Though it has academics in the title, our new journal isn’t especially academic. Its main purpose is practical: to help reduce poverty around the world. Doing so is often seen as technical work for experts in disciplines like engineering, agriculture, pharmacology and economics. But this task also has a large moral and political component. Poor people typically have little political influence and social visibility. And if the rest of us care little about poverty eradication, then not much effort by those experts will be devoted to it. After presenting the new journal’s mission, the bulk of this paper introduces poverty as a subject of constructive academic attention. It does so under five main headings: definition, description, explanation, moral assessment and eradication. At the end, the other essays in this inaugural issue are briefly presented.