Poverty

Poverty is one of the world's most costly and serious social problems. It represents the vast unused and underused potential of millions of people; it costs societies in lost revenues, in lost productivity, in ill health, social dysfunction, and environmental degradation [Page 698]and in vast sums that must be spent either to alleviate poverty's worst symptoms through social welfare programs or to police or control its unruly victims.

Social scientists generally define poverty in two ways. Absolute poverty is the condition in which people are unable to achieve the basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing, and shelter. Relative poverty refers to some socially constructed norm of well-being in comparison to some proportion of a society thought to be lacking. The “poor” in the rich industrialized countries are not, for the most part, materially deprived in the absolute sense. With the help of government transfer programs, such as income support and food and housing subsidies, they may have an apartment to live in, enough food to eat, clothing, and even some amenities like television and cars. Yet in relation to the rest of the society, they are “poor.” Their housing is substandard, their neighborhoods are run down and high in crime, their stores lack the variety and quality of more affluent sectors, their clothing is limited to cheap clothing chains or thrift store hand-me-downs, and their potential is limited by poor schooling and health care.

A new definition of poverty as “social exclusion” has begun to take root among European social scientists and UN researchers. This concept implies that along with material deprivation comes exclusion from some or all of the avenues that ensure the development of one's full human potential as well as one's ability to participate in economic, social, and political life—conditions that the economist Amartya Sen calls “substantive freedoms.” The struggle to survive leaves poor people with no time to participate in the life of their communities or to exercise their citizenship rights. Social exclusion, then, connotes both lack of choice and lack of power.

Poverty as both absolute and relative deprivation has been part of the human condition for thousands of years, but it was only during the 20th century that poverty came to be recognized as a social problem for which there could be public remedies. Traditional societies met people's needs through a combination of the individual's own labor and the obligation of the kinship group to care for its own. In such societies, the poor were those who remained outside this sphere of care, set adrift through war, famine, or the loss of family. Others were at the bottom of culturally sanctioned strata systems, such as the Indian caste system or various kinds of slavery. In the feudal era, the lord of the manor was obliged to care for his serfs so that, although relative poverty existed, there was little poverty in the absolute sense.