QSN : POVERTY IS A CAUSE OF INDIVIDUAL DEFICIENCIES.DISCUSS
Poverty in its most general sense is the lack of necessities. Basic food, shelter, medical care, and safety are generally thought necessary based on shared values of human dignity. Some societies focus on individual failures and deficiencies to explain the occurrence and patterns of poverty. Personal characteristics such as laziness or lack of ability are seen as the primary causes of poverty. The poor are blamed for being poor and solutions to poverty are assumed to lie within their individual control. But this approach fails to acknowledge that poverty is not random. The likelihood of poverty varies sharply depending on age, gender, family structure, health, education, economic conditions and where you live. In other words, it is not the poor choices and ‘bad’ behaviour of individuals that lead to poverty, but structural failings which stack the odds against certain people and make it difficult for them to escape deprivation or reach their full potential. In other words however individual deficiencies may lead to poverty but only to a lesser extent since they are many more factors that may lead to poverty which include cultural belief systems, geographical disparities, and economic, political and social distortions or discrimination. These are some of the factors that lead to poverty which will be expanded in the essay below.
Failure in life may be due to some inborn deficiencies such as physical or mental handicap, dumbness, deafness, blindness, feeblemindedness, deficient legs and hands, and so on. Some of the deficiencies might have been developed later in life. Since an individual does not have any control over many of these deficiencies, he is bound to yield to them and suffer from them. They make such an individual a parasite on society. Some of the deficiencies which can be managed or overcome are often neglected by some individuals and hence they fall a prey to the problem of poverty. We may include under this category, deficiencies such as illiteracy, laziness, extravagance, immorality, bad habits such as gambling, alcoholism. This gives us a clear cut picture that individual deficiencies can cause poverty.
In “A Cultural Typology of Economic Development”, from the book Culture Matters, Mariano Grondona claims development is a matter of decisions. These decisions, whether they are favourable to economic development or not, are made within the context of culture. All cultural values considered together create “value systems”. These systems heavily influence the way decisions are made as well as the reactions and outcomes of said decisions. In the same book, Stace Lindsay's chapter claims the decisions individuals make are a result of mental models. These mental models influence all aspects of human action. Like Grondona's value systems, these mental models which dictate a nations stance toward development and hence its ability to deal with poverty. Since decisions made by individuals cause mental modes this proves that individual deficiencies can cause poverty.
Many people in developed countries blame cycles of poverty, or the tendency for the poor to remain poor, on overly generous welfare programs. Supporters of this position, including some politicians, argue against government spending and initiatives to help the poor. They believe that these programs provide incentives for people to stay poor in order to continue receiving payments and other support. This argument also suggests that welfare discourages work and marriage. In the United States and other developed countries, getting a job results in reduced welfare support; the same is true when a single parent gets married. However, cash welfare benefits for the typical poor U.S. family with children fell in value by half between the early 1970s and the mid-1990s, taking inflation into account. Such benefits may have been too meager to motivate people to stay on welfare or to avoid work or marriage. This proves that individual deficiencies can lead to poverty.
However poverty can also be caused by the restriction of opportunities. The environment of poverty is one marked with unstable conditions and a lack of capital (both social and economical) which together create the vulnerability characteristic of poverty. Because a person's daily life is lived within the person's environment, a person's environment determines daily decisions and actions based on what is present and what is not. Dipkanar Chakravarti argues that the poor's daily practice of navigating the world of poverty generates a fluency in the poverty environment but a near illiteracy in the environment of the larger society. Thus, when a poor person enters into transactions and interactions with the social norm, that person's understanding of it is limited, and thus decisions revert to decisions most effective in the poverty environment. Through this a sort of cycle is born in which the “dimensions of poverty are not merely additive, but are interacting and reinforcing in nature. “Restriction of opportunities can also lead to poverty hence poverty can not only be seen as caused by individual deficiencies only.
Poverty has to do with geography, For example, statistics show that people who live in rural areas far away from the cities are poorer. This is caused by the lack of communication and transportation in remote rural areas. Because of this, governments can’t provide essential services such as potable water, affordable food, primary health care, and education. People who live there are totally isolated from the rest of the society hence poverty is emerged.
Poverty has to do with geography, For example, statistics show that people who live in rural areas far away from the cities are poorer. This is caused by the lack of communication and transportation in remote rural areas. Because of this, governments can’t provide essential services such as potable water, affordable food, primary health care, and education. People who live there are totally isolated from the rest of the society hence poverty is emerged and this shows that poverty is not only caused by individual deficiencies but is caused by many contributing factors.
More recently, sociologists have focused on other theories of poverty. One theory of poverty has to do with the flight of the middle class, including employers, from the cities and into the suburbs. This has limited the opportunities for the inner-city poor to find adequate jobs. According to another theory, the poor would rather receive welfare payments than work in demeaning positions as maids or in fast-food restaurants. As a result of this view, the welfare system has come under increasing attack in recent years and this shows that individual deficiencies cannot be seen as the main cause of poverty as they are many other factors.
Cultures are socialized and learned, and one of the tenants of learning theory is that rewards follow to those who learn what is intended. The culture of poverty theory explains how government antipoverty programs reward people who manipulate the policy and stay on welfare. The underlying argument of conservatives such as Charles Murray in Loosing Ground (1984) is that government welfare perpetuated poverty by permitting a cycle of “welfare dependency” where poor families develop and pass on to others the skills needed to work the system rather than to gain paying employment. The net result of this theory of poverty is summed by Asen’s (2002: 48) perceptive phrase, “From the war on poverty to the war on welfare.” This theory of poverty based on perpetuation of cultural values has been fraught with controversy. No one disputes that poor people have subcultures or that the subcultures of the poor are distinctive and perhaps detrimental. The concern is over what causes and constitutes the subculture of poverty.
Various theorists believe the way poverty is approached, defined, and thus thought about, plays a role in its perpetuation. Maia Green (2006) explains that modern development literature tends to view poverty as agency filled. When poverty is prescribed agency, poverty becomes something that happens to people. Poverty absorbs people into itself and the people, in turn, become a part of poverty, devoid of their human characteristics. In the same way, poverty, according to Green, is viewed as an object in which all social relations (and persons involved) are obscured. Issues such as structural failings (see earlier section), institutionalized inequalities, or corruption may lie at the heart of a region's poverty, but these are obscured by broad statements about poverty. Arjun Apadurai writes of the “terms of recognition” (drawn from Charles Taylor's ‘points of recognition), which are given the poor are what allows poverty to take on this generalized autonomous form. The terms are “given” to the poor because the poor lack social and economic capital, and thus have little to no influence on how they are represented and/or perceived in the larger community. Furthermore, the term “poverty”, is often used in a generalized matter. This further removes the poor from defining their situation as the broadness of the term covers differences in histories and causes of local inequalities. Solutions or plans for reduction of poverty often fail precisely because the context of a region's poverty is removed and local conditions are not considered. This proves that poverty can be seen as a label and since poverty can be seen as a label this makes the people to believe that they cannot make it in life hence this leads the people in to poverty. With this it shows that individual deficiencies cannot be seen as the cause of poverty but can only be seen as a contributing factor.
Behind the increasing interconnectedness promised by globalization are global decisions, policies, and practices. These are typically influenced, driven, or formulated by the rich and powerful. These can be leaders of rich countries or other global actors such as multinational corporations, institutions, and influential people. In the face of such enormous external influence, the governments of poor nations and their people are often powerless. As a result, in the global context, a few get wealthy while the majority struggle. This shows that individual deficiencies cannot be blamed for poverty.
Capital deficiency, Industries require huge capital for their fast growth. But lack of enough capital has hampered the growth of our industries. The process of economic liberalization which has been let loose recently, has of course, started showing its positive results during these days. Time is not ripe to pass find judgements and its results. People who rely on fruits and vegetables that they produce for household food consumption (subsistence farmers) often go through cycles of relative abundance and scarcity. For many families that rely on subsistence production for survival, the period immediately prior to harvest is a 'hungry period.' During these periods of scarcity, many families lack sufficient resources to meet their minimal nutritional needs. Being familiar with these cycles has enabled development practitioners to anticipate and prepare for periods of acute need for assistance. Agricultural cycles cause poverty hence this shows that individual deficiencies cannot be blamed for causing poverty.
All in all individual deficiencies can cause poverty but only to a lesser extent since they are plenty of factors that cause poverty as they have been explained in that essay above.
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