American poverty as a structural failing: evidence and arguments.
Saturday, January 29, 2005 at 07:13AM
TheSpook
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]
Article originally appeared on (http://brownwatch.com/).
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