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American Heritage Dictionary:
pov·er·ty |
[Middle English poverte, from Old French, from Latin paupertās, from pauper, poor.]
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Barron's Business Dictionary:
poverty |
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Roget's Thesaurus:
poverty |
noun
Antonyms by Answers.com:
poverty |
Definition: want; extreme need, often financial
Antonyms: abundance, affluence, luxury, richness, wealth
Oxford Dictionary of Geography:
poverty |
A concept difficult to define. Absolute poverty may be defined as an individual's inability to satisfy basic needs in food, clothing, shelter, and health. In more economically developed countries relative poverty is more often discussed; in the UK this term applies to those households where annual income (including all benefits) is below 50% (sometimes 60%) of the median—this illustrates the problem of where to draw the ‘poverty line’. Data for poverty in the UK are provided by CACI Ltd, a micro-market research organization which supplies data of gross household income for all postcodes in the UK, based on a survey of over 4 million households, and the UK government index of local deprivation.
It is argued that poverty is socially constructed—‘embedded in a nexus of production relations diffused throughout society’.
A poverty profile is a ‘snapshot of the poor’ (
The latter may identify target groups for poverty alleviation programmes, which ‘should focus on people's functionings and capabilities, not on income- or consumption-based definitions’ (A. Sen 1992 39). In less economically developed countries such programmes include food for work programmes (from which, due to cultural constraints, women are often excluded), capital loans, which can increase indebtedness, the establishment of income generation projects, the provision of credit, especially micro-credit, land reform, and the strengthening of legal entitlement to land; for example, for sharecroppers. Poverty alleviation programmes may fail greatly to improve living standards but can still succeed in increasing the self-respect of the beneficiaries when they result in qualitative shifts in social relations.
Within the UK, variations in poverty are demographic and spatial. Demographic ageing has compounded the problem of pensioner poverty, which exhibits marked spatial variations; pensioners are best off in East Anglia and worst off in the North region (
Gale Encyclopedia of US History:
Poverty |
While aspects of poverty in the United States have changed significantly since colonial times, debates about how best to alleviate this condition continue to revolve around issues of morality as well as economics. In eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century America, most people worked throughout their lives at a succession of unstable jobs, under unhealthy conditions. Widows, immigrants, the ill, and the elderly generally had few sources of support outside their own poor families. Town-ships and counties resorted to such drastic solutions as auctioning off poor local residents to local farmers. Indigent nonresidents would simply be sent out of town. The primary form of public assistance, known as "out-door relief," consisted of food, fuel, or small amounts of money. Poorhouses were founded to serve the indigent more cheaply than outdoor relief while discouraging them from applying for further public assistance. Especially in the North, poorhouses attempted to improve their residents' personal habits. Supervised work, such as farming, weaving, and furniture building, was required; alcohol was forbidden.
Poorhouses became notorious for overcrowding, filth, disease, and corrupt management. Reformers also increasingly criticized outdoor relief for demoralizing the poor and attracting idlers and drunks. By the Civil War (1861–1865), private relief associations run by evangelical Protestants, immigrant groups, and upper-class women's groups had begun to assume a more bureaucratic form. The Charity Organization Society, founded in Buffalo, New York, in 1877 (chapters were established in most U.S. cities by 1892) attempted to systematize relief by sending volunteers to investigate the circumstances of each applicant and advise them on how to live a respectable life. Handouts were to be given only in cases of extreme need. This approach, known as "scientific charity," proved impractical. Yet elements of its method evolved into the caseworker system of social welfare agencies.
At the end of the nineteenth century, one-fifth to one-quarter of the poorhouse population was long-term—primarily elderly people, along with the mentally ill and the chronically sick. Most inmates—out-of-work men, or women giving birth to illegitimate children—stayed only for a week or two at a time. Poor children were generally separated from their parents and moved into orphan asylums. Increasingly, the able-bodied homeless slept on police station floors and in the new shelters (municipal houses or wayfarers' lodges) that began to open around the turn of the century.
Defining Poverty Levels
Attempts to define poverty levels in the United States have long been arbitrary and controversial. From about 1899 to 1946, poverty minimum subsistence levels were based on "standard budgets"—goods and services a family of a certain size would need to live at a certain level. In his 1904 book Poverty Social Worker, Robert Hunter set one of the first national poverty line figures: below $460 annually for a five-person family in the North; below $300 for the same size family in the South. A study commissioned by the Congressional Joint Committee on the Economic Report in 1949 determined the poverty line to be $1,000 for farm families and $2,000 for nonfarm families.
In 1965, the federal government adopted landmark poverty thresholds, devised by economist Molly Orshansky, that took into account household sizes and types (such as elderly or nonelderly). Specifying an amount of money adequate for a family might be fraught with difficulties, Orshansky wrote, but it was possible to determine a level that was clearly insufficient. She based her figures on information from the Department of Agriculture, using the "economy" food plan—the cheapest of the four standard food plans, intended for "temporary or emergency use when funds are low"—and a survey showing that families of three or more people spent about one-third of their after-tax income on food. Lacking minimum-need standards for other household necessities (such as housing, clothing, and transportation), Orshansky simply multiplied these food costs by three to determine minimum family budgets.
In 1969, the thresholds began to be indexed to the Consumer Price Index rather than the cost of the economy food plan. The weighted average poverty thresholds established by the U.S. Census Bureau for 2001 range from $8,494 for an individual 65 or older to $39,413 for a family of nine people or more with one related child under eighteen.
This measurement of poverty has been widely criticized. It does not account for noncash government benefits, such as free school lunches or food stamps, and it fails to account for geographic differences in the cost of living. Critics also believe the thresholds do not properly reflect the overall rise in U.S. income since the 1960s.
Who Are the Poor?
Measurements of the extent of poverty in the United States depend, of course, on how it is defined. Poverty is a relative term; it must be understood differently for an affluent postindustrial culture than for a developing country. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, "People are poverty-stricken when their income, even if adequate for survival, falls markedly behind that of the community."
In his groundbreaking 1962 book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, Michael Harrington called attention to a group of between 40 million and 50 million Americans (20 to 25 percent of the population at that time) living without adequate nutrition, housing, medical care, and education—people deprived of the standard of living shared by the rest of society. Harrington derived his figures from several sources, including a late-1950s survey by sociologist Robert J. Lampman and family budget levels from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In 2000, 11.3 percent of the population—31.1 million people—were considered poor, continuing a decline in poverty that began during the economic boom of the mid-1990s, when the poor accounted for 14.5 percent of the population. Before then, the last major decline occurred between 1960, when the rate was 22.2 percent, and 1973 (11.1 percent).
As of 2002, child poverty rates also had fallen since their peak in 1993. Yet more than 11 million children—16.2 percent of all Americans 18 years old or younger—were living in poverty, about the same number recorded in 1980. This group included 17 percent of all children under the age of six. About 5 million children were living in extreme poverty, in families with incomes less than half of the poverty line. Among African Americans, the childhood poverty rate was 30 percent; among Latino families it was 28 percent.
The enormity of this continuing problem cannot be overstressed. The infant mortality rate is more than 50 percent higher in poor families. Children growing up in poverty are more likely to drop out of high school and become parents in their teens, more likely to have junk food diets that predispose them to childhood obesity and diabetes, more likely to suffer chronic health conditions and mental retardation, and more likely to lack positive role models for academic and job success. Thirty-five percent of single-parent families live in poverty, more than twice the national average. Teenagers in poor families are more likely than other teens to be single parents. Poor single parents attempting to join the workforce are seriously hampered by the need to find affordable quality health care and child care (which can consume more than 20 percent of a poor working mother's income).
Another way to look at poverty by the numbers is to see how total income is shared in the United States and whether the poor are closing the gap between themselves and the rest of society. Harrington noted that the increase in the share of personal income earned by the poorest one-fifth of the population between 1935 and 1945 was reversed between 1945 and 1958. The poor increased their share in the late 1960s, only to see these gains reversed once more, beginning in the 1980s.
In 1968, the Citizens Board of Inquiry Into Hunger and Malnutrition in America estimated that 14 million Americans were going hungry. Nearly thirty years later, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that nearly 35 million Americans were unable to supply their families with sufficient amounts of food. Other poverty markers include lack of education: The poverty rate for high school dropouts is three times the rate for those who have a high school diploma.
In 1960, the federal Commission on Rural Poverty report, The People Left Behind, found that nearly one-third of rural Americans lived in poverty. Their homes were substandard, their access to health care was rare, and their education—particularly among the children of black field workers—was minimal. By the late 1990s, the percentage of poor rural Americans declined to 16 percent, partly due to mechanization and closure of coal mines in Appalachia, which caused workers to migrate to urban areas. Electricity and plumbing are now standard, but isolated rural residents have fewer child care options and social and educational services than their urban peers.
The nearly 9 million rural poor—one-fifth of the poor population—are 55 percent white, 32 percent black, and 8 percent Hispanic. Migrant field workers from Mexico and Central America, who struggle to support families on substandard pay, generally live in crowded, makeshift housing. Native Americans are also hard hit by poverty; more than a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. On reservations, the unemployment rate is three times the average for rest of the U.S. population, with high levels of alcoholism and tuberculosis as well.
While the stereotype of the poor is of a group that goes from cradle to grave without improving its lot, there is substantial movement in and out of poverty. About one-third of the poor in any given year will not be among the poor the following year. Only 12 percent of the poor re-main poor for five or more years. A national study in the 1990s found that more than half of these "poverty spells" lasted one year or less. The reasons people slide into poverty include divorce, job loss, and incomes that do not keep pace with the cost of living, especially in low-wage occupations.
Other common misconceptions about the poor are not borne out by the figures. While poverty rates are greater among blacks and Hispanics than among other ethnic groups, non-Hispanic whites comprise 48 percent of the poor, African Americans account for 22.1 percent, and Hispanics, 22 percent. Less than half (42 percent) of the poor live in central cities, and less than 25 percent live in inner-city ghettos. Surprisingly, more than one-third (36 percent) of the poor live in the suburbs.
Official poverty figures do not include the homeless (or people in institutions—jails, mental institutions, foster care, nursing homes), but the best estimates put the homeless population at anywhere from 500,000 to more than 800,000. The ranks of the homeless swelled when enlightened social policy of the 1970s—deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill with the goal of reintegrating them into society—fell afoul of budget cutbacks and lack of community follow-through in the 1980s.
There are many economic and social reasons poverty remains a major problem in the United States. As American companies have opened manufacturing plants abroad, where labor is cheaper and lower benefit standards are the norm, well-paying, of ten unionized, jobs for blue-collar workers have disappeared from American cities. Other jobs have moved to the car-dependent suburbs, out of reach to a population largely dependent on public transportation. Meanwhile, the expanding service sector is split between high-paying professional employment in business and technology, and low-wage service industry jobs (janitors, maids, fast-food and retail workers). While one person is employed in about 60 percent of poor families, minimum-wage jobs—of ten lacking health and other benefits—do not pay enough to keep families from poverty. With little or no accumulated wealth, the poor and their families have no savings to fall back on if they lose a job or have unanticipated expenses.
The Welfare System
The foundation of the welfare system and the government's only program of mass public assistance—the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—was established during the Great Depression as part of the 1935 Economic Security Act. The federal government paid half the cost of the program for the families of needy children and established broad guidelines. State governments picked up the rest of the cost, set payment levels, and administered the program. Food Stamps (Food and Nutritional Assistance) also originated during the New Deal, as a means of supplementing farm income with coupons that could be redeemed for food.
Social programs in the United States tend to operate in thirty-year cycles. The "rediscovery" of poverty after the Great Depression began with the publication of such influential books as John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958) and Michael Harrington's The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962), in which he argued that the poor—in particular, children, the elderly, and nonwhites, increasingly isolated in urban ghettos—had become invisible to the middle-class white majority. Although President John F. Kennedy's support of antipoverty proposals was cut short by his assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a "War on Poverty" in his 1964 inaugural speech. The success of Johnson's Great Society program—which included urban renewal and a broadscale fight against poverty, disease, and lack of access to education and housing—was greatly helped by relatively low unemployment and inflation, a federal budget surplus, the growing civil rights movement, and an increasing level of public confidence in sociological studies. Certain aspects of these social programs were enhanced in the 1970s, under the administration of President Richard Nixon.
In 1967, the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson to study the causes of the riots that swept American inner cities that year, recommended that the federal government establish "uniform national standards" of welfare aid "at least as high as the annual 'poverty level' of income" (which was then $3,335 for an urban family of four). The commission also advised that states be required to participate in the Unemployed Parents program of the AFDC and that welfare mothers of young children no longer be required to work.
AFDC cash benefits were pegged to the number of children in the family, which caused some critics to believe that women on welfare were having more children to boost the amount of their checks, or separating from the father of their children in order to qualify for this benefit. (However, while the proportion of mother-only households increased during the years of the program, the real value of the payments decreased.) About one-third of AFDC recipients were found to remain in the program for six or more years. The Family Support Act of 1988 expanded AFDC benefits to families with two unemployed parents and required absent parents to pay child support. Eight years later, however, AFDC was eliminated and replaced by block grants to states, which administer their own programs.
President Kennedy revived the food stamp program in 1961; nine years later, Congress set a minimum benefit level for food stamps—which were now free—and offered them at a low cost to families over the poverty line; eligibility was broadened later in the 1970s. All funds for the program, administered by state welfare agencies, are provided by the federal government.
Under Medicaid, established in 1965, the federal government pays matching funds to states to cover a portion of medical expenses for low-income elderly, blind, and disabled persons, and for members of low-income families with dependent children. States have considerable latitude in setting eligibility, benefits, and payments to service providers. In 1963, a physician had never examined 20 percent of Americans below the poverty level; in 1970, this number fell to 8 percent. Prenatal visits by pregnant women increased dramatically, which contributed to an overall drop in infant mortality of 33 percent (50 percent in some poor areas) between 1965 and 1972.
Initiated in 1972, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) gives cash benefits to elderly, blind, and disabled persons in order to bring their income to federally established minimum levels. The program is administered by the Social Security Administration, with some benefits supplemented by individual states.
Beginning in the 1970s, Section 8 Low-Income Housing—administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)—initiated payments to private developers who set aside apartments at below-market rates for low-income families. Now known as the Housing Choice Voucher Program, it accounts for more than half of federal funds spent on housing for the poor; low-rent public housing accounts for another 25 percent. Only about 19 percent of the poor receive housing benefits, however, compared with about 40 percent receiving cash benefits from AFDC and SSI. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), expanded under the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Bill Clinton, gives workers a tax break based on their earned income, adjusted gross income, and the number of children they have. In 2001, the income of recipients with no qualifying children had to be less than $10,710; with two or more qualifying children, the income limit was $32,121. This program was appealing to policymakers because it rewards workers (benefits increase with increased income), helps families with children, and works through the tax code, with no need for a separate bureaucracy.
Other social programs have increased the availability of services to the poor, including day care for children, health care, work-training, special programs for agricultural workers, and free legal assistance. While Social Security, instituted in 1935, is not based on need—it is based on the amount of Social Security tax paid on wages—this entitlement, with its substantial monthly payments, has played a huge role in keeping the elderly from poverty.
The Welfare Backlash
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the phenomenon of the "inner city" as a cauldron of joblessness, major crime, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, and welfare dependency began to make headlines. For more than a decade, liberals had decried the low level of benefits welfare clients received while conservatives argued that welfare breeds dependency. Increasingly, welfare applicants were the offspring of welfare families. Tabloid stories of "welfare queens" using their government stipend to buy Cadillacs only inflamed the debate. Many agreed that welfare served to tide people over when they hit bottom but created a subclass of citizens with little dignity or self-respect.
During the Reagan administration, many social programs were reduced in scope or eliminated. The self-perpetuating nature of poverty noted by influential sociologist Oscar Lewis—who coined the phrase "the culture of poverty"—was seized upon by conservatives eager to end welfare. Lewis's sympathetic description of the way six-year-old slum children in South America had become so accustomed to a hopeless view of the world that they seem unlikely to be able to escape from poverty was intended to shift attention from individual poverty victims to the culture of impoverished communities. But conservatives used his views to argue that the children of ghetto families lack a work ethic. This sentiment was exacerbated during the 1980s by lack of income growth among middle-class wage earners, which made many leery of "handouts" going to a group of ten perceived as undeserving. (In fact, nearly half the income the poor received came from wages; welfare accounted for only 25 percent of the total.)
By the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton was promising to "end welfare as we know it." The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 officially ended the entitlement status of welfare and (as revised in 1997) denied assistance to newly arrived legal emigrants. The goal of this program was to reduce the welfare rolls, increase the number of working poor, and reduce out-of-wedlock births.
AFDC was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a $16.5 billion block grant program to the states to fund "welfare-to-work" programs. Unlike AFDC, which supplied federal matching funds of one to four dollars for every dollar in state appropriations, TANF's block grants are not tied to state expenditures. The new rules require that 50 percent of able-bodied adults receiving assistance be cut off after two years, and that 80 percent of each state's welfare recipients receive no more than five years of aid in a lifetime. Adults who do not have children under age six must work at least 30 hours per week to receive food stamps; unmarried teenage mothers receiving welfare benefits must attend school and live with an adult.
The burden on former welfare recipients has been significant. Finding and keeping even a temporary, low-paid job is generally a daunting undertaking for someone with a shaky or nonexistent job history, few skills, and little experience with the schedules and social skills working people take for granted. People new to the job market of ten must find the money for child care and transportation to work. Cut off from Medicaid benefits after one year and usually uninsured at work, this population has become even more vulnerable to health crises.
Changing Views of the Poor
The prevailing nineteenth-century view of the poor, whether religious or sectarian, rested on the assumption that weak moral fiber was to blame for their situation. In the twentieth century, thinking about poverty shifted to a greater emphasis on social and environmental factors. Robert Hunter, author of Poverty (1904), boldly declared that most of the poor "are bred of miserable and unjust social conditions. …" In Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), Jane Addams—cofounder of Hull House, which offered community services to the poor in Chicago—questioned the reformers' insistence on thrift and hard work as specific virtues for the poor, because the rich were not held to the same standards. The best way to ensure virtuous behavior on the part of the poor, she wrote, was to push for shorter hours, better wages (including a level of pay for women that would keep them from turning to prostitution), restrictions on child labor, and alternatives to the temptations of the saloon.
Yet overreliance on government handouts continued to be seen as a moral issue even in the midst of the Great Depression, when New Deal policies were created to promote economic recovery, not specifically to eliminate poverty. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber."
In the 1960s, the reigning belief was that behavior associated with the ghetto was due not to ingrained cultural characteristics, but rather to segregation and a history of limited opportunities that—coupled with bitter personal experiences—made the prospect of a better life through hard work seem unrealistic. Urban field studies undertaken in the late 1960s were interpreted in light of this point of view.
Black ghettos were once home to middle-class as well as lower-class African Americans. As William Julius Wilson has pointed out, this social geography offered young people a range of role models and job contacts. By the 1970s, the growth of suburbs and civil rights legislation had enabled middle-class African Americans to move out of the inner city. Without an adequate tax base to fund good schools and other city services or middle-class incomes to support banks, shops, and other services, neighborhoods declined. High-density housing projects built in the 1950s to replace old slums tore apart the tight-knit fabric of communities and created an apathetic culture that became the festering center of unemployment, drug addiction, and crime. The inner-city population is also a particularly youthful one, and the fourteen-to twenty-five-year-old group is statistically more likely to commit crime, be welfare dependent, and have out-of-wedlock births.
One of the most controversial documents of the 1960s was "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a white paper issued by the Department of Labor in 1965. Moynihan wrote that the instability of black families was a primary cause of poverty, and that welfare policies should encourage intact families and work as a means of integrating these families into the mainstream. Critics took Moynihan to task for blaming the poor rather than advocating societal change.
Another influential book, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward (1971), proposed that welfare recipients should not be encouraged to work at a menial job just to bring in some money and avoid idleness—they should hold out for jobs that pay a living wage—and that welfare is necessary to the economic survival of women, whose jobs traditionally pay less than men's.
Charles Murray's book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, published in 1984, was one of several prominent studies that decried liberal social policies for creating a welfare-dependent population during the 1970s. In Murray's view, the federal government should withdraw from the welfare business, and the poor—except for the truly deserving, whose needs would be served by private charity and local government—should take responsibility for their own lives. Murray's critics say the economic downturn was responsible for increased unemployment, which in turn made more people poor during the 1970s. Also to blame, they say, was a decline in real wages—the actual purchasing power of income—and the effect of baby boomers entering the job market. Critics maintain that the poverty rate would have risen even farther had Great Society programs not been in place.
Bibliography
Bane, Mary Jo, and David T. Ellwood. Welfare Realities: From Rhetoric to Reform. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Blank, Rebecca M. It Takes a Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting Poverty. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Citro, Constance F., and Robert T. Michael. Measuring Poverty: A New Approach. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1995.
Copeland, Warren R. And the Poor Get Welfare: The Ethics of Poverty in the United States. Nashville, Tenn.: Abington Press, 1994.
Danziger, Sheldon H., et al. Confronting Poverty: Prescriptions for Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Duncan, Cynthia M. Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999.
Edin, Kathryn, and Laura Lein. Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997.
Harrington, Michael. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. New York: Macmillan. 1962.
Jencks, Christopher. Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
———, and Paul E. Peterson, eds. The Urban Underclass. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1991.
Katz, Michael B. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America. New York: Basic Books, 1996.
Lavelle, Robert, et al. America's New War on Poverty: A Reader for Action. San Francisco: KQED Books, 1995.
Moynihan, Daniel P. Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty. New York: The Free Press, 1969.
Murray, Charles. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950– 1980. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
O'Hare, William P. A New Look at Poverty in America. Washington, D.C.: Populations Reference Bureau, Inc., vol. 51, no. 2, Sept. 1996.
Schwartz, Joel. Fighting Poverty with Virtue: Moral Reform and America's Urban Poor, 1825–2000. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Schwarz, John E., and Thomas J. Volgy. The Forgotten Americans. New York: Norton, 1992.
Wilson, William Julius. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Gale Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World:
Poverty |
Poverty in early modern Europe was not well understood—at least outside of the biblical conception that the poor will always be with us—and the extent of poverty in the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution has not been well mapped—not by historians, and certainly not by the contemporaries who were confronted by the hungry and diseased, the homeless and fatherless, on their doorsteps. Yet there can be no doubt that both the threat and the reality of poverty were pervasive throughout the early modern period.
The material and spiritual needs of the poor were the subject of endless clerical rumination, which sometimes resulted in actual assistance. The needs of the poor likewise merited the extensive practical consideration of urban magistrates and rural nobility alike, whose best interests often dictated that they do something to lessen, or at least justify, the suffering that they saw around them. Poverty generated responses from the poor ranging from quiet acquiescence and submission to the mercy of God to the violent or coercive appropriation of resources, with a host of possibilities in between. One clear marker of the poor was the need to engage in behaviors intended to ward off hunger, cold, nakedness, or other material deprivation. It is not surprising, therefore, that when historians try to count the poor in early modern Europe, they inevitably begin with the lists of those who applied for and received charity: those who professed in the criminal court records that they turned to theft or prostitution out of desperation; those who sought exemption from the payment of taxes and dues; and those caught participating in bread riots, or myriad other activities located firmly in what historians have to come to refer to as "the economy of makeshifts."
Toward a Definition
Any attempt to determine the number of poor in early modern Europe presumes that there exists a clear definition of poverty as well as widely agreed upon indicators of its extent and severity. This is not the case. At the most basic level, the poor were best defined by what they were not. Thus, in early modern Europe poverty could be characterized as the antithetical state either to that of being rich (the most common modern understanding) or that of being powerful (the more typical medieval conception). While power and wealth often travel together, they need not necessarily do so. Certainly the processes of commercialization and urbanization begun in the High Middle Ages and accelerated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concomitant with the expansion of capitalist economic attitudes and behaviors, worked to increase the importance of money, thereby giving the pecuniary definition of poverty greater cultural resonance over time. But the conflation of the poor with the weak persisted.
This lingering medieval resonance was facilitated in large part by the ongoing influence of the biblical categories of the poor, which consisted especially of widows, orphans, prisoners, and the disabled. All of these groups, which we might now classify as the "structural poor," were likely to suffer from limited resources as well as wielding little political or social power. They are marked by their dependence on others (notably male, be they husbands, fathers, law enforcers, or doctors) for food and shelter, as well as for protection. And it was precisely this dependence that marked them as "deserving"; that is, worthy of receiving the love (caritas) of the community as manifested in material aid. The undeserving poor, by contrast, were believed to be those who were capable of work but who out of laziness or sheer malice refused to earn their own keep. To aid them was not only counterproductive to the health of the economic and social order, it was in fact a sin, and harmful to the soul of both giver and recipient. If the giving of aid indiscriminately was ever practiced in the medieval past (the evidence is mixed), it was certainly no longer tolerated in the early modern period either by intellectuals or bureaucrats.
This is not to say, however, that exceptions were not made to the biblical rule that the able-bodied who do not work do not eat. Other categories of legitimated poor existed alongside those structurally dependent groups identified in the Bible. The most important of these were the voluntary poor, the shamefaced poor, and what we might now refer to as the cyclical poor. The voluntary poor were those individuals, usually acting in the context of well-established organizations or societies, who had renounced material comforts in favor of a life of humiliation following Christ. The most important of these groups were the mendicant monastic orders that came to prominence in the milieu of urban economic prosperity during the High Middle Ages, most notably the Franciscans and the Dominicans. Their renunciation of material possessions was supposed to be so complete that the only way individual friars could survive was to beg for their bread while they traveled about preaching to souls. The mendicant orders were the subject of heated debates about the spiritual legitimacy of their mission and the social impact of their method, both at the time of their establishment and in the context of the Reformation. Nonetheless, they survived, and even flourished in some parts of Catholic Europe following the Tridentine reforms, remaining an important part of the charitable landscape of early modern Europe.
A less contentious exception to the biblical rule that those who do not work do not eat were the socalled shamefaced poor. This group consisted of members of the ancient nobility who had fallen on hard times economically and could no longer afford the style of life that they were expected to maintain. In truly dire cases they could no longer afford even to support themselves at the margin of subsistence. The source of their distress was often a combination of overspending and the concomitant loss of family land, or the declining profitability of its exploitation by tenant farmers or wage laborers. Because the very definition of nobility precluded members of noble families from working their own land or marshaling their remaining resources to a trade or business, their impoverished condition could only be alleviated by the charitable assistance of others. Moreover, such aid had to be dispensed with discretion in order to avoid any further embarrassment being heaped on the families concerned. In a world in which work was expected of all who were physically able, the shamefaced poor make for an odd exception from the modern perspective. For here was a group whose members were denied the opportunity to work on account of their social status and not their physical attributes. But with the exception of England and the Netherlands, which commercialized early (the Netherlands never having had a strong tradition of local nobility anyway), the shamefaced poor remained an important category of those receiving relief in Europe at least until the social disruptions of the French Revolution. And even in the decidedly bourgeois environment of the Dutch Republic, members of the middling classes (such as urban citizens with corporate rights and artisans with guild memberships) in straitened circumstances received more generous and reliable relief than did the very poor, who could not claim such corporate protections. Downward social mobility, regardless of the level at which one started, was something that all European societies tried to protect against, suggesting that poverty was understood at least as much as a relative state as an absolute one.
The cyclical poor were also made worthy of assistance on account of their changing status over time. Two kinds of cases are especially prominent in this regard. The first included those families that were in the early stages of their household life cycle, with (often many) young children to support and limited access to wage-earning labor. Women's work was poorly remunerated at the best of times, and when pregnant and nursing, women's wages could easily drop to zero. In B. Seebohm Rowntree's classic formulation, the most prosperous time in a family's life was following the mother's childbearing years, when at least some of the children were old enough to earn wages but not yet old enough to have begun separate households of their own. The other vulnerable group included those families in which the primary wage earner was temporarily un- or underemployed because of either the natural rhythms of the work year or, increasingly, of the business cycle. Until the development of the electrified factory and all-weather transport, winter was a season of slow work at best, not just in agriculture, but in urban crafts and trades as well. And as increasingly more individuals left farming for industrial and service sector occupations, the impact of trade cycles on employment became more severe. Guilds with cash reserves for emergency support were the primary means of defense against trade cycles, for those lucky enough to enjoy membership. The bread and cast-off clothing distributed during the severest parts of the winter had to suffice for the rest. Neither those with young families nor those with unemployed household heads could count on the unqualified charitable support of their larger communities, however. Then as now, families in such circumstances were subject to the moralistic assessments of those in a position to offer relief. Critics pointed to poor families with many children as evidence that the poor were sexually reckless, a view articulated most famously by the English economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). Likewise, the able-bodied unemployed generated a great deal of suspicion about how determinedly they were seeking work and whether they were being too choosy about the type of work they would accept, again not unlike the stigma faced by the unemployed in the modern world.
Poverty and Economic Development
Although, as stated earlier, there are no agreed-upon indicators of the extent and severity of poverty in early modern Europe, many historians have nonetheless felt confident in the belief that a great many Europeans lived either below the poverty line or in imminent danger of dropping below it. This confidence rests in large measure on a commonly shared assumption about the general poverty of all preindustrial economies, in which productivity is low and the probability of risks of all kinds is high. In such an essentially Malthusian world, in which the population constantly threatens to outpace the food supply, the cyclical reappearance of episodes of extreme poverty is guaranteed. Moreover, ways to insure against risk were few or nonexistent. However, despite the attractive logic of the presumption that poverty follows from economic underdevelopment, it suffers from one fundamental inconsistency with the facts: that is, poverty continues to exist in the highly developed, immensely productive, risk-averse, and decidedly non-Malthusian modern first world. Thus the classic narratives about economic development are insufficient for a true understanding of poverty in early modern Europe.
One striking alternative to the view of poverty as solely a consequence of underdevelopment has been offered by the Marxist historians Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, who argue that economic development has not only failed to eradicate poverty, it has actually increased the likelihood of it. Specifically, they maintain that the incidence of poverty spread as capitalism developed, first as an agricultural system and later as an industrial system, over the course of the early modern period. The key mechanism they see at work behind this process is that of proletarianization, or the increasing separation of workers from the means of production and thus their forced reliance on wages for their maintenance. They begin their narrative with a fairly dire medieval landscape in which "40 to 60 per cent of western European peasants disposed of insufficient land to maintain a family" (p. 15), and then chart from there what they understand to be the processes of further impoverishment over time: the long-term trend toward diminishment in the size of peasant holdings; the development of social policies that criminalized the poor, thereby permitting the better regulation of the labor market (most notably the Elizabethan Poor Law in England, statues against vagrancy and begging in both Catholic and Protestant Europe, and the institution of workhouses in towns both great and small); and most importantly, the massive shift of the labor force away from small independent holdings and craft workshops toward wage labor in commercial agriculture and industry. While they have supporting evidence of the hardship experienced by particular groups of people and sectors of the economy during this time of radical social and economic change, they fail to make a compelling case for an increase in poverty overall. The spread of capitalist enterprises certainly had its losers, but it had its winners as well. Simply documenting the former in great detail does not demonstrate that the scourge of poverty spread between the end of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the modern era.
Where the classic development story clearly neglects questions of distribution, the Marxist story downplays the importance of massive productivity gains in increasing the pool of material resources to be distributed. Both approaches, then, are inadequate to explain both the origins of poverty in the preindustrial past and its persistence in the face of rapid economic development. If we consider only the material facts of the share of food in the average household budget, lengthening life span, energy available per capita to provide light and heat and perform work, and the remarkable growth of consumables in both number and variety, there can be no doubt that poverty, as understood to be strictly a matter of material deprivation, has decreased precipitously over time, with many of the initial gains achieved over the course of the early modern period. However, poverty is also a relative condition, and it may well be the case that the massive increases in the size of the resource pool have had the counterintuitive effect of highlighting distributional inequities in ways that were not as obvious when the material basis of society was so much lower on average.
The experience of early modern Europe also suggests that poverty is a treatable condition, at least to some extent. Those places that experimented seriously with charitable social policies saw genuine improvements in overall well-being. Two notable examples will have to suffice as evidence for our purposes here. The first is the Tudor-Stuart program of food relief in seventeenth-century England, which demonstrably lowered the variance of wheat prices and contributed to lower levels of noncrisis mortality than in either of the periods before or after the policies were in effect. The second is the strong commitment shown by urban magistrates and guild members in the Dutch Republic to provide outdoor relief for those affected by the cyclical harbingers of poverty, as well as institutional care for the aged, the infirm, and the orphaned, facilitating when possible entry or reentry into the middling world of work. Visitors to the Dutch Republic from all over Europe remarked on the ubiquity and generosity of these institutions and their salubrious effect on the body social. In both of these examples, beneficent social policies traveled hand in hand with economic prosperity, probably as both cause and effect.
Bibliography
Abel, Wilhelm. Massenarmut und Hungerkrisen im vorindustriellen Europa: Versuch e. Synopsis. Hamburg, 1974.
Boyer, George R. An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.
Davis, Natalie. "Poor Relief, Humanism, and Heresy: The Case of Lyon." In Studies of Medieval and Renaissance History 5 (1968): 215–275.
Fogel, Robert. "Second Thoughts on the European Escape from Hunger: Famines, Chronic Malnutrition, and Mortality Rates." In Nutrition and Poverty, edited by S. R. Osmani, pp. 243–286. Oxford and New York, 1992.
Geremek, Bronislaw. Poverty: A History. Translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1994.
Hufton, Olwen H. The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789. Oxford, 1974.
Leeuwen, Marco H. D. van. "Histories of Risk and Welfare in Europe during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries." In Health Care and Poor Relief in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Northern Europe, edited by Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham, and Robert Jütte, pp. 32–66. Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, Vt., 2002.
——. The Logic of Charity: Amsterdam, 1800–50. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans. London and New York, 2000.
Lis, Catharina, and Hugo Soly. Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-industrial Europe. Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979.
Mc Cants, Anne E. C. Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam. Urbana, Ill., 1997.
Pullan, Brian. Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620. Cambridge, Mass., 1971.
Rowntree, B. Seebohm. Poverty: A Study of Town Life. London, 1901.
Schwartz, Robert M. Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century France. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988.
—ANNE E. C. MCCANTS
Gale Encyclopedia of Food & Culture:
Poverty |
About 31.1 million, or 11.3 percent, of Americans were poor in 2000. "Poor," as used here, means living below the poverty threshold, a dollar amount determined by the United States Bureau of the Census by taking a family's total income before taxes and then adjusting for the size of the family and the number of related children under eighteen years of age. In 2000, the poverty threshold ranged from $8,259 for an individual sixty-five and older to $33,291 for a family of nine or more individuals, including eight or more related children under eighteen. The poverty threshold for a family of two adults and two related children was $17,463. Individuals sixty-five and older, blacks and Hispanics, people in families with no workers, households headed by women, and people living inside central cities suffered disproportionately higher rates of poverty compared with other Americans.
The federal poverty threshold originated in the 1950s and is based today on the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan, a minimal-cost food plan determined to be nutritionally adequate according to national dietary guidelines, its cost multiplied by a factor of three (based on the assumption that nutritionally adequate food will cost one-third of a family's income) to account for other living expenses. Although it is updated annually according to the Consumer Price Index for inflation, a chief criticism of the poverty threshold is that food expenses have accounted for less than 15 percent of average income since 1965 (10.2 percent in 2000), making the multiplier too small, while other living expenses (such as housing, health care, transportation, and child care) have increased dramatically, especially for the poor.
Quantitative descriptions of the food and nutrient intakes of poor Americans can be found in analyses of national surveys that collect dietary and sociodemographic data from representative samples of the U.S. population. Analysis of the 1994–1996 Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals (CSFII) showed that poor Americans, defined as adults aged twenty years and older with incomes below 131 percent of the poverty threshold, tended to consume fewer servings of grains, fruits, vegetables, and dairy foods, but more servings of meats and meat alternates and more added sugars, compared with adults with higher incomes. Fewer servings of grains, fruits, vegetables, and dairy foods, and lower energy and nutrient intakes were found for men and women with less than a high-school education, a proxy measure for poverty, compared with men and women who had completed high school and beyond.
Analyses of a number of national surveys conducted between 1977 and 1996 show that dietary intakes of low-income adults have changed over time. For example, overall dietary quality improved among low-income white and Hispanic women, primarily due to reductions in total and saturated-fat and cholesterol intakes. However, fruit and vegetable intakes remained below the recommended amounts, as did those of key nutrients such as calcium, iron, and folic acid.
Poverty, Food Insufficiency, Food Insecurity, and Hunger
Poverty is inextricably linked with food insufficiency (not having enough to eat some or all of the time), food insecurity (uncertainty about or inability to acquire nutritionally adequate foods in socially acceptable ways), and hunger (the physical consequence of not having enough to eat). According to data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), food insufficiency affected 4.1 percent of U.S. house holds, or between 9 and 12 million individuals. Data from the September 2000 Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement showed the prevalence of food insecurity to be 10.5 percent, and the prevalence of hunger to be 3.1 percent, affecting 11 million and 3.3 million Americans, respectively. Numerous studies of national survey data have shown lower intakes of several nutrients among men, women, and children who experience food insufficiency or food insecurity. Analysis of food intakes and serum nutrients of adults from food-insufficient families has also shown lower intakes of fruits, vegetables, and dairy products, and lower concentrations of serum albumin, serum carotenoids, and serum vitamins A and E. Additional analyses of food-insufficient adults and children reveal a higher prevalence of overweight and obesity, poor health status, and iron deficiency.
Results from qualitative analyses of dietary data, in the form of ethnographic research studies, complement findings from quantitative studies and confirm differences in food choices between poor and nonpoor Americans. Poor Americans tend to consume more starches, fats, and sugars but less of foods associated with good health, like fruits and vegetables, high-fiber grains, and low-fat dairy items. Although specific food choices may differ by ethnicity or geographic location, commonalities in eating patterns exist among poor Americans. Food intakes can vary quite dramatically in the course of a month, with greater quantities and more varied foods purchased immediately after a pay period or allotment of food assistance (such as food stamps) and very limited quantities, of little variety, purchased as funds run out. Also, food intakes are not equal within households. A common occurrence is for the wife or mother of the family to reduce her intake in order to feed her children. Communal dining may also be impossible when income limits available cookware or dining facilities, or sporadic work schedules keep all members of a family from being together at one time. Feelings of deprivation, often rooted in childhood, may lead to buying nonnutritious foods (such as soda and snack foods) that are also attractive because inexpensive. Although studies show that, in theory, consuming a minimal-cost diet in accordance with the latest dietary guidelines is possible, poor Americans are more likely to purchase foods from small, nearby stores that charge an average of 10 percent more than large supermarkets farther from home.
Food Assistance in the United States
Many poor Americans are eligible for federal food-assistance programs like the Food Stamp Program, the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Program, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). In addition to or as a substitute for government assistance, many poor Americans also receive charitable assistance from food pantries and soup kitchens. In 2000, 50.4 percent of Americans identified as food-insecure received assistance from one of the three federal food-assistance programs, 16.7 percent received food from a food pantry, and 2.5 percent had family members who ate at a soup kitchen. Although participation in these programs and services may reduce food insecurity, the dietary quality of participants' food may not be better than that of nonparticipants. Given societal pressures to join the dominant culture and eat the most advertised, least expensive, most accessible foods—healthful or not—the challenge is how to improve the diets of all Americans, especially the poor.
Bibliography
Alaimo, K., R. R. Briefel, E. A. Frongillo, and C. M. Olson. "Food Insufficiency Exists in the United States: Results from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III)." American Journal of Public Health 88 (1998): 419–426.
Andrews, M., L. S. Kantor, M. Lino, and D. Ripplinger. "Using USDA's Thrifty Food Plan to Assess Food Availability and Affordability." Food Review 24 (2001): 45–53.
Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. The Thrifty Food Plan, 1999. CNPP-7A. Available at http://www.usda.gov/cnpp/FoodPlans/TFP99/Index.htm.
Dalaker J. "Poverty in the United States: 2000." U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, Series P60-214. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 2001.
Dixon, L. B., M. A. Winkleby, and K. L. Radimer. "Dietary Intakes and Serum Nutrients Differ between Adults from Food-Insufficient and Food-Sufficient Families: Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 1988–1994." Journal of Nutrition 131 (2001): 1232–1246.
Fitchen, J. M. "Hunger, Malnutrition, and Poverty in the Contemporary United States: Some Observations on Their Social and Cultural Context." Journal of Food and Foodways 2 (1988): 309–333.
Kaufman, P. R., J. M. MacDonald, S. M. Lutz, and D. M. Smallwood. "Do the Poor Pay More for Food? Item Selection and Price Differences Affect Low-Income Household Food Costs." Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, November 1997.
Kumanyika, S., and S. M. Krebs-Smith. "Preventive Nutrition Issues in Ethnic and Socioeconomic Groups in the United States." In Primary and Secondary Preventive Nutrition, edited by A. Bendich and R. J. Deckelbaum. Totowa, N.J.: Humana Press, 2001.
Nord, M., K. Nader, L. Tiehen, M. Andrews, G. Bickel, and S. Carlson. Household Food Security in the United States, 2000. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, September 2000.
Sharpe, D. L., and M. Abdel-Ghany. "Identifying the Poor and Their Consumption Patterns." Family Economics and Nutrition Review 12 (1999): 15–25.
Siega-Riz, A. M., and B. M. Popkin. "Dietary Trends among Low Socioeconomic Status Women of Childbearing Age in the United States from 1977 to 1996: A Comparison among Ethnic Groups." Journal of the American Medical Women's Association 56 (2001): 44–48.
United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. Food Consumption per Capita Data System. Available at http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/foodconsumption/datasystem.asp.
—L. Beth Dixon
Investopedia Financial Dictionary:
Poverty |
A state or condition in which a person or community lacks the financial resources and essentials to enjoy a minimum standard of life and well-being that's considered acceptable in society. Poverty status in the United States is assigned to people that do not meet a certain threshold level set by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Investopedia Says:
Poverty rates in the United Sates, the percentage of U.S. population with poverty status, are calculated by the U.S. Bureau of Census, and precludes institutionalized people, people living in military quarters, those living in college dormitories and individuals under the age of 15. Poverty rates are an important statistic to follow as a global investor, as a high poverty rate is often indicative of larger scale issues within the country in question.
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Devil's Dictionary:
poverty |
n.
A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. The number of plans for its abolition equals that of the reformers who suffer from it, plus that of the philosophers who know nothing about it. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.
Word Tutor:
poverty |
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
— James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987)
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Wikipedia on Answers.com:
Poverty |
Poverty is the state of one who lacks a certain amount of material possessions or money.[1] Absolute poverty or destitution refers to the one who lacks basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live in absolute poverty today. Relative poverty refers to lacking a usual or socially acceptable level of resources or income as compared with others within a society or country.[1] For most of history poverty had been mostly accepted as inevitable as traditional modes of production were insufficient to give an entire population a comfortable standard of living.[1][2] After the industrial revolution, mass production in factories made wealth increasingly more inexpensive and accessible. Of more importance is the modernization of agriculture, such as fertilizers, in order to provide enough yield to feed the population.[3]
The supply of basic needs can be restricted by constraints on government services such as corruption, debt and loan conditionalities and by the brain drain of health care and educational professionals. Strategies of increasing income to make basic needs more affordable typically include welfare, economic freedom, and providing financial services. Today, poverty reduction is a major goal and issue for many international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank.
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Contents
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The English word "poverty" came from Latin pauper = "poor", via Anglo-Norman povert. There are many definitions of poverty depending on the context of the situation and the views of the person giving the definition
Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and clothe a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living in marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation.
Poverty is pronounced deprivation in well-being, and comprises many dimensions. It includes low incomes and the inability to acquire the basic goods and services necessary for survival with dignity. Poverty also encompasses low levels of health and education, poor access to clean water and sanitation, inadequate physical security, lack of voice, and insufficient capacity and opportunity to better one’s life.
Poverty is usually measured as either absolute or relative poverty (the latter being actually an index of income inequality). Absolute poverty refers to a set standard which is consistent over time and between countries. The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than US $1.25 (PPP) per day, and moderate poverty as less than $2 or $5 a day (but note that a person or family with access to subsistence resources, e.g. subsistence farmers, may have a low cash income without a correspondingly low standard of living – they are not living "on" their cash income but using it as a top up). It estimates that "in 2001, 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day."[6] A dollar a day, in nations that do not use the U.S. dollar as currency, does not translate to living a day on the amount of local currency as determined by the exchange rate.[7] Rather, it is determined by the purchasing power parity, which would look at how much local currency is needed to buy the same things that a dollar could buy in the United States.[7] Usually, this would translate to less local currency than the exchange rate in poorer countries as the United States is a more expensive country.[7]
The proportion of the developing world's population living in extreme economic poverty fell from 28 percent in 1990 to 21 percent in 2001.[6] Most of this improvement has occurred in East and South Asia.[8] In East Asia the World Bank reported that "The poverty headcount rate at the $2-a-day level is estimated to have fallen to about 27 percent [in 2007], down from 29.5 percent in 2006 and 69 percent in 1990."[9] In Sub-Saharan Africa extreme poverty went up from 41 percent in 1981 to 46 percent in 2001[citation needed], which combined with growing population increased the number of people living in extreme poverty from 231 million to 318 million.[10]
In the early 1990s some of the transition economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia experienced a sharp drop in income.[11] The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in large declines in GDP per capita, of about 30 to 35% between 1990 and the trough year of 1998 (when it was at its minimum). As a result poverty rates also increased although in subsequent years as per capita incomes recovered the poverty rate dropped from 31.4% of the population to 19.6%[12][13] The World Bank issued a report predicting that between 2007 and 2027 the populations of Georgia and Ukraine will decrease by 17% and 24% respectively.[14]
World Bank data shows that the percentage of the population living in households with consumption or income per person below the poverty line has decreased in each region of the world since 1990:[15][16]
| Region | 1990 | 2002 | 2004 |
|---|---|---|---|
| East Asia and Pacific | 15.40% | 12.33% | 9.07% |
| Europe and Central Asia | 3.60% | 1.28% | 0.95% |
| Latin America and the Caribbean | 9.62% | 9.08% | 8.64% |
| Middle East and North Africa | 2.08% | 1.69% | 1.47% |
| South Asia | 35.04% | 33.44% | 30.84% |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | 46.07% | 42.63% | 41.09% |
Other human development indicators have also been improving. Life expectancy has greatly increased in the developing world since World War II and is starting to close the gap to the developed world.[citation needed] Child mortality has decreased in every developing region of the world.[citation needed] The proportion of the world's population living in countries where per-capita food supplies are less than 2,200 calories (9,200 kilojoules) per day decreased from 56% in the mid-1960s to below 10% by the 1990s. Similar trends can be observed for literacy, access to clean water and electricity and basic consumer items.[17]
There are various criticisms of these measurements.[18] Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion note that although "a clear trend decline in the percentage of people who are absolutely poor is evident ... with uneven progress across regions...the developing world outside China and India has seen little or no sustained progress in reducing the number of poor".
Since the world's population is increasing, a constant number living in poverty would be associated with a diminishing proportion. Looking at the percentage living on less than $1/day, and if excluding China and India, then this percentage has decreased from 31.35% to 20.70% between 1981 and 2004.[8]
The 2007 World Bank report "Global Economic Prospects" predicts that in 2030 the number living on less than the equivalent of $1 a day will fall by half, to about 550 million. An average resident of what we used to call the Third World will live about as well as do residents of the Czech or Slovak republics today. Much of Africa will have difficulty keeping pace with the rest of the developing world and even if conditions there improve in absolute terms, the report warns, Africa in 2030 will be home to a larger proportion of the world's poorest people than it is today.
Relative poverty views poverty as socially defined and dependent on social context, hence relative poverty is a measure of income inequality. Usually, relative poverty is measured as the percentage of population with income less than some fixed proportion of median income. There are several other different income inequality metrics, for example the Gini coefficient or the Theil Index.
Relative poverty measures are used as official poverty rates in several developed countries. As such these poverty statistics measure inequality rather than material deprivation or hardship. The measurements are usually based on a person's yearly income and frequently take no account of total wealth. The main poverty line used in the OECD and the European Union is based on "economic distance", a level of income set at 60% of the median household income.[19]
Economic aspects of poverty focus on material needs, typically including the necessities of daily living, such as food, clothing, shelter, or safe drinking water. Poverty in this sense may be understood as a condition in which a person or community is lacking in the basic needs for a minimum standard of well-being and life, particularly as a result of a persistent lack of income.
Analysis of social aspects of poverty links conditions of scarcity to aspects of the distribution of resources and power in a society and recognizes that poverty may be a function of the diminished "capability" of people to live the kinds of lives they value. The social aspects of poverty may include lack of access to information, education, health care, or political power.[20][21]
Poverty may also be understood as an aspect of unequal social status and inequitable social relationships, experienced as social exclusion, dependency, and diminished capacity to participate, or to develop meaningful connections with other people in society.[22][23][24] Such social exclusion can be minimized through strengthened connections with the mainstream, such as through the provision of relational care to those who are experiencing poverty.
The World Bank's "Voices of the Poor," based on research with over 20,000 poor people in 23 countries, identifies a range of factors which poor people identify as part of poverty. These include:
David Moore, in his book The World Bank, argues that some analysis of poverty reflect pejorative, sometimes racial, stereotypes of impoverished people as powerless victims and passive recipients of aid programs.[25]
Ultra-poverty, a term apparently coined by Michael Lipton,[26] connotes being amongst poorest of the poor in low-income countries. Lipton defined ultra-poverty as receiving less than 80 percent of minimum caloric intake whilst spending more than 80% of income on food. Alternatively a 2007 report issued by International Food Policy Research Institute defined ultra-poverty as living on less than 54 cents per day.[27]
The effects of poverty may also be causes, as listed above, thus creating a "poverty cycle" operating across multiple levels, individual, local, national and global.
One third of deaths – some 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day – are due to poverty-related causes: in total 270 million people, most of them women and children, have died as a result of poverty since 1990.[28] Those living in poverty suffer disproportionately from hunger or even starvation and disease.[29] Those living in poverty suffer lower life expectancy. According to the World Health Organization, hunger and malnutrition are the single gravest threats to the world's public health and malnutrition is by far the biggest contributor to child mortality, present in half of all cases.[30]
Rises in the costs of living making poor people less able to afford items. Poor person spend a greater portion of their budgets on food than richer people. As a result, poor households and those near the poverty threshold can be particularly vulnerable to increases in food prices. For example, in late 2007 increases in the price of grains[31] led to food riots in some countries.[32][33][34] The World Bank warned that 100 million people were at risk of sinking deeper into poverty.[35] Threats to the supply of food may also be caused by drought and the water crisis.[36] Intensive farming often leads to a vicious cycle of exhaustion of soil fertility and decline of agricultural yields.[37] Approximately 40% of the world's agricultural land is seriously degraded.[38][39] In Africa, if current trends of soil degradation continue, the continent might be able to feed just 25% of its population by 2025, according to United Nations University's Ghana-based Institute for Natural Resources in Africa.[40] Every year nearly 11 million children living in poverty die before their fifth birthday. 1.02 billion people go to bed hungry every night.[41]
According to the Global Hunger Index, South Asia has the highest child malnutrition rate of the world's regions.[42] Nearly half of all Indian children are undernourished,[43] one of the highest rates in the world and nearly double the rate of Sub-Saharan Africa.[44] Every year, more than half a million women die in pregnancy or childbirth.[45] Almost 90% of maternal deaths occur in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, compared to less than 1% in the developed world.[46]
Women who have born children into poverty may not be able to nourish the children efficiently and provide adequate care in infancy. The children may also suffer from disease that has been passed down to the child through birth. Asthma and rickets are common problems children acquire when born into poverty.[citation needed]
Research has found that there is a high risk of educational underachievement for children who are from low-income housing circumstances. This often is a process that begins in primary school for some less fortunate children. Instruction in the US educational system, as well as in most other countries, tends to be geared towards those students who come from more advantaged backgrounds. As a result, these children are at a higher risk than other children for retention in their grade, special placements during the school's hours and even not completing their high school education.[47] There are indeed many explanations for why students tend to drop out of school. For children with low resources, the risk factors are similar to others such as juvenile delinquency rates, higher levels of teenage pregnancy, and the economic dependency upon their low income parent or parents.[47] Families and society who submit low levels of investment in the education and development of less fortunate children end up with less favorable results for the children who see a life of parental employment reduction and low wages. Higher rates of early childbearing with all the connected risks to family, health and well-being are majorly important issues to address since education from preschool to high school are both identifiably meaningful in a life.[47]
Poverty often drastically affects children's success in school. A child's "home activities, preferences, mannerisms" must align with the world and in the cases that they do not these students are at a disadvantage in the school and most importantly the classroom.[48] Therefore, it is safe to state that children who live at or below the poverty level will have far less success educationally than children who live above the poverty line. Poor children have a great deal less healthcare and this ultimately results in many absences from the academic year. Additionally, poor children are much more likely to suffer from hunger, fatigue, irritability, headaches, ear infections, flu, and colds.[48] These illnesses could potentially restrict a child or student's focus and concentration.
Poverty increases the risk of homelessness.[49] Slum-dwellers, who make up a third of the world's urban population, live in a poverty no better, if not worse, than rural people, who are the traditional focus of the poverty in the developing world, according to a report by the United Nations.[50] There are over 100 million street children worldwide.[51]
Most of the children living in institutions around the world have a surviving parent or close relative, and they most commonly entered orphanages because of poverty.[52] Experts and child advocates maintain that orphanages are expensive and often harm children's development by separating them from their families.[52] It is speculated that, flush with money, orphanages are increasing and push for children to join even though demographic data show that even the poorest extended families usually take in children whose parents have died.[52]
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According to experts, many women become victims of trafficking, the most common form of which is prostitution, as a means of survival and economic desperation.[53] Deterioration of living conditions can often compel children to abandon school in order to contribute to the family income, putting them at risk of being exploited, according to ECPAT International, an NGO designed to end the commercial sexual exploitation of children.[54] For example, in Zimbabwe, a number of girls are turning to prostitution for food to survive because of the increasing poverty.[55]
In one survey, 67% of children from disadvantaged inner cities said they had witnessed a serious assault, and 33% reported witnessing a homicide.[56] 51% of fifth graders from New Orleans (median income for a household: $27,133) have been found to be victims of violence, compared to 32% in Washington, DC (mean income for a household: $40,127).[57]
Various poverty reduction strategies are broadly categorized here based on whether they make more of the basic human needs available or increase the disposable income needed to purchase those needs. Some basic needs, such as improving access to education, may also help increase income.
Before the industrial revolution, poverty had been mostly accepted as inevitable as economies produced little, making wealth scarce.[1] The initial industrial revolution led to high economic growth and eliminated mass absolute poverty in what is now considered the developed world.[1]
Agricultural technologies such as nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides and new irrigation methods have dramatically reduced food shortages in modern times by boosting yields past previous constraints.[58][59] Mass production of goods in places such as rapidly industrializing China has made what were once considered luxuries, such as vehicles and computers, inexpensive and thus accessible to many who were otherwise too poor to afford them.[60][61]
Infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis can perpetuate poverty by diverting health and economic resources from investment and productivity; malaria decreases GDP growth by up to 1.3% in some developing nations and AIDS decreases African growth by 0.3–1.5% annually.[62][63][64] Nations do not necessarily need wealth to gain health.[65] For example, Sri Lanka had a maternal mortality rate of 2% in the 1930s, higher than any nation today.[66] It reduced it to 0.5–0.6% in the 1950s and to .06% today while spending less each year on maternal health because it learned what worked and what did not.[66] Cheap water filters and promoting hand washing are some of the most cost effective health interventions and can cut deaths from diarrhea and pneumonia.[67][68] Knowledge on the cost effectiveness of healthcare interventions can be elusive and educational measures have been made to disseminate what works, such as the Copenhagen Consensus.[65]
Strategies to provide education cost effectively include deworming children, which costs about 50 cents per child per year and reduces non-attendance from anemia, illness and malnutrition, while being only a twenty-fifth as expensive as increasing school attendance by constructing schools.[69] A study by Oxford University shows that schoolgirl absenteeism could be cut in half by providing free sanitary towels.[70] Also, when women are given more capabilities and opportunities, they seem more altruistic in helping the family and more likely to prioritize education.[71]
Desirable actions such as enrolling children in school or receiving vaccinations can be encouraged by a form of aid known as Conditional Cash Transfers.[72] In Mexico, for example, dropout rates of 16-19 year olds in rural area dropped by 20% and children gained half an inch in height.[73] Initial fears that the program would encourage families to stay at home rather than work to collect benefits have proven to be unfounded. Instead, there is less excuse for neglectful behavior as, for example, children stopped begging on the streets instead of going to school because it could result in suspension from the program.[73]
Government revenue can be diverted away from basic services by corruption, such as in Nigeria, where its leaders stole an estimated $400 billion of the country's oil revenue.[74][75] Funds from aid and natural resources are often diverted into private hands and then sent to banks overseas as a result of graft.[30] Preventive measures, according to UNODC, include requiring public officials to disclose earnings and assets and stricter rules on funding to political parties and electoral campaigns.[74] If Western banks rejected stolen money, says a report by Global Witness, ordinary people would benefit “in a way that aid flows will never achieve”.[30] The report asked for more action from banks as they have proved capable of stanching the flow of funds linked to terrorism and money-laundering.[30] A report by the African Union found that more than $150 billion a year is taken from Africa through tax evasion by foreign corporations such that the poverty stricken continent is a net creditor to the rest of the world.[76] It estimated that about 30% of sub-Saharan Africa's GDP has been moved to tax havens.[76]
Developing countries' debt to banks and governments from richer countries are often more than a country can generate per year on profits from exports.[77] If poor countries do not have to spend so much on debt payments, they can use the money instead for basic services such as health-care and education.[78] For example, Zambia spent 40% of its total budget to repay foreign debt, and only 7% for basic state services in 1997.[79] One of the proposed ways to help poor countries has been debt relief. Zambia began offering services, such as free health care even while overwhelming the health care infrastructure, because of savings that resulted from a 2005 round of debt relief.[80]
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as primary holders of developing countries' debt, attach structural adjustment conditionalities to loans which generally include the elimination of state subsidies and the privatization of state services. For example, the World Bank presses poor nations to eliminate subsidies for fertilizer even while many farmers cannot afford them at market prices.[81] In the case of Malawi, almost five million of its 13 million people used to need emergency food aid. However, after the government changed policy and subsidies for fertilizer and seed were introduced, farmers produced record-breaking corn harvests in 2006 and 2007 as production leaped to 3.4 million in 2007 from 1.2 million in 2005, making Malawi a major food exporter.[81] In the former Soviet states, the reconfiguration of public financing in their transition to a market economy called for reduced spending on health and education, sharply increasing poverty.[13][82][83]
A major proportion of aid from donor nations is tied, mandating that a receiving nation spend on products and expertise originating only from the donor country. [84] For example, Eritrea is forced to spend aid money on foreign goods and services to build a network of railways even though it is cheaper to use local expertise and resources.[84] US law requires food aid be spent on buying food at home, instead of where the hungry live, and, as a result, half of what is spent is used on transport.[85]
The loss of basic needs providers emigrating from impoverished countries has a damaging effect. For example, an estimated 100,000 Philippine nurses emigrated between 1994 and 2006.[86] As of 2004, there were more Ethiopia-trained doctors living in Chicago than in Ethiopia.[87] Proposals to mitigate the problem by the World Health Organization include compulsory government service for graduates of public medical and nursing schools and creating career-advancing programs to retain personnel.[86]
Some argue that overpopulation and lack of access to birth control leads to population increase to exceed food production and other resources.[10][88][89] The world's population is expected to reach nearly 9 billion in 2040.[90] However, the reverse is also true, that poverty causes overpopulation as it gives women little power to control giving birth, or to have educational attainment or a career.[91] Empowering women with better education and more control of their lives makes them more successful in bringing down rapid population growth because they have more say in family planning.[71]
Raising farm incomes is described as the core of the antipoverty effort as three quarters of the poor today are farmers.[92] Estimates show that growth in the agricultural productivity of small farmers is, on average, at least twice as effective in benefiting the poorest half of a country’s population as growth generated in nonagricultural sectors.[93]
A guaranteed minimum income ensures that every citizen will live be able to purchase a desired level of basic needs. A more specific policy, called a basic income (or negative income tax) is a system of social security, that periodically provides each citizen, rich or poor, with a sum of money that is sufficient to live on. In parts of Namibia, where such a program pays only $13 a month, people were able to pay tuition fees, raising the proportion of children going to school by 92%, while child malnutrition rates fell from 42% to 10% and economic activity grew by 10%.[94][95] Proponents argue that a basic income is more economically efficient than a minimum wage and unemployment benefits, as the minimum wage effectively imposes a high marginal tax on employers, causing losses in efficiency.
In 1968, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and another 1,200 economists signed a document calling for the US Congress to introduce a system of income guarantees.[96] Winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, with often diverse political convictions, who support a basic income include Herbert Simon,[97] Friedrich Hayek,[98] Robert Solow,[97] Milton Friedman,[99] Jan Tinbergen,[97] James Tobin[100][101][102] and James Meade.[97]
The famine relief model increasing used by aid groups calls for giving cash or cash vouchers to the hungry to pay local farmers instead of buying food from donor countries, often required by law, as it wastes money on transport costs.[103][104]
In Canada, it takes two days, two registration procedures, and $280 to open a business[citation needed] while an entrepreneur in Bolivia must pay $2,696 in fees, wait 82 business days, and go through 20 procedures to do the same. Such costly barriers favor big firms at the expense of small enterprises, where most jobs are created.[105] Often, businesses have to bribe government officials even for routine activities, which is, in effect, a tax on business.[2] Noted reductions in poverty in recent decades has occurred in China and India mostly as a result of the abandonment of collective farming in China and the ending of the central planning model known as the License Raj in India, where GDP grew slower in the 1970s than the preceding 100 years.[106][107][108]
The unwillingness of governments and feudal elites to give full-fledged property rights in land to their tenants is cited as one of the chief obstacles to development.[109][110] The business environment can be further worsened by the failure of governments to provide essential infrastructure.[111][112]
Another form of aid is microloans, made famous by the Grameen Bank, where small amounts of money are loaned to farmers or villages, mostly women, who can then obtain physical capital to increase their economic rewards. For example, the Thai government's People's Bank, makes loans of $100 to $300 to help farmers buy equipment or seeds, help street vendors acquire an inventory to sell, or help others set up small shops. However, microlending has been criticized for making hyperprofits off the poor even from its founder, Muhammad Yunus and in India which has seen a growing wave of defaults and suicides.[113][114][115]
Those in poverty place overwhelming importance on having a safe place to save money, much more so than receiving loans.[116] Also, a large part of microfinance loans are spent on products that would usually be paid by a checking or savings account.[116] Lack of financial services, as a result of restrictive regulations, such as the requirements for banking licenses, makes it hard for even smaller microsavings programs to reach the poor.[117] Mobile banking addresses the problem of the heavy regulation and costly maintenance of saving accounts.[116] Mobile financial services in the developing world, ahead of the developed world in this respect, could be worth $5 billion by 2012.[118] Safaricom’s M-Pesa launched one of the first systems where a network of agents of mostly shopkeepers, instead of bank branches, would take deposits in cash and translate these onto a virtual account on customers' phones. Cash transfers can be done between phones and issued back in cash with a small commission, making remittances safer.[119]
The World Bank says foreign workers sent $328 billion from richer to poorer countries last year, more than double the $120 billion in official aid flows from OECD members. India got $52 billion from its diaspora, more than it took in foreign direct investment.[120]
Cultural factors, such as discrimination of various kinds, can negatively affect productivity such as age discrimination, stereotyping,[121] gender discrimination, racial discrimination, and caste discrimination.[122]
Max Weber and the modernization theory suggest that cultural values could affect economic success.[123][124] However, researchers[who?] have gathered evidence that suggest that values are not as deeply ingrained and that changing economic opportunities explain most of the movement into and out of poverty, as opposed to shifts in values.[125]
Among some individuals, poverty is considered a necessary or desirable condition, which must be embraced to reach certain spiritual, moral, or intellectual states. Poverty is often understood to be an essential element of renunciation in religions such as Buddhism (only for monks, not for lay persons) and Jainism, whilst in Roman Catholicism it is one of the evangelical counsels.
Benedict XVI distinguishes “poverty chosen” (the poverty of spirit proposed by Jesus), and “poverty to be fought” (unjust and imposed poverty). He considers that the moderation implied in the former favors solidarity, and is a necessary condition so as to fight effectively to eradicate the abuse of the latter.[126]
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Translations:
Poverty |
idioms:
Nederlands (Dutch)
armoede, armoedigheid, behoeftigheid, onvruchtbaarheid, gebrek, zwakte
Français (French)
n. - pauvreté
idioms:
idioms:
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - φτώχεια, ανέχεια, ένδεια
idioms:
idioms:
Português (Portuguese)
n. - pobreza (f)
idioms:
Русский (Russian)
бедность, нищета
idioms:
Español (Spanish)
n. - pobreza, escasez
idioms:
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - fattigdom, brist, knapp tillgång
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
贫穷, 缺乏, 贫困
idioms:
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 貧窮, 缺乏, 貧困
idioms:
日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 貧乏, 貧困, 欠乏, 不毛, 貧弱さ
idioms:
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) فقر
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - עוני, דלות, חסרון
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