Getting into poverty research

I am trying to figure out things without having to resort to a blog lately but I think it will be helpful to put this down!! The thing that has been interesting me - I began this research thinking it was entirely open-ended "scope out the research" my professor suggested "look at it philosopically!" Well between the two of those it could take me forever! but for me, what I am interested in is the human dimensions - I guess justice and injustice and all that stuff. And I keep thinking my role is to highlight these things - to draw out what is hidden - not necessarily the brilliant things which are hidden, but the blind spots - the family skeletons, you know - those things. I'm learning. I was all on board last year - and this year had a profound change - skeptical, cynical, journalistic investigative? I don't know - critical? related to Foucault, to my sorrow studies, to my experiences in India. Actually this is NOT really that new - I was critical of gender things a while back and of individuals, but I was more confident about democratic systems than I am this year - perhaps that is the difference.
But now - to focus on "non-ideological" - on "neutral" territory was initially difficult for me to conceptualize in terms of social justice.... now it is very hard for me to abstract "economics" from "political". But I have now - not to turn this off, but to dispose myself differently - not that these projects are valueless, but that I have to extend my energies into thinking something else can be useful... Like... what if we established Henry George's land tax? I used to be brightly enthusiastic about Basic Income last year, but now this year I find even Sachs' to be naive just for being optimistic. On the one hand I don't want to folow Sr. Nirmala and say "The poor will always be with us" while on the other hand, I don't think that they will not be until human beings change. But this is where my professor helped, too, he said that George thinks wealth creation and cycles and inequailty creation (inequality and growth is not the same as poverty and growth - and yet how can you say industriailztaion without noting the other things that are going on...?) anyway - get into this kind of a framework. To work on a solution doesn't mean that I need to give up my critical - "ideological" standpoints insofar as thinking the most powerful persons only work for their own interest and that justice would have to coincide with interest in order for it to happen (of course there are countless examples in history of "underdogs" rising up - but I don't know... go a little further..) Anyway, I needn't become what seems to me at this point to be "naive" in order to work on something and not be what others might feel to be "ideological" or "non-neutral". I suspect my youth has someothing to do with it as does my experience... but i wonder - is it useful to bracket things? If we really will find an astonishingly simple way to redistribute, do the wealthiest people really want to go on it? Even before you get to the wealthy there are a host of other factors that interfere with reasonable solutions - but the only concerted one would be intentional. anyway... maybe I hsould work on my Aristotle for a bit. Both my classes have not been functioning well since the poverty thing! but now I know more what I am supposed to do - to find four or five main normative approaches that are on the pulse - at the cusp, etc.