thesis on the poor

Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty

Clare Callahan is assistant lecturer at Sacred Heart University, where she teaches courses in poverty and literature and the health humanities. She is currently working on her first book project, “Abandoned Subjects.” Her writing on women and poverty in modernist American literature has been published in Twentieth Century Literature .

Joseph Entin is professor of English and American studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is coeditor of three books and the author of Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (2007) and Living Labor: Fiction, Film, and Precarious Work , which is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press in its Class: Culture series.

Irvin Hunt is associate professor of English and African American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (2022). His writing on class and social movements in the Black radical tradition has been published in American Literary History, Public Books, American Quarterly , and in the collection African American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 (2022).

Kinohi Nishikawa is associate professor of English and African American studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground (2018). His writing on class and gender politics in African American print culture has been published in American Literary History , the Edinburgh History of Reading , and in the collection Are You Entertained? Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century (2020).

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Clare Callahan , Joseph Entin , Irvin Hunt , Kinohi Nishikawa; Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty. American Literature 1 September 2022; 94 (3): 383–397. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10084470

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Public rhetoric tends to present poverty as a static condition, often a condition of abject and total deprivation, rather than recognize it as an ongoing act of dispossession. Yet the word poverty itself has the potential to open up quite different connotations. Based on a somewhat uncommon etymology, poverty derives from the Old French poeste , which means power, and poeste gives form to in poustie , which means possibility. 1 As possibility, poverty is a dilemma for governance and, likewise, for the way poverty studies often treats the poor: as “a discrete and singular category,” as apprehensible and governable (Goldstein 2018 : 83). This special issue is a call to reflect on interpretive approaches: to consider how the very attempt to govern people betrays the way poverty poses a problem not only for governance but also, by exuberant extension, for representation itself. We say exuberant , productively overflowing, to mark how literature gives us the elasticity to think poverty beyond the disciplinary walls that segregate thought around it and beyond the representational need to make the poor, and even impoverishment, apprehensible. We have put together this special issue because we believe literature can renovate the word poverty in ways that illuminate conditions it has been wielded to hide, as well as the new coalitions and forms of relationality poverty makes possible. Across two centuries, literature has unsettled the term poverty , and we need this disruption now more than ever. The essays in this special issue show that literature uniquely exceeds the terms of poverty’s representation. It alights our attention on our manner of attending, beyond attempts to reduce, resolve, or otherwise impoverish our understanding of these terms.

• The Pervasiveness of Poverty

In December 2017, Australian professor Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, arrived in Los Angeles for a two-week tour of the United States to investigate the contours of economic suffering in the world’s wealthiest nation. Accompanied by a reporter and photographer from the London-based newspaper The Guardian (but not, notably, a representative from the New York Times ), Alston traveled from California to Alabama; Washington, DC; West Virginia; and Puerto Rico. 2 He found, The Guardian reported, “a land of extreme inequality,” and his conclusions were blunt: poverty in the United States is pervasive; “contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound” (Pilkington 2017 ). Drawing on statistics provided by the US Census Bureau, Alston reported that, as of 2016, 41 million Americans, almost 13 percent of the population, lived in poverty. Forty percent of those lived in “deep” poverty, with incomes less than 50 percent of the official poverty threshold. In addition, he noted, the United States had the highest infant mortality rate in the so-called developed world; 18 percent of American children lived in poverty, comprising over 30 percent of the nation’s poor (Alston 2017a ).

Alston presented economic hardship and deprivation in the United States as a striking paradox: expansive poverty amid America’s affluence and its foundational dedication to equality and opportunity. In the report on his findings, Alston ( 2017b ) noted that, during his tour, “American exceptionalism was a constant theme in my conversations. But instead of realizing its founders’ admirable commitments, today’s United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights.” This notion, that American poverty is a paradox of plenty, is a venerable, common framing. Noted poverty scholar Mark Robert Rank ( 2011 : 16) likewise describes poverty as “a fundamental paradox: in America, the wealthiest country on earth, one also finds the highest rates of poverty in the developed world.” Challenging the deeply embedded notion that poverty is a product of individual faults or pathologies—a refusal to work hard, a lack of adequate skills, a psychology of dependency—Rank contends that “American poverty is largely the result of failings at the economic and political levels.” While contesting the idea that poverty constitutes an individual rather than an institutional problem is laudable, the assertion that poverty is a structural “failing” nevertheless suggests that economic deprivation is a contradiction rather than a constitutive element, a bug and not a design feature. Such framing obscures the possibility that poverty is endemic to US capitalist society—a predictable, integral, even necessary, outcome of the way America’s profoundly racialized economy is structured.

Despite the undeniable statistical evidence for economic privation and suffering in the United States, poverty continues to be “poorly understood” and too-little discussed, especially in the humanities and certainly in literary studies (Rank, Eppard, and Bullock 2021 ). Poverty presents not only a policy problem but also a conceptual problem of seeing and representation; if and how poverty can be addressed as a collective social and political concern depends on how it is depicted and understood. Historian Alice O’Connor ( 2001 ) contends that the institutionalized study of poverty, which she calls “poverty knowledge,” has privileged the expertise of professional researchers and academics while largely excluding poor people themselves as sources of insight. In the twentieth century, poverty emerged as an object of intense public interest and debate in key moments: the Progressive era, when muckrakers and reformers set out to uncover and remedy the contradictions roiling an emerging industrial modernity; the 1930s, when writers, artists, and documentarians, many employed by the US government, surveyed economic hardship across the country and forged support for New Deal policies; and the 1960s, when the federal government launched a “war” on poverty. But the public’s attention to poverty has waned over the past fifty years, under neoliberalism. In the 1980s and 1990s, the war on poverty became a de facto war on the poor, as liberals and conservatives alike breathed new life into long-standing ideas about the “unworthy” poor to focus policy on individual pathology and dependency, infamously personified in President Ronald Reagan’s spurious image of the “welfare queen.” Mobilizing the “culture of poverty” thesis to blame the poor—especially poor people of color—for the poverty they faced, this line of thinking was weaponized to justify the 1996 passage, under President Bill Clinton, of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which aimed to “end welfare as we know it.” In the ensuing neoliberal era, US social policy, under the guise of promoting “hard work” and “healthy marriages,” has functioned effectively to punish, humiliate, and control the poor, especially those who are Black, Latinx, and Indigenous. 3

Propped up by corporate and academic interests, the neoliberal consensus on economic inequality has shown significant cracks since the turn of the century. Over the last decade in particular, economic inequality and extreme wealth have emerged as prominent topics of American political and public discourse, from Occupy Wall Street and its framing of the 1 percent versus the 99 percent; to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, which openly criticized corporate greed and the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires; to the swelling membership of the Democratic Socialists of America. All of these developments raised spiking economic disparity to national prominence. Yet such attention to the growing inequality of our society seems to go hand in hand with relative silence on poverty, whether from voices of the poor or voices for the poor. 4 We may be living in a second Gilded Age, but it seems that our capacity for critique has not kept up with the intensified, and ubiquitous, realities of economic hardship in the United States. The fact that images of dependency, poor choices, and individual and communal pathology continue to represent the most readily available ways to understand poverty suggests that our contemporary political and media cultures are suffering a poverty of the imagination.

The same might be said of our literary culture. In a 2009   Inside Higher Ed op-ed, Keith Gandal predicted that the economic crisis would lead to literary studies finally putting “poverty near the top of the agenda and the center of the field.” More than a decade later, poverty remains stubbornly marginal to literary studies. While poverty constitutes an enduring topic of research in the social sciences, with numerous efforts to correct for the biases embedded in the shockingly durable “culture of poverty” thesis devised originally by Columbia University–trained anthropologist Oscar Lewis in the late 1950s, 5 literary studies and the humanities more broadly have had little to say about it. To be sure, there is a growing, and important, focus in criticism and theory on wealth inequality, precarity, dispossession, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and other forms of domination and subordination. Yet poverty is not reducible to the dynamics named by these keywords, even as it is connected to them. There is a lacuna in humanistic inquiry around not so much the conditions that create poverty as the very recognition of impoverishment as such.

This special issue of American Literature addresses that blind spot by asking what literary culture distinctively has to offer an understanding of poverty in the United States. What theories and methods of reading does literature about poverty demand? What language for talking about poverty does literature provide? In turn, what kinds of demands and pressures do efforts to address poverty, dispossession, and extreme economic inequality place on literary form and language? If the social sciences have claimed this area of inquiry for decades, what can literary studies do to help complicate and challenge dominant forms of poverty knowledge? Might literature offer a poverty knowledge of its own?

In addressing these questions, we build on critical work that has attended to the vexing dilemmas of literary and cultural representation raised by poverty as a category of analysis. Gavin Jones’s American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (2007) suggests that poverty has generated “a sophisticated literary strain” (Jones 2007 : xv) that has not been adequately examined because the focus in literary studies “on oppressed subject positions has tended to evade the problems of economic inequality by centering social marginalization on the cultural identity of the marginalized” (7). Gandal, author of The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum ( 1997 ) and Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film ( 2007 ), and Walter Benn Michaels, author of The Trouble with Diversity ( 2007 ), agree with Jones that the problem of economic privation in US literature has been subsumed by the language of identity. Elsewhere, Michael Denning ( 2007 ; 2010 ) argues for reassessing the categories of labor and class to account for global poverty, precarity, and unemployment. This special issue contributes to these reassessments. Yet rather than juxtapose identity and economics, marginalization and class, subjectivity and structural power, we aim to explore the literary interplay of these categories.

As an economic and social condition, poverty is often perceived as a static state of lack, exclusion, and invisibility rather than, more actively, as a process, a relation, and a matter of “predatory inclusion” or “organized abandonment” (Taylor 2019 ; Gilmore 2015 ). As a form of structured economic deprivation, poverty is always contextual, defined by and against specific social and national norms and expectations; the poor are always conceived against the well-to-do, although individuals often move across those economic categories over time. (In fact, Rank [2011: 18] and his colleagues have found that most Americans will spend at least one year below the poverty line during the course of their lives.) Where to draw the “poverty line” is a subject of debate and struggle. In this special issue, we are concerned with poverty not only as a material condition but also as an object and source of knowledge and art; poverty presents an epistemological and representational problem as well as an economic and social one. To be sure, a great deal of American writing has tended to reinforce the abject incapacity of the poor and the seemingly intractable boundary between the poor and well off. By contrast, this special issue turns primarily to the work of writers who expose the damaging incapacity of those very literary frameworks, suggesting both the failures of top-down efforts to render the poor legible and the possibilities that literature can render poverty otherwise, beyond the conventional liberal categories and conceptualizing lenses that have come to dominate representations of poverty in the United States.

• Reading Poverty Otherwise

Several critics have turned to literature as a wellspring for thinking through such alternatives. Asking, after Jones’s American Hungers , why scholarship in the United States has so far failed to produce “a theoretical discourse that describes the contemporary experience of poverty,” Gayle Salamon ( 2010 : 176) calls for a theory that would enable thinking about the lives of the poor in terms of “their conditions of possibility otherwise,” suggesting that literary scholars are in a position to produce such a theory. The relentless present that seems to organize the experience of poverty and beyond which Salamon calls on literary theory to think is, we suggest, not only a temporal but also an ontological problem, one that has often encouraged the bare life conception of poverty that this special issue seeks to contest. 6

In an effort to understand poverty in terms of power and potentiality, Patrick Greaney takes up this ontological problem by turning to literature. “The thematic representation of the poor,” Greaney ( 2007 : xv–xvi) writes, “as an actual individual or group characterized by socioeconomic misery alternates with the non-representative moments in which literary language . . . reduces itself to the potential for representation.” Greaney turns to literary language, then, precisely because it does not seek to capture and negate the agential aspects of poverty that seem otherwise to evade representation. “Literary language,” he continues, “acknowledges in moments when it becomes poor that poverty creates not an identity but a capacity, even if it appears,” through the lens of deprivation, “as an incapacity.” In other words, for Greaney, literature, in its juxtaposition of theme and form, understands the ontological contingency of poverty as both less and more than the possessive individualism of the neoliberal subject. This special issue calls for literary scholars to take up the work of navigating this persistent conflict between the ongoing ontological dispossession that denies the poor the right to exist—even as they perform productive social and material labor that is critical to society and the economy—and the ongoing emotional, psychological, and physical labor by impoverished people of ontological repossession in the form of covert capacities and potentiality. By ontological repossession , we mean the ways in which poor people are continually reclaiming their status as social and human subjects despite sociopolitical systems that would deny them such status.

Greaney’s reading calls to mind the writer Dorothy Allison’s ( 1992 ) observation, in the context of her coming out as a lesbian when she was a young girl in a poor and working-class churchgoing community, that being an “endangerment to society . . . gives you a lot of power.” Along these lines, this special issue suggests that the literature of poverty does not merely represent poverty but in effect offers a theory of reading poverty otherwise—a theory that might help us to recognize the forms of social, epistemological, and even material power the poor possess despite their active dispossession. The United States has an especially rich tradition of literature by and about the poor, from its inception and extending into our contemporary moment. 7 Contemporary texts that surpass the paradigm of representation as a mode of objectification, pathologization, or surveillance, or of imagining a futurity for the poor only by way of uplift, include fiction by Allison, Gloria Naylor, Jesmyn Ward, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Junot Díaz, and Tommy Orange, as well as poetry by Rafael Campo and C. D. Wright, to name only a few. Analyses of these authors’ writing has focused primarily on issues of race and gender and only secondarily on poverty. This trend has had the perhaps inadvertent effect of treating poverty as a socioeconomic condition or circumstance in which more organic forms of identity are grounded. In such readings, poverty becomes background rather than an active subject, process, or relation.

Together with the contributors to this special issue, we want to ask how an academic conversation around such a set of texts might be transformed if the question of poverty became a primary critical framework through which they were read. One challenge this possibility poses is that, while writers and scholars have sought to recuperate minoritized racial and gender identities through affirmative and celebratory narratives, a similarly recuperative approach to understanding poverty seems to run a greater risk of romanticizing material deprivation; at the same time, lamenting these material realities of poverty risks framing the poor as abject. 8 Extending poverty studies to include literary studies, or vice versa, offers the opportunity to reflect on how the literary as a unique mode of representation can elucidate the ways in which scarcity is manufactured in order to disinherit targeted populations, while also valuing the alternative epistemologies, forms of sociality, and aesthetic and cultural practices that communities produce in response to disinheritance.

Literature and literary studies can, moreover, shape an understanding of poverty by theorizing a mode of address that can resist forms of representation that have historically enabled, for example, criminalization of the means of survival among the poor; at the same time, literature can navigate the critical representational structures through which the poor demand resources necessary for more durable, less provisional modes of living. That the literary as a form of representation grapples with its own conditions of possibility situates it as having a privileged relationship to modes of being, like poverty, that have historically and methodologically posed a problem of representation. Consider, for instance, the scene from Jacob A. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) in which the early flash technology of Riis’s camera causes him to set fire to one of the tenement buildings he’s touring and attempting to document. How the Other Half Lives depicts a city riven between genteel society and the tenements. Riis’s ( 1997 : 38) voyeuristic tour through the tenements’ “dark bedrooms” frequently followed the police, who at times burst into apartments and rooming houses at night to expose the dangers lurking within. In the cited scene, Riis acknowledges that “once, in taking a flash-light picture of a group of blind beggars . . . I managed to set fire to the house” (30). Riis’s incendiary mode of expression here betrays the violence that underlies certain forms of representation: in attempting to bring to light—to expose and enclose—the dark spaces of the tenements, he nearly burns one down. Only the thickness of dirt on the walls, a violation of standards of hygiene, keeps it from burning (30). What Riis ultimately illuminates, then, is the capacity of impoverished spaces themselves to interfere in their negation. In this way, literary language, as a reflexive form that mediates what escapes or resists representation, speaks to the mechanics of this interference. This scene acts as a reminder that poverty , in its etymological relation to aporia , suggests both a without and also a kind of exuberance, what we have evoked here as the “sociality” and “potentiality” and what might also be called the threatening alterity or “collective living otherwise” of the poor (Goldstein 2021 : 117). If certain literary, photographic, and journalistic texts and traditions have variously sought to enclose the poor through exposure, then the work of literary criticism in poverty studies today is twofold: to identify contemporary rhetorical practices of such enclosure and to elaborate narrative countermovements and alternative vocabularies.

• Beats per Minute

In many respects, centering poverty in literary studies is work that remains to be done. We consider this introduction, as well as the essays assembled here, a collective step toward that work. In taking that step, we believe a broad range of criticism may begin to find common ground where it is otherwise siloed into disciplinary knowledge formations. Literary poverty studies might bring together scholarship on financialization and debt; settler colonialism and dispossession; racial capitalism and the carceral state; foreclosure and homelessness; class and proletarianism; and the psychic lives of precarity. It also has the potential to bridge period studies on the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the War on Poverty era, and our present moment. But in order to do these things, critics must be willing to name, address, and engage poverty in literary and cultural representation, even and especially when it refuses to identify itself as such. For why should it not be the case that, given the trajectory of poverty discourse over the past century, literature would struggle to represent an alternately pathologized and obscured life experience? As critics delve into the literary and historical archives of forgotten or buried experience, perhaps we ought to train our senses on a population whose very existence challenges the norms by which we assign value to social and political identities.

As we worked on this project, we considered how we might convene a special issue in which much of the editorial work involves bringing that field into critical discourse. Our method of curating the articles and review essays that appear here identifies poverty as a critical keyword in literary studies. This process of identification is open-ended, carried out with contributors as they presented and revised their work. The articles represent original research across two centuries of American literary history, drawing on sundry subfields. Likewise, the review essays reflect on recent monographs that address questions of poverty and dispossession in literature and criticism even if not all are explicitly about those topics. In bringing these pieces together, neither we nor the authors proceeded from a predetermined set of disciplinary or even interdisciplinary moves. The task was to think together about what it means to center poverty in literary studies at all. A welcome result of that work is five articles that do much to expand the critical imagination. In their own ways, they approach poverty not only as a socioeconomic condition but also as a mode of experience that exceeds racialized and capitalist taxonomies.

Jean Franzino’s “Tales Told by Empty Sleeves: Disability, Mendicancy, and Civil War Life Writing” begins the issue. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials, from street-corner ephemera to federal pension files, Franzino analyzes the textual forms and reception contexts of printed media sold by disabled Civil War veterans for their economic support. These so-called mendicant texts, whose first-person literary accounts lent support to face-to-face financial transactions, highlight traits of authenticity, individuality, and agency in a process Franzino theorizes as a scene of “prosthetic narrative.” Not coincidentally, such traits lie at the heart of how scholars value life writing as both validating and informing the critical orientation of disability studies and poverty studies alike. Yet the powerful connection between material impoverishment and literary creation in mendicant texts means that these traits cannot be taken at face value: some disabled people had to invent the truth they knew people wanted to hear. Thus mendicant texts are, in Franzino’s terms, canny performances of need to a public that risks becoming indifferent to disabled veterans’ plight. In a remarkable critical turn, she contends that approaching mendicant texts precisely for their fictionality and serial or generic authorship allows us to apprehend the actual deprivation from which these people suffered. Moving beyond the need to find “proof” of intersectional oppression, Franzino suggests that mendicant performativity outlines the social dynamics that produce disabled, impoverished subjects in the first instance.

In her article, “Picturing Poverty in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Lori Merish similarly enlists the archive; here, she uses the photographic archive of the same era in order to trace a correspondence between the emerging conception of poverty as a social problem, rather than as an inevitable condition, and the emergence of the modern conception of childhood as a state of dependency. Tracing this correspondence in philanthropic photographic images of poor children, Merish shows that the modern appreciation for childhood innocence surfaced simultaneously and dovetails with the perceived innocence, which is to say, the representational authority, of the photographic medium. In this way, philanthropic photography of poor children in the mid-nineteenth century seeks to void what we have already described here as the threatening alterity of the poor. Merish, considering the work of pioneering urban reformer Samuel B. Halliday and his collaborator, the photographer Richard A. Lewis, before she turns to an examination of “the literary afterlife” of Halliday’s images in Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), argues that mid-nineteenth-century visual and literary imagery of poverty configured the poor as morally legible by picturing their deprivation; in this sense, she advances Franzino’s reading, with regard to Civil War writing, of the fraught deprivation narratives of mendicant texts. “Picturing Poverty” thus also contributes to this special issue’s taking issue with historical and ongoing efforts to render the poor and poverty itself apprehensible through narratives of incapacity and privation. Merish builds on our critique not only in showing how philanthropic photographs of poor children act as a form of capture but also by further arguing that this body of photography and the literature it haunts, as seen in Alger, signifies a willingness on the part of the subject to be captured, to be made visible, a willingness that renders its subject worthy of philanthropic resources.

In “‘Ain’t Any Chance to Rise in the Paper Business’: Poverty, Race, and Horatio Alger’s Newsboy Novels,” Emily Gowen picks up where Merish left off, with a resonant study of what, she argues, is literature’s historical dependence on—rather than transcendence of—a mass print culture supported by the economic exploitation of another group of urban minors: newsboys. Like Merish, Gowen contends that Alger valorizes the impoverished adolescent who surrenders to surveillance, a willing capitulation that Alger associates with Anglo-Saxon whiteness. But in her readings of Ragged Dick and Rough and Ready (1869), Gowen takes a different tack, seeing in these novels a challenge to the nineteenth-century notion that cultural literacy could be a source of upward mobility for the newsboy. She thus interrogates and departs from the dominant reading of Alger as an apologist for philanthropic paternalism. Alger’s imagining of “a workable path up and out of poverty” through self-making, Gowen claims, actually functions to expose the impossibility of any class or individual transcending social and economic forces. In this way, Gowen’s reading of Alger’s novels treats literature as a reflexive mode capable of autocriticism in its laying bare the bankruptcy of the liberal notions of progress and the self on which literary value has historically been predicated. In this treatment of literature, Gowen does the work for which this special issue calls, that of identifying rhetorical practices of enclosure within a set of texts and recognizing narrative countermovements within the same set of texts.

Such reflexivity is expertly on display in Cody C. St. Clair’s “The Scene of Eviction: Reification and Resistance in Depression-Era Narratives of Dispossession.” St. Clair locates the problems of housing and homelessness at the center of modernism during the 1930s. Against the backdrop of newspaper reports on proliferating evictions (such reportage was a genre growing popular by the day with its pathologization of the poor), St. Clair compares eviction scenes in H. T. Tsiang’s The Hanging on Union Square (1935) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), with passing but perceptive treatment of works by Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, and others. This comparison produces both a material and aesthetic intersectionality: according to St. Clair, Tsiang uses a “flat” Cubist aesthetic, Ellison a “thick” collagist one, and together these horizontal and vertical approaches reflect the entanglements of racial and class mechanisms. St. Clair ultimately shows how these authors exploit the internal contradictions of dispossession. Forms of reification, St. Clair argues, are both marks of structural violence and means for being otherwise, for practicing alternative and potentiating ways of relating to housing and of building coalitions.

Continuing this vein of transfiguration, Crystal S. Rudds explores the manner in which literary representations bring to light individual and collective capacities that are typically rendered invisible by dominant discourses of urban poverty as a form of pathological failure. Rudds’s essay, “On Perspective and Value: Black Urbanism, Black Interiors, and Public Housing Fiction,” examines literary representations of one of the most recognizable, highly charged, and racialized spaces of poverty in US society—public housing, which prevailing depictions tend to render as a realm of abject Blackness, crime, and human incapacity that is effectively beyond repair or redemption. To exceed these reifying frames, Rudds contends, is a matter of both literary history and literary critical method; it requires knowing not only where to look—in this case, Frank London Brown’s novel Trumbull Park (1959) and Jasmon Drain’s short story collection Stateway’s Garden (2020), both part of a larger tradition of public housing fiction—but also how to read, in this instance, phenomenologically, through the grounded, subjective perspectives of public housing residents themselves, rather than through an exterior perspective that sees “the ghetto” as a symbol of material and cultural impoverishment. Reading public housing fiction phenomenologically, Rudds contends, makes visible what Elizabeth Alexander calls “the Black interior,” interior spaces of relation and sociality that lie beyond, and implicitly refuse and refute, the often condescending or castigating disciplinary gaze of the social and behavioral sciences. Thus, writing the social life of physical spaces—apartments, hallways, kitchens, and bedrooms—produces “a countercultural value system that speaks back to outsider rhetorical claims.” Public housing fiction offers an encounter with and an understanding of poverty, but it does so through the place- and value-making practices, relations, and struggles of residents rather than the pity, contempt, or fear of external commentators.

Together, these essays stage what is at stake in how literature understands poverty, elucidating not only the problem of poverty but also, and especially, the problem of how we see it. To see poverty differently, they might conclude, is not only a matter of what we see. It is a matter of reflecting on how we see. This work of reflection brings us to the art that graces this issue’s cover: Kevin Lane’s “Beats per Minute.” Lane’s painting mimics a mirror. It is an abstraction sensitively grounded in the material conditions of poverty, which have everything to do with the conditions of perspective. His inkblot technique, a paper fold (hold) that becomes a kaleidoscope, brings looking into crisis: color under duress should not be able to do that. The sheer visual force of it, its exuberance, its use of brown that fades with surprise into purple, pink, yellow, and green, all figured as a heart—to enter these pages this way is to disrupt all of poverty’s knee-jerk associations: darkness, deprivation, and so on. It is to look at vibrant forms of life and living hidden behind structures of confinement. We see wings that are more than wings, hence a heart that is more than a heart, more than what a body bears behind a cage. With Lane, as with everyone else in this volume, we mean not only to look again. We mean to look differently.

Oxford English Dictionary , “Poverty,” https://www-oed-com.sacredheart.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/149126?redirectedFrom=poverty#eid (accessed April 14, 2022).

A search of the New York Times reveals no coverage of Alston’s American sojourn, although the paper did cover Alston’s ensuing trip to the United Kingdom.

See Wacquant 2009 and Goldstein 2021 .

A notable exception here is the contemporary Poor People’s Campaign, which aims “to build a broad, fusion movement that could unite poor and impacted communities across the country.” https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/about/ .

See Lewis 1959 , 1966 .

Salamon ( 2010 : 175) argues that poverty works to force the poor “relentlessly into the present.”

John Marsh ( 2011 : 606) notes that “American literature itself could be said to begin with the problem of poverty and inequality,” while “countless American writers . . . have at one point or another turned their thinking or their art toward the question of poverty.”

John Allen ( 2004 : 11) similarly notes that criticism on themes of homelessness has largely taken up literary romanticism or realism, categories, he argues, that should be questioned.

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5 Essays About Poverty Everyone Should Know

Poverty is one of the driving forces of inequality in the world. Between 1990-2015, much progress was made. The number of people living on less than $1.90 went from 36% to 10%. However, according to the World Bank , the COVID-19 pandemic represents a serious problem that disproportionately impacts the poor. Research released in February of 2020 shows that by 2030, up to ⅔ of the “global extreme poor” will be living in conflict-affected and fragile economies. Poverty will remain a major human rights issue for decades to come. Here are five essays about the issue that everyone should know:

“We need an economic bill of rights” –  Martin Luther King Jr.

The Guardian published an abridged version of this essay in 2018, which was originally released in Look magazine just after Dr. King was killed. In this piece, Dr. King explains why an economic bill of rights is necessary. He points out that while mass unemployment within the black community is a “social problem,” it’s a “depression” in the white community. An economic bill of rights would give a job to everyone who wants one and who can work. It would also give an income to those who can’t work. Dr. King affirms his commitment to non-violence. He’s fully aware that tensions are high. He quotes a spiritual, writing “timing is winding up.” Even while the nation progresses, poverty is getting worse.

This essay was reprinted and abridged in The Guardian in an arrangement with The Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King. Jr. The most visible representative of the Civil Rights Movement beginning in 1955, Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. His essays and speeches remain timely.

“How Poverty Can Follow Children Into Adulthood” – Priyanka Boghani

This article is from 2017, but it’s more relevant than ever because it was written when 2012 was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. That’s no longer the case. In 2012, around ¼ American children were in poverty. Five years later, children were still more likely than adults to be poor. This is especially true for children of colour. Consequences of poverty include anxiety, hunger, and homelessness. This essay also looks at the long-term consequences that come from growing up in poverty. A child can develop health problems that affect them in adulthood. Poverty can also harm a child’s brain development. Being aware of how poverty affects children and follows them into adulthood is essential as the world deals with the economic fallout from the pandemic.

Priyanka Boghani is a journalist at PBS Frontline. She focuses on U.S. foreign policy, humanitarian crises, and conflicts in the Middle East. She also assists in managing Frontline’s social accounts.

“5 Reasons COVID-19 Will Impact the Fight to End Extreme Poverty” – Leah Rodriguez

For decades, the UN has attempted to end extreme poverty. In the face of the novel coronavirus outbreak, new challenges threaten the fight against poverty. In this essay, Dr. Natalie Linos, a Harvard social epidemiologist, urges the world to have a “social conversation” about how the disease impacts poverty and inequality. If nothing is done, it’s unlikely that the UN will meet its Global Goals by 2030. Poverty and COVID-19 intersect in five key ways. For one, low-income people are more vulnerable to disease. They also don’t have equal access to healthcare or job stability. This piece provides a clear, concise summary of why this outbreak is especially concerning for the global poor.

Leah Rodriguez’s writing at Global Citizen focuses on women, girls, water, and sanitation. She’s also worked as a web producer and homepage editor for New York Magazine’s The Cut.

“Climate apartheid”: World’s poor to suffer most from disasters” – Al Jazeera and news Agencies

The consequences of climate change are well-known to experts like Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. In 2019, he submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Council sounding the alarm on how climate change will devastate the poor. While the wealthy will be able to pay their way out of devastation, the poor will not. This will end up creating a “climate apartheid.” Alston states that if climate change isn’t addressed, it will undo the last five decades of progress in poverty education, as well as global health and development .

“Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America” – Barbara Ehrenreich

In this excerpt from her book Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich describes her experience choosing to live undercover as an “unskilled worker” in the US. She wanted to investigate the impact the 1996 welfare reform act had on the working poor. Released in 2001, the events take place between the spring of 1998 and the summer of 2000. Ehrenreich decided to live in a town close to her “real life” and finds a place to live and a job. She has her eyes opened to the challenges and “special costs” of being poor. In 2019, The Guardian ranked the book 13th on their list of 100 best books of the 21st century.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 21 books and an activist. She’s worked as an award-winning columnist and essayist.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

A business journal from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

To End Poverty, What Works, What Doesn’t and Why: A Conversation with the Authors of ‘Poor Economics’

November 9, 2011 • 15 min read.

MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo approach global poverty much as a medical researcher might set about finding the treatment for a disease: They believe in conducting small, randomized trials to see what works, what doesn't and why. Their book, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, explains this approach. Last week, the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs named it the best business book of 2011. Knowledge at Wharton spoke with Banerjee and Duflo at a conference in Goa, India, about their concepts and how they can help rescue millions from destitution.

• Public Policy

“Why would a man in Morocco who doesn’t have enough to eat buy a television? Why is it hard for children in poor areas to learn, even when they attend school? Why do the poorest people in the Indian state of Maharashtra spend seven percent of their food budget on sugar?” Such are the questions that MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo seek to investigate in their research, according to the website of their book, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty .

What makes Banerjee’s and Duflo’s approach radical? The reason is that, unlike other economists who focus on macro issues such as aid, they approach poverty much as medical researchers might set about finding the treatment for a disease — by conducting clinical trials. Duflo, who delivered a TED talk on this theme in February 2010, explained that the effects of aid are often hard to measure, but it is “possible to know which development efforts help and which hurt — by testing solutions with randomized trials.” Their method involves putting social initiatives to the same rigorous scientific tests that medical researchers use for drugs. This takes the guesswork out of policy-making, according to Duflo, by showing “what works, what doesn’t work and why.” There are no miracle cures, but specific steps — such as providing food as an incentive for immunization or providing subsidized bed nets to reduce malaria — can end up having a massive impact on efforts to reduce poverty, the authors note.

Banerjee and Duflo never expected Poor Economics to make for good business. “We wonder how our book is a business book,” says Duflo. But the attention their book has received has now been capped by the 2011 Financial Times Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award. Banerjee and Duflo were at a conference in Goa, India, last week. After their presentation, the authors sat down with Knowledge at Wharton to explain their concepts and how they can be used to end global poverty.

An edited version of the transcript follows.

Knowledge at Wharton: How does it feel to win the book award?

Esther Duflo: We are certainly happy but at the same time baffled. We wonder how our book [can be considered] a business book since it is about finding and thinking of ways to end global poverty. Nonetheless, we are happy that some businesses and businessmen are interested in our work.

Knowledge at Wharton: What, in your view, is the best way to tackle poverty?

Abhijit Banerjee: The central point of our book is that there isn’t a single answer, that the question itself is wrong. There is no single action that is going to solve the problem of poverty. There are perhaps a few hundred steps that we need to take, each of which will do something, as long as we take the right steps. There is no evidence that we could adopt one step that is far more important than the others. I think that the one-size-fits-all recipe for tackling poverty is an illusion. It is a convenient illusion, so that you can believe that you can solve the problem with a single step. But this does not seem to be supported by data.

Knowledge at Wharton: But surely of those hundreds of steps, there must be some crucial ones that come to mind when you talk of eliminating poverty?

Duflo: Yes, there are some crucial steps. I can’t say they are the most important but these, as we know today, are very effective. However, that is not to say that in the future there will not be other steps which would be even more effective.

According to our current state of knowledge, there is a zone of shadow where we are not sure exactly what to do. But there are some things we do know that work across sectors. Educating children, for example, is one of them — imparting quality education to them right from a young age. Similarly, there could be positive social and political impact of health care for the poor, which includes steps like better access to preventive health [and] finding ways to put iron, vitamins, etc., in the food that poor people consume, which we know will be good from a medical point of view. Giving an asset — like a cow — to extremely poor people, and then some help in taking care of that asset, also works. These, we feel, are some of the effective steps that can be taken in the initiative towards ending poverty.

Knowledge at Wharton: In your presentation at the Goa conference, you emphasized the quality of education, quality of curriculum, etc. In the case of the poor, where educating children is often seen as the only passport to escape poverty, does the quality of education matter?

Banerjee: Yes, that is absolutely crucial. If you don’t learn to read or acquire basic math skills by the time you are 13 or 14 — and there is a significant portion of students with this deficiency — then the entire effort is worthless. It is a crime that children should be subjected to such education. No one is talking to them, the whole class is going on and they do not understand a thing. There is nothing worse than this. I don’t believe we are giving children a decent chance to learn.

Duflo: [While] it is not good to say that no education is better than some education, an education that is so blatantly ignorant and irrelevant is a torture.

Knowledge at Wharton: How do you define poverty?

Banerjee: There is no one way to define poverty that is going to satisfy everyone. You have to make an arbitrary call as to what you think poverty is, and when you make that call, you should decide what you are trying to capture. If you are trying to capture a set of people who are so desperate that they need immediate help, that is one thing. If you want to say what is an unacceptable level of standard of living, and the country needs to somehow fix that problem, then that is a different thing. There is no definition that is independent of the question you have posed. If the policy question is, ‘How do I target emergency help?’, then that is one definition. It would be very different if you were to decide to set the target for, say, the next 15 years. Our poverty line for the desperately poor should be much lower than our goal that you will provide everyone at least ‘X’ after 15 years. It depends upon what policy question we are trying to answer.

Knowledge at Wharton: In India, poverty has always been a top-of-mind issue. Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for his work on poverty. C.K. Prahalad became famous for The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid . Would you agree that poverty in India is a lucrative opportunity area?

Duflo: At a basic level, there are lots of poor people, and so they are a market. There are some forms of social businesses that have done well in this regard, and they are there for us to see. A lot of people inspired by C.K. Prahalad say that you can make money while helping the poor. However, you have to be a little more careful. I am not saying that these opportunities don’t exist. Sometimes it is true that there is a market and someone can come and creatively tap it. But there are also lots of things that the poor need and the market is not able to provide them. It is a big mistake to think that markets will be able to do everything. This notion is misguided.

Knowledge at Wharton : The Indian Planning Commission has set the poverty line at 65 cents a day. You have different views on this and on what parameters poverty should be measured. Would you briefly explain that?

Banerjee: Let’s not use [the conversion to U.S. cents]; it is very misleading. Let’s say Rs. 32, and let’s be very clear about what that means. The problem with that conversion is that it doesn’t allow for differences in prices. The latest conversion between the rupee and dollar that allows for differences in prices is roughly Rs. 19 to a U.S. dollar. That is the right conversion, not Rs. 48 or Rs. 49 to a dollar [the current exchange rate]. This is what the World Bank uses in PPP [Purchasing Power Parity] estimates. So, under this conversion, Rs. 32 is $1.70. That’s the right number, not 65 cents a day. For any of these questions [about poverty], the market dollar rate is not relevant. You take a bus ride here, it costs Rs. 3. In the U.S., it would cost $2. You have to adjust for the fact that things are cheaper in India than in the U.S. If you don’t do that, you get a completely misleading number.

Duflo: We are not deeply interested in measuring poverty. Others do it. People in the World Bank do it, and they put in lots of effort at measuring poverty levels. India itself has a long tradition of doing that very well. At the end of the day, what is important is not to measure poverty as much as try to understand what to do about it. In some sense, it is a democratic debate in which all people should have something to say.

Knowledge at Wharton: The poor, you say, are more discerning customers than the rich because they have to make a little go a much longer way. But do the government, aid workers, companies, etc., make any effort to provide choice?

Banerjee: It’s a good question. I think lots of aid policy and, in general, the social policy ignores the free will of the poor. They are seen as sort of desperate — you give them this and they are going to take it. The poor, on the other hand, are trying to have a good life within the constraints they face. And if you tell them to have a particular kind of food every day just because it is healthy food — for instance, eat chickpeas everyday — they are not going to do it. So you have to dig out their reality as to how they want to live their lives. We often tell them to boil water for 20 minutes but we don’t take the reality of their lives [into consideration]. Twenty minutes is a lot of time for a woman who has to do so many things in the house. You have to think of what the priorities are. You tell them to do things and then wonder why they are not doing them. They are not doing them because you have not understood their lives very well. You have to give them choices and understand their choice behavior. If you really want to do something for them, you have to make it attractive enough for them to do it. You can’t think of the poor as machines.

Knowledge at Wharton: Is the problem of global poverty too huge to envision and address?

Duflo: We need to cut this huge problem into many problems, problems that can be dealt with one by one. Some people term it as one huge problem and then conclude that there is one big solution to it. Projected this way, people get depressed by the enormity of the problem. The right thing is to say that it is not one giant problem, but a series of issues that need to be addressed in numerous ways. This way, there will be incremental victories and progress towards ending poverty.

Knowledge at Wharton: You say that the three villains of efforts to eradicate poverty are ideology, ignorance and inertia. And the three problem interfaces are the expert, the aid worker and the local policy maker. In rural India, it is the local government and the aid worker who are regarded as the biggest hurdles. What is your experience of other countries?

Duflo: Essentially, there is not much aid coming to India, and hence you cannot blame the aid workers. India gets very little aid, and most of the money on anti-poverty programs is spent by the government. So, there is no large presence of aid workers in India, but there are many good NGOs [non-governmental organizations] in India who are doing excellent work. There is a lot of difference between the places where policies are being designed, say in New Delhi, and people in the field. These field workers are doing good work, and they have a much better sense of what is actually going on at the field level. Their knowledge is not necessarily being harnessed. There are countries — in Africa, for example — which receive lots of aid, but essentially face the same issues.

Knowledge at Wharton: Do anti-poverty campaigns receive enough money? Is there adequate funding for projects such as yours?

Banerjee: No. There is a lot more money that could be spent. And even within what is being spent, little money goes into supporting innovative programs that can be carefully tested, carefully identified and carefully implemented. Too much money and governmental resources are spent on programs that have not been tested. Rather than spending it carefully, too much is spent on [the] wrong programs. There is too little money going into anti-poverty programs that we would like to see.

Knowledge at Wharton: What has your Poverty Action Lab (the Abdul Latif Jamil Poverty Action Lab or J-PAL) accomplished so far?

Banerjee: In 2003, we founded the Poverty Action Lab to encourage and support research on a new way of doing economics, based on what we call randomized control trials. These give researchers, working with local partners, a chance to implement large-scale experiments designed to test their theories. As of 2010, J-PAL researchers had completed or were engaged in 240 experiments across 40 countries. A very large number of organizations, researchers and policy makers have embraced the idea of randomized trials. Many have come to share our basic premise — it is possible to make very significant progress against the biggest problems in the world through a set of small steps, each well thought-out, carefully tested and judiciously implemented.

Knowledge at Wharton: How do you think the Occupy protest movement, that started on Wall Street and has spread globally, will impact the ongoing debate on global poverty?

Duflo: At the moment, the Occupy Wall Street protest is very much in response to domestic issues in the U.S., to the increasing inequalities in the U.S. in the past 10 to 15 years, to inertia and to the inadequate response to the economic crisis in the U.S. Global poverty is not at the forefront of their consideration at this point in time. So I frankly don’t know whether or not this protest is going to have any impact on how to think about solving the problem of global poverty.

Banerjee: There is a general worry that it will lead to an irresponsible, populist backlash in policymaking in the West, like anti-trade and all that. It could turn into something like the Tea Party. And that will be bad. But right now, they are just reacting to what is the real problem in all the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries. In some of these countries, there is ballooning inequality, and there is very little official response to tackle this.

Knowledge at Wharton: Recent studies have shown that poverty has increased dramatically in the U.S. over the past decade, due in part to the economic downturn. In a world of continuing global financial uncertainty, what challenges do we face in fighting global poverty?

Banerjee: Slowing growth in the West is a huge problem for growing countries like India, China, Bangladesh and Pakistan, which rely on servicing these markets. They are all going to face some constraints on that account. It is also clear that there is a certain amount of policy attention or creativity that is now being directed to finding the equilibrium within [Western] economies. After all, we need talent from the whole world to think about ways of ending poverty.

Duflo: The crises in the end have to affect the lives of the very poor. The immediate impact of the global financial crisis was not as harsh on the very poor as on the middle classes of the rich countries. What is more worrisome is the inability to get out of the crisis in the past few years. That eventually will create additional challenges, particularly for the people in the developing world.

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America Looks at Poverty All Wrong

P overty in America has, for decades, been framed as an issue of “them” rather than “us.” The poverty stricken are routinely thought to reside far outside of mainstream America. Central to this understanding is the belief that the poor haven’t worked hard enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps—or that they’ve made bad decisions and choices throughout their lives, resulting in poverty.

There is also a strong racial component to this perception. Poverty is typically portrayed as a Black or Brown problem rather than an American problem. Furthermore, the poor are depicted as largely confined to inner cities with high crime rates and other pathological conditions, mired in poverty for generations.

Would it surprise you, then, to learn that between the ages of 20 and 75, 75 % of all Americans will spend at least one year in or near poverty? Or that only 10% of the poor live in high poverty neighborhoods? Or that, according the U.S. Census Bureau, two thirds of the poor classify themselves as White? Or that most individuals in poverty remain poor for only one or two years? All of these facts describe the actual realities of poverty, rather than the myths.

It turns out that the reach of poverty is incredibly wide. Most Americans will at some point in their lives encounter poverty. The reason for this is that during the course of a lifetime, many unanticipated events can and do occur: losing a job, families splitting up, getting sick, or even experiencing a pandemic. When such events strike, there is very little in the form of a social safety net to protect people from falling into poverty in this country. The U.S. devotes far fewer of its resources to preventing poverty than most other industrialized countries. The result is that we have the highest rates of poverty and inequality among the group of wealthy nations. In America, the poverty-stricken can be found down nearly any street, within any demographic or racial group, and across the entire political and ideological spectrum.

Read More: Nobody Cares About Homeless People Until They Die

As a society, we each pay a hefty price for having such high rates of poverty in our midst, particularly among children. As researchers of poverty and inequality, my colleague Michael McLaughlin and I estimated the annual economic cost of childhood poverty in the United States. We relied on the latest government data and social science research in making our cost estimates. In particular, we examined the effect that childhood poverty has upon future economic productivity, health care, and criminal justice costs, as well as increased outlays as a result of child homelessness and maltreatment. Adding up these expenses resulted in an eye-opening estimate that childhood poverty was costing the U.S. slightly over $1 trillion dollars a year. This represented 28% of the entire federal budget, a jarring estimate.

Impoverished children grow up possessing fewer skills and are thus less able to contribute to the productivity of the economy. They are also more likely to experience frequent health care problems and to engage in crime. These costs are borne by the children themselves, but ultimately by the wider society, as well. In this sense, the economic costs of poverty becomes an issue of “us,” rather than “them.”

Most of us are familiar with the saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” It turns out that this is particularly true in the case of poverty. It is not a question of paying or not paying. Rather, it is a question of how we pay, which then affects the amount we end up spending. In making an investment up front to alleviate poverty, the evidence suggests we will be repaid many times over by lowering the enormous costs associated with a host of interrelated problems.

Shifting our understanding of poverty from a perception of “them” to one of “us” can begin to awaken Americans’ understanding of this deeply rooted economic and social problem. If poverty is no longer confined to strangers, we can’t comfortably sit back and believe that we’re unaffected. The reality is that, in one way or another, each of us are harmed by this scourge upon our landscape—either directly through experiencing poverty at some point in our lives or by sending our tax dollars to pay for the high cost of poverty. Such an understanding is essential to motivate both the general public and policy makers into confronting poverty.

Poverty can and must be reduced. But it starts with the simple recognition that each of us are harmed by the high rates of U.S. impoverishment. For, as Benjamin Franklin wisely pointed out at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

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‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback

By Patricia Cohen

• Oct. 17, 2010

For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.

The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report . Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis ), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.

Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.

Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.

“We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.

The old debate has shaped the new. Last month Princeton and the Brookings Institution released a collection of papers on unmarried parents, a subject, it noted, that became off-limits after the Moynihan report. At the recent annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, attendees discussed the resurgence of scholarship on culture. And in Washington last spring, social scientists participated in a Congressional briefing on culture and poverty linked to a special issue of The Annals , the journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science .

“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.

The topic has generated interest on Capitol Hill because so much of the research intersects with policy debates. Views of the cultural roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,” Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, noted at the briefing.

This surge of academic research also comes as the percentage of Americans living in poverty hit a 15-year high: one in seven, or 44 million.

With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.

To Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as “shared understandings.”

“I study inequality, and the dominant focus is on structures of poverty,” he said. But he added that the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?

As part of a large research project in Chicago, Professor Sampson walked through different neighborhoods this summer, dropping stamped, addressed envelopes to see how many people would pick up an apparently lost letter and mail it, a sign that looking out for others is part of the community’s culture.

In some neighborhoods, like Grand Boulevard, where the notorious Robert Taylor public housing projects once stood, almost no envelopes were mailed; in others researchers received more than half of the letters back. Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference, Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.

The shared perception of a neighborhood — is it on the rise or stagnant? — does a better job of predicting a community’s future than the actual level of poverty, he said.

William Julius Wilson, whose pioneering work boldly confronted ghetto life while focusing on economic explanations for persistent poverty, defines culture as the way “individuals in a community develop an understanding of how the world works and make decisions based on that understanding.”

For some young black men, Professor Wilson, a Harvard sociologist, said, the world works like this: “If you don’t develop a tough demeanor, you won’t survive. If you have access to weapons, you get them, and if you get into a fight, you have to use them.”

Seeking to recapture the topic from economists, sociologists have ventured into poor neighborhoods to delve deeper into the attitudes of residents. Their results have challenged some common assumptions, like the belief that poor mothers remain single because they don’t value marriage.

In Philadelphia, for example, low-income mothers told the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas that they thought marriage was profoundly important, even sacred, but doubted that their partners were “marriage material.” Their results have prompted some lawmakers and poverty experts to conclude that programs that promote marriage without changing economic and social conditions are unlikely to work.

Mario Luis Small, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and an editor of The Annals’ special issue, tried to figure out why some New York City mothers with children in day care developed networks of support while others did not. As he explained in his 2009 book, “Unanticipated Gains,” the answer did not depend on income or ethnicity, but rather the rules of the day-care institution. Centers that held frequent field trips, organized parents’ associations and had pick-up and drop-off procedures created more opportunities for parents to connect.

Younger academics like Professor Small, 35, attributed the upswing in cultural explanations to a “new generation of scholars without the baggage of that debate.”

Scholars like Professor Wilson, 74, who have tilled the field much longer, mentioned the development of more sophisticated data and analytical tools. He said he felt compelled to look more closely at culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which attributed African-Americans’ lower I.Q. scores to genetics.

The authors claimed to have taken family background into account, Professor Wilson said, but “they had not captured the cumulative effects of living in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.”

He added, “I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the environment, that we must consider structural and cultural forces.”

He mentioned a study by Professor Sampson, 54, that found that growing up in areas where violence limits socializing outside the family and where parents haven’t attended college stunts verbal ability, lowering I.Q. scores by as much as six points, the equivalent of missing more than a year in school.

Changes outside campuses have made conversation about the cultural roots of poverty easier than it was in the ’60s. Divorce, living together without marrying, and single motherhood are now commonplace. At the same time prominent African-Americans have begun to speak out on the subject. In 2004 the comedian Bill Cosby made headlines when he criticized poor blacks for “not parenting” and dropping out of school. President Obama, who was abandoned by his father, has repeatedly talked about “responsible fatherhood.”

Conservatives also deserve credit, said Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, for their sustained focus on family values and marriage even when cultural explanations were disparaged.

Still, worries about blaming the victim persist. Policy makers and the public still tend to view poverty through one of two competing lenses, Michèle Lamont , another editor of the special issue of The Annals, said: “Are the poor poor because they are lazy, or are the poor poor because they are a victim of the markets?”

So even now some sociologists avoid words like “values” and “morals” or reject the idea that, as The Annals put it, “a group’s culture is more or less coherent.” Watered-down definitions of culture, Ms. Hymowitz complained, reduce some of the new work to “sociological pablum.”

“If anthropologists had come away from doing field work in New Guinea concluding ‘everyone’s different,’ but sometimes people help each other out,” she wrote in an e-mail, “there would be no field of anthropology — and no word culture for cultural sociologists to bend to their will.”

Fuzzy definitions or not, culture is back. This prompted mock surprise from Rep. Woolsey at last spring’s Congressional briefing: “What a concept. Values, norms, beliefs play very important roles in the way people meet the challenges of poverty.”

390 Poverty Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

• 📑 Aspects to Cover in a Poverty Essay

Students who learn economics, politics, and social sciences are often required to write a poverty essay as part of their course. While everyone understands the importance of this topic, it can be hard to decide what to write about. Read this post to find out the aspects that you should cover in your essay on poverty.

🏆 Best Poverty Topics & Free Essay Examples

👍 powerful topics on poverty and inequality, 🎓 simple & easy topics related to poverty, 📌 interesting poverty essay examples, ⭐ strong poverty-related topics, 🥇 unique poverty topics for argumentative essay, ❓ research questions about poverty.

Topics related to poverty and inequality might seem too broad. There are so many facts, factors, and aspects you should take into consideration. However, we all know that narrowing down a topic is one of the crucial steps when working on an outline and thesis statement. You should be specific enough to select the right arguments for your argumentative essay or dissertation. Below, you will find some aspects to include in your poverty essay.

Poverty Statistics

First of all, it would be beneficial to include some background information on the issue. Statistics on poverty in your country or state can help you to paint a picture of the problem. Look for official reports on poverty and socioeconomic welfare, which can be found on government websites. While you are writing this section, consider the following:

• What is the overall level of poverty in your country or state?
• Has the prevalence of poverty changed over time? If yes, how and why?
• Are there any groups or communities where poverty is more prevalent than in the general population? What are they?

Causes of Poverty

If you look at poverty essay titles, the causes of poverty are a popular theme among students. While some people may think that poverty occurs because people are lazy and don’t want to work hard, the problem is much more important than that. Research books and scholarly journal articles on the subject with these questions in mind:

• Why do some groups of people experience poverty more often than others?
• What are the historical causes of poverty in your country?
• How is poverty related to other social issues, such as discrimination, immigration, and crime?
• How do businesses promote or reduce poverty in the community?

Consequences of Poverty

Many poverty essay examples also consider the consequences of poverty for individuals and communities. This theme is particularly important if you study social sciences or politics. Here are some questions that may give you ideas for this section:

• How is the psychological well-being of individuals affected by poverty?
• How is poverty connected to crime and substance abuse?
• How does poverty affect individuals’ access to high-quality medical care and education?
• What is the relationship between poverty and world hunger?

Government Policies

Governments of most countries have policies in place to reduce poverty and help those in need. In your essay, you may address the policies used in your state or country or compare several different governments in terms of their approaches to poverty. Here is what you should think about:

• What are some examples of legislation aimed at reducing poverty?
• Do laws on minimum wage help to prevent and decrease poverty? Why or why not?
• How do governments help people who are poor to achieve higher levels of social welfare?
• Should governments provide financial assistance to those in need? Why or why not?

Solutions to Poverty

Solutions to poverty are among the most popular poverty essay topics, and you will surely find many sample papers and articles on this subject. This is because poverty is a global issue that must be solved to facilitate social development. Considering these questions in your poverty essay conclusion or main body will help you in getting an A:

• What programs or policies proved to be effective in reducing poverty locally?
• Is there a global solution to poverty that would be equally effective in all countries?
• How can society facilitate the reduction of poverty?
• What solutions would you recommend to decrease and prevent poverty?

Covering a few of these aspects in your essay will help you demonstrate the in-depth understanding and analysis required to earn a high mark. Before you start writing, have a look around our website for more essay titles, tips, and interesting topics!

• Poverty Research Proposal To justify this, the recent and most current statistics from the Census Bureau shows that the level and rate of poverty in USA is increasing, with minority ethnic groups being the most disadvantaged.
• What Causes Poverty in the World One of the major factors that have contributed to poverty in given areas of the world is overpopulation. Environmental degradation in many parts of the world has led to the increase of poverty in the […]
• Wordsworth’s Vision of Childhood in His Poems “We Are Seven” and “Alice Fell or Poverty” Specifically, the joint publication he released in 1798 known as “Lyrical Ballads” are considered the most important publications in the rise of the Romantic literature in the UK and Europe.
• Poverty: A Sociological Imagination Perspective I was raised in a nuclear family, where my mum was a housewife, and my father worked in a local hog farm as the overall manager.
• Analysis of Theodore Dalrymple’s “What Is Poverty?” With ethical arguments from Burnor, it can be argued that Dalrymple’s statements are shallow and based on his values and not the experience of those he is judging.
• “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” by Peter Singer The article “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” by author Peter Singer attempts to provide a workable solution to the world poverty problem.
• Poverty and the Environment The human population affects the environment negatively due to poverty resulting to environmental degradation and a cycle of poverty. Poverty and the environment are interlinked as poverty leads to degradation of the environment.
• Relationship Between Crime Rates and Poverty This shows that the strength of the relationship between the crime index and people living below the line of poverty is.427.
• Max Weber’s Thoughts on Poverty Weber has contributed to the exploration of the origins of poverty and the impact of religions on the attitude to it.
• Consumerism: Affecting Families Living in Poverty in the United States Hence, leading to the arising of consumerism protection acts and policies designed to protect consumers from dishonest sellers and producers, which indicates the high degree of consumer’s ignorance, and hence failure to make decisions of […]
• Poverty Effects on Child Development and Schooling To help children from low-income families cope with poverty, interventions touching in the child’s development and educational outcomes are essential. Those programs campaign against the effects of poverty among children by providing basic nutritional, academic, […]
• Poverty in India and China India’s slow rate of poverty reduction compared to China is due to the differences in their approach to the economy. Improving the living conditions and general well being of the people is not only the […]
• Poverty in the World In this paper, we will be looking at the situation of poverty in the world, its causes and the efforts of the international organizations to manage the same.
• The Problem of Poverty in Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” To see the situation from the perspective of its social significance, it is necessary to refer to Mills’ concept of sociological imagination and to the division of problems and issues into personal and social ones.
• The End of Poverty Philippe Diaz’s documentary, The End of Poverty, is a piece that attempts to dissect the causes of the huge economic inequalities that exist between countries in the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.
• Poverty and Its Effects on Childhood Education The foremost strength of Guo’s study is that in it, author succeeded with substantiating the full soundness of an idea that children’s exposure to poverty cannot possibly be thought of as only the factor that […]
• The Philippines’ Unemployment, Inequality, Poverty However, despite the strong emphasis of the government on income equality and poverty reduction along with the growth of GDP, both poverty and economic and social inequality remain persistent in the Philippines.
• Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Development The research focuses on the causes of poverty and the benefits of poverty alleviation in achieving sustainable development. One of the causes of poverty is discrimination and social inequality.
• Community Work: Helping People in Poverty The first project would be water project since you find that in most villages water is a problem, hence $100 would go to establishing this project and it’s out of these water then the women […]
• Social Issues of Families in Poverty With the tightened budget, parents of the families living in poverty struggle to make ends meet, and in the course of their struggles, they experience many stresses and depressions.
• The Singer Solution to World Poverty: Arguments Against The article compares the lives of people in the developed world represented by America and that of developing world represented by Brazil; It is about a school teacher who sells a young boy for adoption […]
• Children Living in Poverty and Education The presence of real subjects like children is a benefit for the future of the nation and a free education option for poor families to learn something new and even use it if their children […]
• Global Poverty: Famine, Affluence, and Morality In the article Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Michael Slote contends that rich people have a moral obligation to contribute more to charities.
• Reflective Analysis of Poverty It can be further classified into absolute poverty where the affected do not have the capability to make ends meet, and relative poverty which refer to the circumstances under which the afflicted do not have […]
• Poverty Areas and Effects on Juvenile Delinquency The desire to live a better life contributes to the youths engaging in crimes, thus the increase in cases of juvenile delinquencies amid low-income families. The studies indicate that the fear of poverty is the […]
• Poverty in Africa These pictures have been published online to show the world the gravity of the poverty situation in the African continent. The pictures represent the suffering of majority of the African people as a result of […]
• The Problems of Poverty and Hunger Subsequently, the cause in this case serves as a path to a solution – more social programs are needed, and wealthy citizens should be encouraged to become beneficiaries for the hungry.
• Poverty in Bambara’s The Lesson and Danticat’s A Wall of Fire Rising It is important to note the fact that culture-based poverty due to discrimination of the past or political ineffectiveness of the nation can have a profound ramification in the lives of its victims.
• Poverty Through a Sociological Lens Poverty-stricken areas, such as slums, rural villages, and places hit by disasters, lack the required economic activities to improve the employment and wealth status of the people.
• Cause and Effect of Poverty For example, the disparities in income and wealth are considered as a sign of poverty since the state is related to issues of scarcity and allocation of resources and influence.
• Analysis of a Social Problem: Poverty Furthermore, the World Bank predicts that both the number of people and the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty will increase in 2020 and 2021 due to the coronavirus outbreak.
• Poverty as a Great Social Problem and Its Causes The human capital model assumes that the inadequate incomes of the working poor are the result of characteristics of the labor market rather than the inadequacy of the poor.
• Poverty and Global Food Crisis: Food and Agriculture Model Her innovative approach to the issue was to measure food shortages in calories as opposed to the traditional method of measuring in pounds and stones.
• The Connection Between Poverty and Mental Health Problems The daily struggle to earn a daily bread takes a toll on an individual mental health and contributes to mental health problem.
• We Can Stop Poverty in Ghana Today One of the main disadvantages of the document is that the problem of poverty is not considered separately, but only as a part of other economic and social problems.
• Environmental Degradation and Poverty It is however important to understand the causes of the environmental degradation and the ways to reduce them, which will promote the improvement of the environmental quality.
• The Myth of the Culture of Poverty Unfortunately, rather all of the stereotypes regarding poor people are widespread in many societies and this has served to further increase the problem of generational poverty. Poor people are regarded to be in the state […]
• Poverty in New York City, and Its Reasons The poverty rate for seniors in New York is twice the poverty rate in the United States. New York City’s blacks and Hispanics have a much higher poverty rate than whites and Asians in the […]
• “The Hidden Reason for Poverty…” by Haugen It is also noteworthy that some groups of people are specifically vulnerable and join the arrays of those living in poverty.
• Dependency Theory and “The End of Poverty?” It is also reflected in the film “The End of Poverty?” narrating the circumstances of poor countries and their precondition. It started at the end of the fifteenth century and marked the beginning of the […]
• Poverty Policy Recommendations Different leaders have considered several policies and initiatives in the past to tackle the problem of poverty and empower more people to lead better lives.
• Child Poverty and Academic Achievement Association It is expected to pay attention to the challenges and problems poor children and their families may face in their lives.
• Concept of Poverty The main difference between this definition and other definitions of poverty highlighted in this paper is the broad understanding of the concept.
• Third World Countries and the Barriers Stopping Them to Escape Poverty The phrase Third World was initially used in the Cold War period to represent those countries that were neither on the West NATO nations referred to as the first world countries, nor on the East-Communist […]
• War on Poverty in US The term war on poverty officially came into being in 1964 and referred to concerted government efforts to eradicate assiduous poverty in the United States of America.
• Aspects of Global Poverty There are arguments that have been put forth in regard to the causes of poverty in various nations with some people saying that the governments in various nations are there to be blamed for their […]
• Political Economy: Relationship Between Poverty, Inequality, and Nationalism The prevalence of nationalism leads to changes in the education system, as the government tries to justify the superiority of the country by altering the curriculum.
• Poverty and Diseases A usual line of reasoning would be that low income is the main cause of health-related problems among vulnerable individuals. Such results that the relationship between mental health and poverty is, in fact, straightforward.
• The Poverty Issue From a Sociological Perspective The core of the perspective is the idea that poverty is a system in which multiple elements are intertwined and create outcomes linked to financial deficits.
• Poverty Simulation Reflection and Its Influence on Life Something that stood out to me during the process is probably the tremendous emotional and psychological impact of poverty on a person’s wellbeing.
• Poverty Effects and How They Are Handled Quality jobs will provide income to the younger people and women in the community. The focus on developing and facilitating small and medium-sized enterprises is a great strategy but more needs to be done in […]
• Children in Poverty in Kampong Ayer, Brunei Part of the reason is likely malnutrition that results from the eating or consumption patterns of the families and also dependency on the children to help out with the family or house chores.
• “The End of Poverty” by Phillipe Diaz In the film End of Poverty, the filmmaker tries to unravel the mystery behind poverty in the world. The film is arranged in such a way that the author has persuasively argued his case that […]
• Poverty, Government and Unequal Distribution of Wealth in Philippines The author of the book Poverty And The Critical Security Agenda, Eadie, added: Quantitative analyses of poverty have become more sophisticated over the years to be sure, yet remain problematic and in certain ways rooted […]
• Poverty, Inequality and Social Policy Understanding The roots of inequality can relate to both welfare and some other factors, for example, the judiciary. Therefore, the principle of equality is violated, and social norms cannot be considered to be respected.
• Inequality and Poverty Relationship To begin with, it is necessary to define the concepts of poverty and inequality. As of inequality, it is the difference in access to income, power, education, and whatever.
• The Rise of Poverty in the US The main issue that is portrayed in the article is the presence of the invisible poor and the homeless poor in the US.
• Poverty and Development Into the 21st Century The choices of citizens in the west influence the consumer, as well as political behaviors of the consumers and voters in the developing regions.
• Social Business Scope in Alleviating Poverty Instead of charity work, social business aims at creating a mechanism in which the poor may be helped in a sustainable manner in that the social business makes profits just like conventional businesses, but the […]
• Poverty in the Bronx: Negative Effects of Poverty South Bronx is strictly the southwestern part of the borough of Bronx and Bronx is the only borough in New York city in the mainland.
• Poverty in Urban Areas The main reason for escalation of the problem of poverty is urban areas is because the intricate problems of urban poverty are considered too small to attract big policies.
• Effects of Poverty on Immigrant Children As research studies show, although there is a group of immigrants who belong to higher social classes, mostly because of their formal education levels, most of immigrants belong to the low socioeconomic class, as most […]
• How Poverty Contributes to Poor Heath The results show that poverty is the main cause of poor health. The study was purposed to assess the effect of poverty in determining the health status of households.
• Global Poverty Project: A Beacon of Hope in the Fight Against Extreme Poverty The organization works with partners worldwide to increase awareness and understanding of global poverty and inspire people to take action to end it.
• The Causes of an Increase in Poverty in Atlanta, Georgia The key causes of the high poverty rise in the city include housing policies and instabilities, the lack of transit services and public transportation infrastructure in suburban areas, and childhood poverty.
• Thistle Farms: Help for Women Who Are Affected by Poverty As I said in the beginning, millions of women need help and assistance from the community to overcome poverty and heal emotional wounds caused by abuse. You can purchase a variety of its home and […]
• Median Household Incomes and Poverty Levels The patterns of poverty in the Denver urban area show that rates are higher in the inner suburb and the core city and lower in the outer suburb.
• Poverty: The American Challenge One of the main problems in the world is the problem of poverty, which means the inability to provide the simplest and most affordable living conditions for most people in a given country.
• Saving the Planet by Solving Poverty The data is there to make the necessary links, which are needed when it comes to the economic variations and inadequate environmental impacts of climate change can be distinguished on a worldwide scale.
• Anti-Poverty Programs From the Federal Government The programs provide financial assistance to low-income individuals and families to cover basic needs like housing and food. The anti-poverty programs that have been most effective in reducing poverty rates in the United States are […]
• Rural Development, Economic Inequality and Poverty The percentage of the rural population is lower for developed countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Thus, the objective of the proposal is to determine how the inhabitants of the country in […]
• Global Poverty: Ways of Combating For example, one of such initiatives is social assistance and social protection programs, which ensure the safety and creation of various labor programs that will help increase the number of the working population.
• Poverty and Homelessness as a Global Social Problem What makes the task of defining poverty particularly difficult is the discrepancy in the distribution of social capital and, therefore, the resulting differences in the understanding of what constitutes poverty, particularly, where the line should […]
• Poverty: Aspects of Needs Assessment The target neighborhood and population for the following analysis are women of reproductive age, defined as 15 to 49 years, in Elmhurst and Corona, Queens. 2, and the percentage of births to women aged over […]
• What Is Poverty in the United States? Estimates of the amount of income required to meet necessities serve as the foundation for both the official and supplemental poverty measurements.
• The Caribbean Culture: Energy Security and Poverty Issues Globally, Latin American and the Caribbean also has the most expensive energy products and services because of fuel deprivation in the Caribbean and the Pacific regions.
• Poverty: The Main Causes and Factors Because of the constant process of societal development, the concept of poverty changes rapidly, adapting to the new standards of modern human life.
• How to Overcome Poverty and Discrimination As such, to give a chance to the “defeated” children and save their lives, as Alexie puts it, society itself must change the rules so that everyone can have access to this ticket to success. […]
• Poverty and Homelessness in American Society It is connected with social segregation, stigmatization, and the inability of the person to improve their conditions of life. The problem of affordable housing and poverty among older adults is another problem that leads to […]
• Private Sector’s Role in Poverty Alleviation in Asia The ambition of Asia to become the fastest-growing economic region worldwide has led to a rapid rise of enterprises in the private sector.
• Connection of Poverty and Education The economy of the United States has been improving due to the efforts that have been made to ensure that poverty will not prevent individuals and families from having access to decent education.
• The Opportunity for All Program: Poverty Reduction The limiting factors of the program may be the actions of the population itself, which will not participate in the employment program because of the realized benefits.
• Early Childhood Financial Support and Poverty The mentioned problem is a direct example of such a correlation: the general poverty level and the well-being of adults are connected with the early children’s material support.
• Global Poverty: The Ethical Dilemma Unfortunately, a significant obstacle to such global reforms is that many economic systems are based on the concept of inequality and exploitation.
• Discussion: Poverty and Healthcare One of the research questions necessary to evaluate this issue is “How do ethical theories apply to the issue?” Another critical research question worth exploring is “Which cultural values and norms influence the problem?” These […]
• Explosive Growth of Poverty in America The three richest Americans now own 250 billion USD, approximately the same amount of combined wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the country. Wealth inequality is a disturbing issue that needs to be at […]
• “Life on a Shoestring – American Kids Living in Poverty” by Claycomb Life on a Shoestring – American Kids Living in Poverty highlights the widening disparity between the poor and the wealthy in America and how the economic systems are set up to benefit the rich and […]
• Decreasing Poverty With College Enrollment Program In order to achieve that, it is necessary, first and foremost, to increase the high school students’ awareness of the financial aid programs, possibilities of dual enrollment, and the overall reality of higher education.
• Poverty in Rural and Urban Areas My main focus is on articles explaining the sources of poverty in rural and urban areas and the key difference between the two.
• Reducing Poverty in the North Miami Beach Community The proposed intervention program will focus on the students in the last semester of the 9th and 10th grades and the first semester of the 11th and 12th grades attending the client schools.
• Food Banks Board Members and Cycle of Poverty What this suggests is that a large portion of the leadership within these collectives aim to provide assistance and food but not to challenge the current system that fosters the related issues of poverty, unemployment, […]
• Poverty as a Social Problem in Burundi The rationale for studying poverty as a social problem in Burundi is that it will help to combat poverty through the advocacy plan at the end of this paper.
• Poverty: Subsidizing Programs Subsidizing programs are considered welfare and net initiatives that the government takes to aid low-income families and individuals affected by poverty.
• Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? & How to Judge Globalism The article Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality by Robert Hunter Wade explores the phenomenon of globalization and its influence on the poverty and inequality ratios all over the world.
• The Problem of Poverty in Chad Thus, the study of the causes of poverty in the Republic of Chad will help to form a complete understanding of the problem under study and find the most effective ways to solve it.
• “Poverty, Toxic Stress, and Education…” Study by Kelly & Li Kelly and Li are concerned with the lack of research about poverty and toxic stress affecting the neurodevelopment of preterm children.
• Is Poverty a Choice or a Generational Curse? The assumption that poverty is a choice persists in public attitudes and allows policy-makers to absolve themselves of any responsibility for ensuring the well-being of the lower socioeconomic stratum of society.
• Poverty in “A Modest Proposal” by Swift The high number of children born to poor families presents significant problems for a country.”A Modest Proposal” is a satirical essay by Jonathan Swift that proposes a solution to the challenge facing the kingdom.
• Life Below the Poverty Line in the US The major problem with poverty in the US is that the number of people living below the poverty threshold is gradually increasing despite the economic growth of the country. SNAP is not considered to be […]
• The Relationship Between Single-Parent Households and Poverty The given literature review will primarily focus on the theoretical and empirical aspects of the relationship between single-parent households and poverty, as well as the implications of the latter on mental health issues, such as […]
• Poverty and Its Effect on Adult Health Poverty in the UK is currently above the world average, as more than 18% of the population lives in poverty. In 2020, 7% of the UK population lived in extreme poverty and 11% lived in […]
• Child Poverty in the United States The causes of child poverty in the United States cannot be separated from the grounds of adult poverty. Thus, it is essential to take care of the well-being of children living in poverty.
• Juvenile Violent Crime and Children Below Poverty The effect of this trend is that the number of children below poverty will continue to be subjected to the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
• Poverty and Homelessness as Social Problem The qualifications will include a recommendation from the community to ensure that the person is open to help and willing to be involved in the neighborhood of Non-Return.
• Feminization of Poverty and Governments’ Role in Solving the Problem However, women form the greatest percentage of the poor, and the problem continues to spread. Furthermore, the public supports available are inaccessible and inadequate to cater for women’s needs.
• Free-Trade Policies and Poverty Level in Bangladesh The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which the end of the quota system and introduction of a free-trade system for the garment industry in Bangladesh has impacted on poverty in […]
• Poverty and Risks Associated With Poverty Adolescents that are at risk of being malnourished can be consulted about the existing programs that provide free food and meals to families in poverty.
• Poverty and Inequality Reduction Strategies Thus, comprehending the causes of poverty and inequalities, understanding the role of globalization, and learning various theoretical arguments can lead to the establishment of appropriate policy recommendations.
• International Aid – Poverty Inc This film, the research on the impact of aid on the states receiving it, and the economic outcomes of such actions suggest that aid is a part of the problem and not a solution to […]
• Poverty Effects on American Children and Adolescents The extent to which poor financial status influences the wellbeing of the young children and adolescents is alarming and needs immediate response from the community.
• Progress and Poverty Book by Henry George George wrote the book following his recognition that poverty is the central puzzle of the 20th century. Thus, George’s allegation is inconsistent with nature because the number of living organisms can increase to the extent […]
• Vicious Circle of Poverty in Brazil The vicious circle of poverty is “a circular constellation of forces that tend to act and react on each other in such a way that the country in poverty maintains its poor state”.
• Global Education as the Key Tool for Addressing the Third World Poverty Issue Global education leads to improvements in the state economy and finances. Global education helps resolve the unemployment problem.
• Poverty, Partner Abuse, and Women’s Mental Health In general, the study aimed at investigating the interaction between poverty and the severity of abuse in women. The research question being studied in this article is how income intersects with partner violence and impacts […]
• America’s Shame: How Can Education Eradicate Poverty The primary focus of the article was global poverty, the flaws in the educational system, as well as the U.S.government’s role in resolving the problem.
• Global Poverty and Ways to Overcome It These are some of the strategies, the subsequent application of which would significantly reduce the level of poverty around the world.
• Social Work at Acacia Network: Poverty and Inequality Around the 1980s, the number of older adults was significantly increasing in society; the local government of New York established a home for the aged and was named Acacia Network. The supporting staff may bond […]
• Poverty and Sex Trafficking: Qualitative Systematic Review The proposed research question is to learn how the phenomenon of poverty is connected to sex trafficking. To investigate the relationship between the phenomenon of poverty and sex trafficking.
• End of Extreme Poverty Importantly, the ability to remain the owners of a substantial amount of accumulated wealth is the primary motivation for such individuals.
• The Problem of Poverty in the United States The problem of increasing poverty is one of the major political issues in the United States, which became especially agile after the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the difficult economic situation all over […]
• Poverty and Unemployment Due to Increased Taxation The government on its side defended the move while trying to justify the new measures’ benefits, a move that would still not benefit the country.
• Poverty as a Global Social Problem For example, the research shows that Kibera is the largest slum in the country, and this is where many people move to settle after losing hope of getting employed in towns.
• Researching the Problem of Poverty However, the rich people and the rich countries reduce poverty to some extent by providing jobs and markets to the poor, but the help is too little compared to the benefits they get thus accelerating […]
• Poverty, Social Class, and Intersectionality I prefer the structural approach to the issue as I believe the created structures are responsible for the existence of diverse types of oppression.
• Wealth and Poverty: The Christian Teaching on Wealth and Poverty To illustrate the gap between the world’s richest and the world’s poorest, a recent UN publication reported that the wealth of the three richest persons in the world is greater than the combined wealth of […]
• Guns Do Not Kill, Poverty Does It is widely accepted that stricter gun control policies are instrumental in alleviating the problem, as they are supposed to reduce the rate of firearm-related deaths, limiting gun access to individuals at-risk of participating in […]
• Poverty’s Effects on Delinquency The economic status of people determines their social class and the manner in which they get their basic needs. Seeing these things and the kind of life rich people lead motivates the poor to commit […]
• The Criminalization of Poverty in Canada In this regard, with a special focus on Canada, the objective of this essay is to investigate how public policy has transformed alongside the public perception of social welfare reform.
• The Issue of Vicious Circle of Poverty in Brazil The persistence of poverty, regardless of the many shocks that every state receives in the normal course of its survival, raises the feeling that underdevelopment is a condition of equilibrium and that there are pressures […]
• Community Health Needs: Poverty Generally, the higher the level of poverty, the worse the diet, and hence the higher the chances of developing diabetes. Consequently, a considerable disparity in the prevalence of diabetes occurs between communities with high levels […]
• “Poverty, Race, and the Contexts of Achievement” by Maryah Stella Fram et al. The article “Poverty, race, and the contexts of achievement: examining the educational experience of children in the U.S. Multilevel models were then applied in the analyses of how children varied in their reading scores depending […]
• Microeconomic Perspective on Poverty Evolution in Pakistan The periodic spike in poverty levels, notwithstanding economic growth, implies incongruous policy functionality in relation to drivers of poverty and the subsequent failure to improve the indicators.
• The Impact of Poverty on Children Under the Age of 11 The strengths of the Marxist views on poverty are in the structural approach to the problem. Overall, the Marxist theory offers a radical solution to the problem of child poverty.
• Poverty Reduction and Natural Assets Therefore, the most efficient way to increase the efficiency of agriculture and reduce its environmental impacts is ensuring the overall economic growth in the relevant region.
• Corporate Social Responsibility & Poverty Alleviation Researchers state that “preventing and managing the negative impacts of the core business on the poor” are essential indicators of the social responsibility of the company.
• Health, Poverty, and Social Equity: The Global Response to the Ebola Outbreak Canada and Australia, as well as several countries in the Middle East and Africa, were the most active proponents of this ban, halting the movements for both people and goods from states affected by the […]
• Health, Poverty, and Social Equity: Indigenous Peoples of Canada Another problem that much of northern Canada’s Indigenous Peoples face is the availability of healthcare services and people’s inability to access medical help.
• The Problem of Childhood Poverty Unequal income distribution, adult poverty, government policies that exclude children and premature pregnancy are some of the items from the long list of childhood poverty causes. Before discussing the causes and effects of childhood poverty, […]
• Individualistic Concepts and Structural Views on Poverty in American Society The concepts presented in the book Poverty and power help to better understand the content of the article and the reasons for such a different attitude of people to the same problem.
• Poor Kids: The Impact of Poverty on Youth Nevertheless, the environment of constant limitations shapes the minds of children, their dreams and the paths they pursue in life, and, most importantly, what they make of themselves.
• Poverty: Causes and Effects on the Population and Country Thesis: There are a great number of factors and issues that lead a certain part of the population to live in poverty and the input that such great numbers of people could provide, would be […]
• The Internet and Poverty in Society The information that can be found on the web is a very useful resource but at the same time it is important to consider several things with the treatment and examination of the presented information.
• Poverty in Africa: Impact of the Economy Growth Rate Thus, a conclusion can be made that economic growth in Africa will result in the social stability of the local population.
• Poverty and Disrespect in “Coming of Age in Mississippi” by Anne Moody Life was not fair to a little Anne the chapters about her childhood are alike to a chain of unfortunate events that happened to her and her relatives.
• Vietnam’s Economic Growth and Poverty & Inequality A significant part of the population was active in employment, and this means that the numerous income-generating activities improved the economy of this country.
• Poverty and Disasters in the United States Focusing on the precaution measures and the drilling techniques that will help survive in case of a natural disaster is one of the most common tools for securing the population.
• Intro to Sociology: Poverty It is challenging to pinpoint the actual and not mythological reasons for the presence of poverty in America. The former can be summed up as a “culture of poverty”, which suggests that the poor see […]
• The Notion of “Poverty” Is a Key Word of a Modern Society As far as the countries of the Third World are deprived of these possibilities, their development is hampered and the problem of poverty has become a chronic disease of the society.
• The Problem of Poverty in Africa The major aim of the study is to identify the causes of poverty and propose best strategies that can help Africans come out of poverty.
• Poverty Sustainability in Sub-Saharan Countries: The Role of NGOs The position of research and statistics in undertaking social-counting work is not queried. It is after the research method is used in other tribulations of the charity that gaps emerge between management and research.
• The Effects of Poverty Within Criminal Justice The approach used in this study is deductive since the reasoning in the study proceeds from the general principle regarding the fact that poverty has a role to play in the administering of fairness in […]
• The Poverty Rates in the USA Poverty in the U. Officially the rate of poverty was at14.3%.
• Poverty in America: A Paradox Many people especially the young people living in other countries and more so in developed countries wish to immigrate to America instead of working hard to achieve the dream of better opportunities.
• Values and Ethics: Poverty in Canada The case study1 has indicated for instance, that the number of people living in poverty in 2003 is at 4. A group of individuals would therefore be granted the mandate to lead the others in […]
• War and Poverty Connection in Developing Countries The scholars claim that conflict and war in most nations have been found to exacerbate the rate of poverty in the affected nations.
• Cultures and Prejudice: Poverty Factors For instance, if the two cultures had in the past interacted in a negative way, the poor culture directs all the blame to the well up culture.
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• Poverty: An Echo of Capitalism
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• Poverty and Challenges in Finding Solutions
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• The Relationship Between Poverty and Education
• Divorce Outcomes: Poverty and Instability
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• Detroit Poverty and “Focus Hope” Organization
• Poverty Controversy in the USA
• Poverty as the Deprivation of Capabilities
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• The Solution to World Poverty by Peter Singer
• The Poverty Across the US Culture
• How Racial Segregation Contributes to Minority’s Poverty?
• Catholic Dealing With Poverty and Homelessness
• Human Capital and Poverty in Scottsdale
• Global Poverty Studies and Their Importance
• The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform
• Challenges of Social Integration: Poverty
• Globalization and the Issue of Poverty: Making the World a Better Place
• The Economic Effect of Issuing Food Stamps to Those in Poverty
• Business and Pollution Inequality in Poor States
• “Facing Poverty With a Rich Girl’s Habits” by Suki Kim
• What Should You Do? Poverty Issue
• Causes of Poverty Traps in an Economy, Its Results and Ways of Avoiding Them
• Tourism Contribution to Poverty Reduction
• Millennium Development Goals – Energy and Poverty Solutions
• Sociological Indicators of Energy Poverty
• Energy and Poverty Solutions – Non-Traditional Cookstoves
• Energy and Poverty Solutions – World Bank
• How do Migration and Urbanization Bring About Urban Poverty in Developing Countries?
• Poverty and Domestic Violence
• The Rise of Extremist Groups, Disparity and Poverty
• Measuring Poverty and Social Exclusion in Australia
• Does Poverty Lead to Terrorism?
• “Urban and Rural Estimates of Poverty: Recent Advances in Spatial Microsimulation in Australia” by Tanton, R, Harding, A, and McNamara, J
• Importance of Foreign Aid in Poverty Reducing
• Hispanic Childhood Poverty in the United States
• How Poverty Affects Children Development?
• Why Is Poverty Important in Contemporary Security Studies?
• Millennium Development Goals in Kenya, Ivory Coast, Haiti, and Chad
• Development Is No Longer the Solution to Poverty
• Issues Underlying Global Poverty and Provision of Aid
• Films Comparison: “The Fields” by Roland Joffe and “Hotel Rwanda” by Terry George
• Poverty Prevalence in the United States
• Terrorism, Poverty and Financial Instability
• Global Poverty and Education
• Critical Analyses of the Climate of Fear Report From Southern Poverty Law Center
• How World Vision International Contributes to Poverty Reduction
• Global Poverty, Social Poverty and Education
• Global Poverty, Social Policy, and Education
• Poverty Reduction in Africa, Central America and Asia
• Does Parental Involvement and Poverty Affect Children’s Education and Their Overall Performance?
• African Poverty: To Aid, or Not to Aid
• Poverty Fighting in Saudi Arabia and in USA
• Technological Development in Trade and Its Impacts on Poverty
• Social Dynamics: The Southern Poverty Law Centre
• Property, Urban Poverty and Spatial Marginalization
• Rural Poverty in Indonesia
• Is Poverty of Poor Countries in Anyway Due to Wealth of the Rich?
• Poverty and Gender Violence in Congo
• Correlation Between Poverty and Obesity
• Fight Poverty, Fight Illiteracy in Mississippi Initiative
• Civil War and Poverty: “The Bottom Billion” by Paul Collier
• Analytical Research: Poverty in Thailand: Peculiarities and Perspectives
• Poverty Indicators in Developing Countries
• Poverty, Homelessness and Discrimination in Australia: The Case of the Aboriginal
• Africa’s Poverty: The Influence of Western States
• Susceptibility of Women and Aboriginal People to Poverty in Canada
• Social Issues; Crime and Poverty in Camden
• MDG Poverty Goals May Be Achieved, but Child Mortality Is Not Improving
• Microcredit: A Tool for Poverty Alleviation
• Impacts of Global Poverty Resistance
• Reducing Poverty: Unilever and Oxfam
• Poverty in the United States
• The Mothers Who Are Not Single: Striving to Avoid Poverty in Single-Parent Families
• Effect of Poverty on Children Cognitive and Learning Ability
• Sweatshops and Third World Poverty
• War on Poverty: Poverty Problem in US
• Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right and the UN Declaration of Human Rights
• The Causes of Poverty Concentration in the Modern World
• Poverty in Saudi Arabia
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• Poverty as a Peculiarity of the Economical Development
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• Poverty Among Women and Aboriginals
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• Poverty in America Rural and Urban Difference (Education)
• What Is the Relationship Between Race, Poverty and Prison?
• Poverty in Russia During the Late Nineteenth Century
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• Why Poverty Rates are Higher Among Single Black Mothers
• Poverty and Its Impact on Global Health: Research Methodologies
• Poverty Concerns in Today’s Society
• Literature Study on the Modern Poverty Concerns
• Poverty and Wealth in “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara
• Peter Singer on Resolving the World Poverty
• Concepts of Prenatal Drug Exposure vs. Poverty on Infants
• UN Summit in New York: Ending Global Poverty
• Why Has Poverty Increased in Zimbabwe?
• Should Private Donations Help Eliminate Child Poverty?
• Why Was Poverty Re-Discovered in Britain in the Late 1950s and Early 1960?
• Why Does Child Labour Persist With Declining Poverty?
• Why Are Child Poverty Rates Higher in Britain Than in Germany?
• What Are the Principles and Practices for Measuring Child Poverty in Rich Countries?
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• What Is the Relationship Between Income Distribution and Poverty Reduction in the UK?
• What Are the Pros and Cons of Poverty in Latin America?
• Should Poverty Researchers Worry About Inequality?
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• What Is the Connection Between Poverty and Crime?
• Why Have Some Indian States Done Better Than Others at Reducing Rural Poverty?
• What Is the Relationship Between Lack of Education and Poverty?
• Why Are Child Poverty Rates So Persistently High in Spain?
• Trade Liberalisation and Poverty: What Are the Links?
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It Is Expensive to Be Poor

Minimum-wage jobs are physically demanding, have unpredictable schedules, and pay so meagerly that workers can’t save up enough to move on.

Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson made a move that was unprecedented at the time and remains unmatched by succeeding administrations. He announced a War on Poverty, saying that its “chief weapons” would be “better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities.”

So starting in 1964 and for almost a decade, the federal government poured at least some of its resources in the direction they should have been going all along: toward those who were most in need. Longstanding programs such as Head Start, the Legal Services Program, and the Job Corps were created. Medicaid was established. Poverty among seniors was significantly reduced by improvements to Social Security.

Johnson seemed to have established the principle that it is the responsibility of the government to intervene on behalf of the disadvantaged and the deprived. But there was never enough money for the fight against poverty, and Johnson found himself increasingly distracted by another and deadlier war—the one in Vietnam. Although underfunded, the War on Poverty still managed to provoke an intense backlash from conservative intellectuals and politicians.

In their view, government programs could do nothing to help the poor, because poverty arises from the twisted psychology of the poor themselves. By the Ronald Reagan era, it had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology that poverty is caused not by low wages or a lack of jobs and education, but by the bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles of the poor.

Picking up on this theory, pundits and politicians have bemoaned the character failings and bad habits of the poor for at least the past 50 years. In their view, the poor are shiftless, irresponsible, and prone to addiction. They have too many children and fail to get married. So if they suffer from grievous material deprivation, if they run out of money between paychecks, if they do not always have food on their tables—then they have no one to blame but themselves.

In the 1990s, with a bipartisan attack on welfare, this kind of prejudice against the poor took a drastically misogynistic turn. Poor single mothers were identified as a key link in what was called “the cycle of poverty.” By staying at home and collecting welfare, they set a toxic example for their children, who—important policy makers came to believe—would be better off being cared for by paid child-care workers or even, as Newt Gingrich proposed, in orphanages.

Welfare “reform” was the answer, and it was intended not only to end financial support for imperiled families, but also to cure the self-induced “culture of poverty” that was supposedly at the root of their misery. The original welfare reform bill—a bill, it should be recalled, that was signed by President Bill Clinton—included an allocation of $100 million for “chastity training” for low-income women.

The Great Recession should have put the victim-blaming theory of poverty to rest. In the space of only a few months, millions of people entered the ranks of the officially poor—not only laid-off blue-collar workers, but also downsized tech workers, managers, lawyers, and other once-comfortable professionals. No one could accuse these “nouveau poor” Americans of having made bad choices or bad lifestyle decisions. They were educated, hardworking, and ambitious, and now they were also poor—applying for food stamps, showing up in shelters, lining up for entry-level jobs in retail. This would have been the moment for the pundits to finally admit the truth: Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

For most women in poverty, in both good times and bad, the shortage of money arises largely from inadequate wages. When I worked on my book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America , I took jobs as a waitress, nursing-home aide, hotel housekeeper, Walmart associate, and a maid with a house-cleaning service. I did not choose these jobs because they were low-paying. I chose them because these are the entry-level jobs most readily available to women.

What I discovered is that, in many ways, these jobs are a trap: They pay so little that you cannot accumulate even a couple of hundred dollars to help you make the transition to a better-paying job. They typically give you no control over your work schedule, making it impossible to arrange for child care or take a second job. And in many of these jobs, even young women soon begin to experience the physical deterioration—especially knee and back problems—that can bring a painful end to their work life.

I was also dismayed to find that, in some ways, it is actually more expensive to be poor than not poor. If you can’t afford the first month’s rent and security deposit you need in order to rent an apartment, you may get stuck in an overpriced residential motel. If you don’t have a kitchen or even a refrigerator and a microwave, you will find yourself falling back on convenience-store food, which—in addition to its nutritional deficits—is also alarmingly overpriced. If you need a loan, as most poor people eventually do, you will end up paying an interest rate many times higher than what a more affluent borrower would be charged. To be poor—especially with children to support and care for—is a perpetual high-wire act.

Most private-sector employers offer no sick days, and many will fire a person who misses a day of work, even to stay home with a sick child. A nonfunctioning car can also mean lost pay and sudden expenses. A broken headlight invites a ticket, plus a fine greater than the cost of a new headlight, and possible court costs. If a creditor decides to get nasty, a court summons may be issued, often leading to an arrest warrant. No amount of training in financial literacy can prepare someone for such exigencies—or make up for an income that is impossibly low to start with. Instead of treating low-wage mothers as the struggling heroines they are, our political culture still tends to view them as miscreants and contributors to the “cycle of poverty.”

If anything, the criminalization of poverty has accelerated since the recession, with growing numbers of states drug-testing applicants for temporary assistance, imposing steep fines for school truancy, and imprisoning people for debt. Such measures constitute a cruel inversion of the Johnson-era principle that it is the responsibility of government to extend a helping hand to the poor. Sadly, this has become the means by which the wealthiest country in the world manages to remain complacent in the face of alarmingly high levels of poverty: by continuing to blame poverty not on the economy or inadequate social supports, but on the poor themselves.

It’s time to revive the notion of a collective national responsibility to the poorest among us, who are disproportionately women and especially women of color. Until that happens, we need to wake up to the fact that the underpaid women who clean our homes and offices, prepare and serve our meals, and care for our elderly—earning wages that do not provide enough to live on—are the true philanthropists of our society.

GREAT THINKERS John Locke

An essay on the poor law.

Recommended edition:  Political Essays , ed. Mark Goldie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 182- 198.

If the cause of this evil be well looked into, we humbly conceive it will be found to have proceeded neither from scarcity of provisions, nor from want of employment for the poor, since the goodness of God has blessed these times with plenty, no less than the former, and a long peace during those reigns gave us as plentiful a trade as ever. The growth of the poor must therefore have some other cause, and it can be nothing else but the relaxation of discipline and the corruption of manners; virtue and industry being as constant companions on the one side as vice and idleness are on the other.

Online: Bowling Green State Text (Free Version) Amazon (Recommended Edition)

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Suffering of the Poor as a Social Problem in Christmas Carol

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