World Poverty

        Alfred Marshall said in his book Principles of Economic, “The study of the causes of poverty is the study of the causes of the degradation of a large part of mankind.”(Marshall 3) Henry George describes poverty as “not merely deprivation; it means shame, degradation . . . the denial of the strongest impulses and sweetest affections . . .” (George 455) Poverty is everywhere around the world. It affects everyone and nobody can escape from it. It is a fact of life everybody has to face, whether it is happening to them or they see it around them. For some, it may be because of mental deficiency, bad health, or alcohol abuse. For others, it may be because they live in an area affected by poverty where everyone is poor due to where they live or perhaps from a natural disaster that has affected them. Many people afflicted by poverty have to leave their education early in order to work so they can help provide for their family. This means that later on in their life, they cannot get a job that will pay enough to supply their family with basic necessities because they did not have a full education. Others have no hope of even obtaining an education due to where they live. No one particularly knows the cause of poverty, but there are many people who have studied it and have come up with their own theories as to why poverty exists. There are very few things being done to fix the problem of poverty, and many of those few things only exacerbate the problem instead of help it. Governments around the world try to come up with policies that they believe will somehow make poverty go away, but this is becoming an increasing problem. Most of their courses of action to eliminate poverty only irritate the problem and increase the severity of it. On the surface and at first glance, these strategies imposed by governments seem to help people in poverty, but in all reality they are really making the problem much worse.

        According to Anup Shah in his article “Causes of Poverty”, “the new poverty line is defined as living on the equivalent of $1.25 a day . . . 1.4 billion people live on or below that line.” He also goes on to say that every day around the world, over 24,000 children die, mostly due to hunger caused by poverty. Shah relates poverty and inequality and their ongoing problem by saying “inequality – the gap between the rich and the poor – is quite high and often widening”. Like Shah explained, many people around the world are afflicted by poverty (Shah). Whether a person lives in the poor part of town in New York City or in the slums of a rural area in Africa, it is still considered poverty. Wherever they may be, these people live in terrible circumstances. Many of them cannot find a job and therefore cannot provide food, clothing, shelter, and other basic necessities of survival for their families. According to John Kenneth Galbraith in his writing The Position of Poverty, “People are poverty-stricken when their income, even if adequate for survival, falls radically behind that of the community. Then they cannot have what the larger community regards as the minimum necessary for decency . . .” He continues by saying that the community these people live in now looks down upon them because they cannot keep up with the status quo and provide for their families what that community deems necessary (Galbraith 409). Daniel T. Lichter gives information about poverty and how it affects children in his journal “Poverty and Inequality Among Children”. He explains that “childhood poverty impairs physical growth, cognitive development, and socio-emotional functioning.” Lichter goes on to say that many children are affected by poverty and we may not realize how bad it is until they become adults. (Lichter 122)

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How badly a person is afflicted by poverty depends on a variety of things. The size of a family, where they live, and the changes in living costs are just a few things that can affect the degree of deprivation for a family. When one thinks of poverty, they can think of it as falling into two categories. In his writing, Galbraith explores those two different categories. The first type of poverty Galbraith labels “case poverty”. He explains that this type of poverty can be found anywhere a person looks in any country. The example he uses to describe case ...

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