Why do people live in poverty?

Answer 1

Maybe it's better to start by asking why people don't live in poverty. Your question starts out from the perspective that people aren't "supposed" to live in poverty.

So, first of all, humanity has developed products and services to make life easier and more comfortable than just living in the wilderness: tasty foods and recipes, medical knowledge and care, housing that keeps the temperature comfortable and keeps us from the elements, education and entertainment for our minds, cell phones and mail and the internet and infrastructure for them to work so we can communicate with people, distribution systems to get these great things to people who can afford them. So there's lots of great stuff that we get to enjoy if we're not living in poverty.

Second of all, people can afford to pay for this stuff. They create something (crops, interesting essays, music, business strategy ideas) and sell it, or they do work for someone else who's willing to pay them because they help them do this. Or maybe they got really lucky and made a good investment, like owning land that turned out to be valuable because of mineral riches, or buying the winning lottery ticket. Or they took wealth from someone else by force. Or maybe they didn't do any of these things, but their ancestor did and bequeathed the money to them, or someone has convinced a government or a charity to support them.

So, people who live in poverty simply lack the resources or the opportunity to get all this great stuff from society. They don't have or do anything someone is willing to pay them for (or they do but haven't figured out how to turn that into money) and they haven't managed to convince governments to give them things. Maybe if they could manage to get educated, or win a visa lottery to move to a country where they could make more money from skills they do have, they'd be less poor. Another kind of wealth is the environment: people who are poor can't turn the environment into wealth very well either, perhaps because it's polluted or because the fish stocks have been depleted, or perhaps because their local environment never had wealth that was easy to extract.

You'll notice that I haven't said much about exploitation, corruption, wars, racism, justice, or anything like that. Well, these things are all important, but in the end they're just means to the ends I described above. If you think that there's some natural law in history that says we ought to be moving in the direction where people get wealthier and poverty rates would go down, then your answer would focus on the factors that have impeded this movement. However, if you think that some parts of the world support subsistence living but people there don't have much to offer that the rest of the world would want to trade for, then you'll need to be convinced why they should be wealthy, not why they remain poor.

Here's a good article by Robert Lucas, a Nobel-prize winning economist, who takes the first view, that history is pushing everyone toward greater wealth: http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=3333

Answer 2

Unfortunately some people are unable to find work, and as such are unable to source a steady income. This leaves them unable to pay rent or a mortgage and as such are left homeless, or having to live in shelters. Not every person, whilst they may deserve it, are able to afford a nice home or at least live in comfortable surroundings.