American poverty as a structural failing: evidence and arguments.

Few questions have generated as much discussion across time as that of the causes of human impoverishment. The sources and origins of poverty have been debated for centuries. The question of causality has found itself at the heart of most debates surrounding poverty and the poor. In recent times these debates have often been divided into two ideological camps. On one hand, poverty has been viewed as the result of individual failings. From this perspective, specific attributes of the impoverished individual have brought about their poverty. These include a wide set of characteristics, ranging from the lack of an industrious work ethic or virtuous morality, to low levels of education or competitive labor market skills. On the other hand, poverty has periodically been interpreted as the result of failings at the structural level, such as the inability of the economy to produce enough decent paying jobs. Within the United States, the dominant perspective has been that of poverty as an individual failing.  The argument in this article is that such an emphasis is misplaced and misdirected. By focusing on individual attributes as the cause of poverty, social scientists have largely missed the underlying dynamic of American impoverishment. Poverty researchers have in effect focused on who loses out at the economic game, rather than addressing the fact that the game produces losers in the first place. Three lines of evidence are detailed in order to illustrate the structural nature of poverty--1) the inability of the U.S. labor market to provide enough decent paying jobs for all families to avoid poverty or near poverty; 2) the ineffectiveness of American social policy to reduce levels of poverty through governmental social safety net programs; and 3) the fact that the majority of the population will experience poverty during their adult lifetimes, indicative of the systemic nature of U.S. poverty. Each of these lines of evidence are intended to empirically illustrate that American poverty is by and large the result of structural failures and processes. [more]

• Pictured above: Millionare Comedian Cosby. His message to Blacks is --  you're poor because you're stupid & lazy. And you're stupid & lazy because you're Black. bwaaaaahhhhh [more]