp, obtain weapons and feed themselves for weeks at a time.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Zeroing in on Peru

Medicaid, America's main health-care scheme for the poor, does not cover childless adults in most states, no matter how destitute they are.

ECONOMIST: Food stamps

And what societies believe about how fluid they are matters almost as much as the reality: if America's poor ever start to believe they will never get rich, the place will be heading for trouble.

ECONOMIST: Class

Labour MP Vernon Coaker, who is his party's spokesman on Northern Ireland, said he supported reform but had concerns about how the government's changes would impact on people "whose only problem is that they are poor".

BBC: Northern Ireland MPs express benefits concern