Predatory Welfare

Predatory Welfare: How Finance Capital Profiteers from Social Grants is a powerful, eye-opening account of how social welfare, distributed in the form of cash transfers, shapes inequality in contemporary South Africa. In a narrative style, following individual stories, Erin Torkelson challenges the widely held belief that simply giving money to the poor can solve poverty.

Originally from Arizona, Torkelson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of the Western Cape and holds a doctorate in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. As a scholar and an activist, her work sits at the intersection of political economy, critical development studies, critical race theory, feminist kinship studies, and science & technology studies. She has published academic pieces in World Development, Society and Space, and the Journal of Southern African Studies. Her popular articles have appeared in Counterpunch, Znet, GroundUp, The Daily Maverick, and The Mail and Guardian, and she made a documentary film for The Cutting Edge on SABC1. She works with the Black Sash, Open Secrets, and Institute for Economic Justice on the South African social grant system and has presented her research to the Constitutional Court-appointed Panel of Experts, the National Credit Regulator, the South African Social Security Agency, and the Department of Social Development.