(Nov. 27) – There’s something besides deep discounts and special sales. This is the beginning of the giving season and, as we mop up from Thanksgiving, a lot of hands will be out. From the Salvation Army volunteers ringing bells at retailers to charitable-gift campaigns stuffed in the mailbox, there’s no shortage of need. And it’s coming from places many of us don’t expect.

(Nov. 27) – Some data scientists say that mining of anonymized mobile phone activity is the best way to track economic conditions in countries with limited national, or any kind of, statistics.

(Nov. 26) – A half-century ago, 40 bishops from around the world gathered in an ancient Roman church and signed a pledge to forsake worldly goods and live like the neediest among their flock. They were in Rome for the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the deliberations that opened the Catholic Church to the modern world. The bishops’ all but forgotten pledge, known as the Pact of the Catacombs, has gained new resonance with Pope Francis’ vision of a church for the poor.

(Nov. 25) – For many food banks, the holiday season is a good time to ramp up the collection of donations. The holidays tend to spur generosity. “When we’re advertising and we say we need 100 turkeys or we need 50 pies or we need so many bags of dressing, people respond,” said Ron Busroe, national secretary for Community Relations and Development at the Salvation Army.

(No. 24) – 24/7 Wall St. reviewed statewide social and economic measures to rank each state’s living conditions. Massachusetts, home to one of the nation’s wealthiest and most highly educated populations, leads the nation. Mississippi, the poorest state in the country, trails the other 49 states.

(Nov. 15) – In 2014, Amer­ica’s edu­ca­tion sys­tem marked an im­port­ant mile­stone. For the first time ever, chil­dren of col­or be­came a ma­jor­ity among K-12 pub­lic school stu­dents na­tion­wide

(Nov. 10) – Marriage is correlated with prosperity in the U.S. So many conservatives promote marriage as a financial elixir. Yet this perspective is scientifically flawed. It also suffers from too narrow a geographical focus on conditions in the U.S.

(Nov. 8) – If countries fail to sustain policies that combat the impacts of climate change while also providing safety nets for the world’s poor, global warming will drive an additional 100 million people into poverty by 2030, a new World Bank report finds.

(Nov. 6) – Hunger is probably the most salient consequence of poverty. This salience has some rationale: Hunger makes food a priority, and poor people spend about half of their income on it. But hunger is, nevertheless, a symptom of poverty, not a problem to be tackled in isolation — the solution to hunger may not have much to do with the supply of food.

(Nov. 3) – Does the U.S. lead the world in childhood poverty? Absolutely not. Bernie Sanders often claims that America has the highest child-poverty rate of any advanced democracy in the world. He uses this fact to justify his call for a European-style social-welfare state. But what if it’s simply not true?