It is small, personal and utterly unconcerned with great social problems.
"You are in the midst of all these great social problems, and you have to put that in the mix".
Still, at 65, he is recognized, whatever his literary irascibility, for a capacity to bring to the great social problems of the day a kind of solid good sense, the way his mentor Alexis de Tocqueville did a century ago.
Responding to the newspaper's desire for "trustworthy information" on the great social problems of the day, Mayhew prepared three volumes that were published in 1851; the fourth volume, The Criminal Prisons of London, was written in collaboration with John Binny and did not appear until 1862.
This economic starvation of our nonprofits is why he believes we are not moving the needle on great social problems.
According to Seltzer, one view they shared was that "the greatest social problem of our time was over-population.
Of course, male-on-female violence is the greater social problem, but the fact that The Killer Inside Me has attracted so much gender-based criticism is interesting.
Of late, an appealing fiction that aids and abets our amnesia about race in America has taken hold among some progressives: on this view, our greatest social problem today is inequality of wealth and income, and so admissions to colleges and universities should take this as their focus.
The pilot, in Newham, east London, will test the work of economist, government adviser and "guru of happiness" Lord [Richard] Layard, who claims that mental illness has taken over from unemployment as today's greatest social problem, costing £17bn a year.
They have greater social problems.
