Poverty

#Sociology

What is poverty? §

• Absolute poverty: the point at which a household’s income falls below the necessary level to purchase food to physically sustain its members
  • Biological poverty, you don’t even have enough food
• Relative poverty: a measurement of poverty based on a percentage of the median income in a given location
  • This is much more common. It’s comparative, not absolute.
  • Some people fail to achieve the average income or lifestyle enjoyed by the rest of society
• The official poverty line is calculated using a formula developed in the 1960s
  • Only poverty has an officially recognized definition, its the only social class with that
  • Initially the formula was based on comparing income with a threshold that is set at three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963 and adjusted for family size
  • This only considers family size, nothing to do with location
  • Can be problematic as the cost of food has decreased but the cost of living (rest, utilities, etc.) has increased
• Debate about poverty
  • At the core of the debate about poverty in America is the question whether poverty is the cause of social ills such as crime, poor educational outcomes, divorce, and so on, or whether it is the result of these things.
    • Does poverty lead to social issues like crime? (Poverty -> crime)
    • Or does crime and other social issues lead to poverty? (Crime -> poverty)

What causes poverty? §

• Cultural values?
  • The “Culture of Poverty” argument
    • Poor people adopt certain values and practices, which differ from those of “mainstream” society, to survive in hard circumstances
    • They pass these values on to their children
    • The poor have a set of different values
    • They often continue to rely on these practices even after they have become potentially detrimental to their survival
    • Matrifocal and multigenerational (mother is leader of house)
    • Instant gratification
  • The Underclass Thesis
    • Another version of the culture of poverty
    • The underclass thesis states that not only are the poor different from the mainstream in their ability to take advantage of what society has to offer, but they also are increasingly deviant and even dangerous to the rest of us
• Structural Factors?
  • Cycle of poverty
    • William Julius Wilson turned the focus from welfare to factors such as deindustrialization, globalization, suburbanization, and discrimination as causes of urban poverty
    • lack of jobs lead to a lack of employed men for women to marry
    • William Julius Wilson’s arguments
      • Poverty is about both cultural and systemic forces
      • Cultural: values, attitudes, skills
      • Structural: discrimination, racism, changes in the economy
      • They are inextricably linked, and we cannot talk about one while ignoring the other
• Perverse incentives
  • perverse incentives: an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable result that is contrary to the intentions of its designers
  • Welfare trap: welfare regulations make work and marriage less attractive and rising welfare benefits more attractive

Does poverty impact us? §

• Susan Mayer found very little evidence to support the widely held belief that parental income has a direct effect on children’s life chances
  • If we provided extra money to poor families, would we expect to see the performance of children in these families improve? If yes, there might be a strong case for a variety of transfer programs to the poor. If no, what do we do?
  • There are important and systematic differences in outcomes across families with different incomes
  • But giving money to poor parents will not help
• The Bell Curve - Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray
  • Some traits that make adults economically successful make the good parents
  • Emphasizes IQ and race
  • Ignores personality, looks, networking, and plain luck
  • It’s not poverty or education or parenting that ultimately has the most impact on children’s outcomes, but simply
• The Gautreaux Assisted Living Program in Chicago and the Moving to Opportunity study began in 1994
  • Studies were designed to see if moving less impoverished communities might affect the quality of life
  • MTO study in particular seemed to show that living in a quieter, less stressful environment did have very positive effects on children
  • Moving to a less poor neighborhood in childhood
    • Increased future annual income
    • Boosted marriage rates
    • Raised both college attendance rates and quality of college attended
  • The age of the child moved was a critical factor: moving to a less poor neighborhood in teenage years had no significant impact
• Summary
  • Yes: Material deprivations that poverty induces such as poor nutrition lack of medical care unsafe environment toxic stress
  • Yes: parenting stress hypothesis: poverty and its stress leads to poor parenting practices
  • No: parental characteristics ranging form parenting styles to genetic endowments that lead to low income, less education, also lead to detrimental developmental outcomes for offspring

Demographics of poverty §

• Poverty is far from evenly distributed across the country
• Poverty is not permanent - most poor people fall below the poverty line for only short periods
• Higher in southern states
• Minorities have higher rates than whites
  • Number wise, whites compose the largest group
  • Rate wise, native Americans have the highest rate of poverty
• Age: Children are more likely to live in poverty than any other age group
• Women (the feminization of poverty) - female headed households are more likely to be poor than any other type of family
• Minimum wage workers - poverty will remain their lot in life
• Poverty follows lines of social characteristics that are features of society. Therefore, sociologists examine the social system as contributing factors, rather than individual factors such as laziness or lower IQ as its cause