This is the first volume to take seriously the policy implications of the experience of this Peruvian mother. It is an experience shared by people living in poverty in countries as disparate as Norway and Uganda, the UK and Pakistan, South Korea, China and India. It is probably true of people in poverty everywhere.

Certainly, that is the view of Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate, who has had a profound influence on recent global debates about poverty reduction. He argues that shame, specifically ‘the ability to go about without shame’, lies at the ‘irreducible absolutist core in the idea of poverty.’ This link between poverty and shame is important for at least four reasons that are evidenced in this volume and in two companion volumes by the same research team. First, shame hurts. Physiologically shame is recognised by increased pro-inflammatory cytokine activity and cortisol; psychologically it is associated with depression, anxiety and suicidal ideas. To live in shame every day adds to the pain of poverty.

Second, shame, while internally felt, is externally imposed by those of us who are not poor: the ‘they’ referred to by the Peruvian mother cited above. We impose shame whenever we speak of ‘the poor’ as an undifferentiated group; when we refer glibly to people in poverty as scroungers, lazy or good for nothing; when we justify our relative affluence in terms of our ability, hard work and motivation; or when we avert our gaze by not, for example, acknowledging a person begging in the street.

Third, social psychology reveals that shame is the most debilitating of the emotions, causing people to retreat socially, to lose faith in themselves and to find their sense of agency eroded. While we might naively wish to encourage people in poverty to help themselves by shaming them, we are, in fact, more likely to have the opposite effect. Shame undermines people's ability to help themselves.

Finally, and for similar reasons, policies that stigmatise and are shaming are likely to be ineffective. They demoralise and reduce individual agency.