Poverty and Education

Social Causes and Consequences of Poverty

Poverty affects rural, urban, and suburban areas. The official poverty measure in the United States is based on data collected in the 1950s. These data indicate that families spent about a third of their income on food, so the poverty level was set at 3 times food costs. Since then, the measure has been updated only for inflation. The measure is widely accepted to be inadequate. Other factors for the cost of living such as housing, child care, health care, and transportation have grown disproportionately and are not currently factored into the measurement.

Causes of Poverty

Poor people do not cause poverty. Stereotypical characteristics attributed to poor people (laziness, promiscuity, lack of work ethic, poor judgment, devaluation of education, failure to accept personal responsibility) are not causes of poverty. Poverty in the Unites States is a result of the politics of distribution. In wealthy countries such as the United States, there is no scarcity of food, shelter, health care, or opportunity; rather, poverty in this country results from the ways in which social goods and opportunities are distributed. Poverty is created and sustained by numerous human decisions institutionalized in social politics and practices.

Many jobs simply do not pay enough to support a family. Nearly 35 million U.S. citizens—one quarter of the U.S. labor force—earn poverty-level wages with little opportunity for advancement. The gap between the rich and the poor more than doubled between 1979 and 2000. The richest 1% in 2000 had more money to spend after taxes than the bottom 40%. Such economic disparity did not just happen. Government policies beginning in the 1930s encouraged racial and economic segregation. For example, the work of the Home Owner's Loan Corporation distributed racial and ethnic demographics maps to banks and used the maps to hold banks to a certain standard when loaning money for homes. Practices such as this contributed to the creation of poor inner-city neighborhoods and the phenomenon known as White flight. Other government policies that supported White flight include the GI Bill of 1944 and the Interstate Highway Act of 1956.

Social stratification is at play between the rich and the poor. As a result of geographical and economic segregation, the poor are pitted against each other. The current rhetoric of Latino immigrants being willing to do more work for less wages than African Americans only fuels racist notions of African Americans being parasites and undeserving welfare recipients.

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