Explanations Of Poverty Research Articles

Poverty, not the poor.

This review explains how and why the United States has systemically high poverty. Descriptive evidence shows that U.S. poverty is (i) a huge share of the population, (ii) a perennial outlier among rich democracies, (iii) staggeringly high for certain groups, (iv) unexpectedly high for those who "play by the rules," and (v) pervasive across various groups and places. This review then discusses and critiques three prevailing approaches focused on the individual poor rather than the systemically high poverty: (i) behavioral explanations "fixing the poor," (ii) emotive compassion "dramatizing the poor," and (iii) cultural explanations both dramatizing and fixing the poor. The essay then reviews political explanations that emphasize the essential role of social policy generosity, political choices to penalize risks, power resources of collective political actors, and institutions. This review demonstrates a long emerging but ascending and warranted shift away from individualistic explanations of the poor toward political explanations of poverty.

‘A constant battle’: the interaction of government discourse, poverty and child and family social work practice

ABSTRACT This 2017 study explores social workers’ perspectives on the interaction of UK government discourse, poverty, and social work practice with families since the 2007–08 economic crash. This has continued relevance in today’s economic climate when the number of families in poverty is increasing. This small-scale qualitative study used interviews with social workers undertaking assessments in statutory children and young people’s service in one inner-London borough, analysed using thematic analysis. Conducted for a Social Work Masters dissertation, the study finds social workers hold structural explanations for poverty, and feel themselves to be in conflict with the prevailing individualising poverty discourse. Approaches to financial talk with families risk foreclosing the possibility of open discussion and unintentionally reinforce stigma. The sense of conflict in working within the austerity climate bears an emotional toll on participants.

Ontological contradictions in the UK’s Universal Credit reforms

ABSTRACT The Universal Credit reforms of the 2010s were a crucial turning point in the UK’s social security system. The reforms have been widely criticized in the literature for placing too much responsibility on welfare recipients, for using cultural explanations of poverty, and for prioritizing incentive-based solutions. This article argues that these common points of criticism actually point to demonstrable contradictions in the formation of Universal Credit, contradictions that are problematic regardless of the strength of the aforementioned criticisms. The focus is on “ontological contradictions”, which derive from fundamental assumptions about how individual agents relate to their material and ideational contexts. To make this argument, a critical realist framework is developed in a dialogue with existing poststructuralist approaches.

Free Agency, Hard Work, and the Justification of Economic Inequality in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Free Agency, Hard Work, and the Justification of Economic Inequality in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Definition and Measurement of Poverty: An Integrated Islamic Approach

In this paper an attempt is made to learn as to how the Islamic shariah defines and measures the phenomenon of poverty. A systematic study of the Qur’an, the traditions of Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), the conduct of righteous caliphs, and the writings of early Muslim jurists would make it clear that the poor, indigent, and destitute are given adequate importance. The early Islamic state, where necessary, made serious efforts to assist and rehabilitate the poor and the needy. One of the means of assistance and rehabilitation was zakat. The disbursement of zakat funds required that the poor should be unambiguously and convincingly separated from the non-poor. How was it done in the past? Traditions of the Prophet (the sunnah) throw sufficient light on this issue. When we carefully go through the traditions, it would be clear that the explanation of poverty as given by the Prophet is dynamic. It defies time and space limitations. A deeper probe of the traditions would reveal that, for all practical purposes, the Prophet has stressed on an integrated approach. His explanation is far more comprehensive, integrated, and meaningful than the one expressed today in terms of daily intake of certain minimum calories. Present-day Muslim countries should redefine their approach towards the definition and measurement of poverty to reflect the essence of Islamic shariah.

Economic Inequality, the Working Poor, and Belief in the American Dream

AbstractDoes exposure to economic inequality undermine belief in the American dream? Scholarship has long argued that the availability of meritocratic ideologies like the American dream inoculates people against exposure to inequality by leading them to rationalize unequal outcomes by viewing wealth as due to hard work and poverty as due to indolence. The existence of inequality where the “have-nots” are working poor, however, could serve to undermine such a process because their employment status casts them as “deserving poor” and limits the applicability of agency-based explanations for poverty. Across two experiments embedded in national surveys, exposure to inequality alone did not cause significant reductions in belief in the American dream; however, exposure to inequality where the have-nots were working poor significantly reduced belief in the American dream. Moderation and mediation analyses indicate these effects were most pronounced among lower-income Americans and indirectly heightened support for government reduction of inequality.

Is Tanzania's economic growth leaving the poor behind? A nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag assessment.

Most developing economies have recently experienced significant economic growth without corresponding substantial poverty reduction and improved population wellbeing. This paper uses a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model to explore the growth-poverty relationship in Tanzania using annual time series data on per capita consumption expenditure, real GDP, GINI index, and unemployment from 1991–2020. To explore the causality among the variables and long-run asymmetry between per capita consumption expenditure and economic growth, the study employs Granger causality and Wild test respectively. The results confirm the presence of long and short-run asymmetric behavior of economic growth. Besides, in the short-run, the Granger causality test supported the feedback hypothesis between economic growth and consumption expenditure, and the unidirectional hypothesis from income inequality and unemployment to consumption expenditure. In the long-run, unidirectional causality was observed from consumption expenditure to both economic growth and unemployment. The study submits that while economic growth exhibits poverty reduction features, growth alone is not sufficient to alleviate poverty because the interaction of income inequality with economic growth dampens the poverty-reducing effects of economic growth. Therefore, economic growth has a significant explanation for poverty but not all about the evolution of poverty. The study opens policy perspectives with wide international relevancy as outlined in the policy implication section.

The (In)Visibility of Race in School Discipline Across Urban, Suburban, and Exurban Contexts

Background/Context: Racial disparities in school discipline represent a long-standing injustice in U.S. schools. Students of color, particularly Black students, are systematically subjected to harsher school disciplinary actions compared with their peers. A growing body of evidence demonstrates the severity of the problem and the negative consequences of harsh punishment, particularly given that students who are disciplined are more likely to be forced into the complex nexus of education and incarceration. Focus of Study: In this study, we aimed to understand how different racial contexts in urban, suburban, and exurban schools shaped responses to and understandings about racial disparities in school discipline. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework that centers the visibility and invisibility of race (Artiles, 2019) throughout the disciplinary cycle, this study was guided by two research questions: (1) What are the similarities and differences in educators’ and students’ understandings of racial contexts and racial disparities in school discipline across urban, suburban, and exurban school districts? (2) How do urban, suburban, and exurban school districts’ racial contexts shape educators’ responses to racial disparities in discipline? Research Design: This research was part of a larger mixed-methods research–practice partnership that aimed to understand racial disparities in school discipline and how to address them across varying school contexts in Central Virginia. The qualitative portion of the study included individual and focus group interviews and classroom observations. The findings reported in this article focus specifically on 50 individual and focus group interviews with teachers, leaders, staff, and students. Findings: Our findings demonstrate the ways race was made visible and invisible in responses to and understandings about racial disparities in discipline. This was evident in the ways deficit perspectives were racialized and how race-evasive perspectives and ideologies dominated educators’ responses to the problem. We found these responses were mediated by the racial contexts of each school. For instance, we learned that educators at the urban middle school with a majority of Black and Latinx students were the most willing to discuss the role of race and racism in shaping racial disparities in discipline compared with educators at the suburban and exurban schools. Educators at the racially diverse suburban high school focused on socioeconomic diversity and relied on deficit cultural explanations for poverty. Contrastingly, educators at the exurban school openly discussed its racial homogeneity with its mostly White students, and their language regarding racial disparities was laced with race-evasive terms and some racist perspectives. Across suburban and exurban school contexts, many educators adopted race-evasive and deficit rationales for disproportionality in ways that failed to consider the role of the school in disciplinary outcomes. We also found that students across the three school contexts were more willing than educators to discuss the role of race and racism in explaining disparities in discipline. Conclusions/Recommendations: Findings from this study have important implications for how schools can respond more effectively to racial disparities in discipline. First, it is important that schools create policies and practices that provide clear guidelines to promote racial equity in discipline. Data should therefore be collected, shared, discussed, analyzed, and used to inform how to improve disciplinary practices and interventions at multiple intersections (e.g., by race, gender, socioeconomic status, and disability) given research that demonstrates disproportionality in discipline emerges among students of color and multiply-marginalized students. Second, schools must critically examine how their everyday beliefs about race become enacted in practice and ultimately institutionalized, thereby granting privileges to dominant groups. Third, schools can benefit from including and engaging with students as they reform disciplinary procedures to address racial disparities. Ultimately, disrupting racial inequities in discipline requires responses that include engagement with race and racism in ways that attend to both individual beliefs and school policies and practices.

Social Workers’ Causal Attributions for Poverty: Does the Level of Spatial Concentration of Disadvantages Matter?

Social workers may play an important role in the implementation of welfare policies targeted at the poor. Their norms, beliefs, and attitudes form local anti-poverty programmes and affect discretionary practices with their clients. Despite this, we know little about how social workers’ exposure to poverty shapes their attitudes towards poverty and their causal attributions for poverty. This study investigates social workers’ poverty explanations and the extent to which they depend on the level of local poverty. Data from a survey conducted among Hungarian social workers were analysed using multilevel linear regression models. To measure local poverty, we used a composite index of poverty, as well as a subjective measure of exposure to poverty. Our analysis revealed that most social workers explained poverty with structural causes, but individual blame was also frequent. Contrary to our hypothesis, the level of local poverty did not significantly increase the adoption of structural explanations but did raise the occurrence of individualistic ones. However, the effect of local poverty was non-linear: social workers tended to blame the poor for their poverty in the poorest municipalities, where multiple disadvantages are concentrated, while moderate poverty did not lead to such opinions. Our results suggest that efforts should be made to improve the poverty indicator framework to better understand the phenomenon of spatial concentration of multiple disadvantages and its consequences for the poor.

When Explanations for Poverty Help Explain Social Policy Preferences: The Case of European Public Opinion Amidst the Economic Recession (2009\u20132014)

Individuals hold beliefs about what causes poverty, and those beliefs have been theorized to explain policy preferences and ultimately cross-country variations in welfare states. However, there has been little empirical work on the effects of poverty attributions on welfare state attitudes. We seek to fill this gap by making use of Eurobarometer data from 27 European countries in the years 2009, 2010 and 2014 to explore the effects of poverty attributions on judgments about economic inequality as well as preferences regarding the welfare state. Relying on a four-type typology of poverty attribution which includes individual fate, individual blame, social fate and social blame as potential explanations for poverty, our analyses show that these poverty attributions are associated with judgments about inequality and broadly defined support for the welfare state, but have little or no effect on more concrete policy proposals such as unemployment benefits or increase of social welfare at the expense of higher taxes.

Lay Explanation of Poverty During the Pandemic in Hungary

The paper analyzes perceived causes of poverty in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County, Hungary, one of the most disadvantaged areas of the country. Data collection was carried out in the second half of 2020 using consensus theory and the methods of systematic data collection. The aim of the research is to discover whether support for explanations which blame structural conditions is dominant in the public perception of poverty during the pandemic. From the research discussed it is clear that structural conditions are not dominant and that the poor are often seen as being themselves responsible for their unfavourable situation. The COVID-19 pandemic is not associated with a high support for the social type of lay explanations.

HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II Reply to Critics

HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II Reply to Critics

Debunking Myths about Poverty: Social Actor Representation of the Participants of the Canceled Ontario Basic Income Pilot Project

ABSTRACT The purpose of this research is to explore the representation of participants of the canceled Basic Income Pilot in Ontario, Canada. Applying social actor representation analysis and the Discourse-Historical Approach of Critical Discourse Analysis, we examined news articles and government Hansard records about the canceled Ontario Basic Income Pilot in 2018. A number of myths about poverty emerged in our analysis (e.g., “people are lazy, unmotivated, and need incentives to work”; “poor people are mentally ill and drug addicted”). We challenge the veracity of these myths, showing how they perpetuate an individual explanation of poverty, and are deeply flawed.

“You Start with the Youth”: Narratives of Deservingness and Dissent at a Homeless Service Organization

As they provide social services to people experiencing poverty and homelessness, many nonprofit organizations perpetuate ideologies that obscure the political and economic causes of poverty and blame poor people for their plight. But the ideologies and practices of service provision are more diverse than many scholars of the nonprofit industry have assumed. What are the processes by which professionalized service organizations not tied to broader social movements might nonetheless facilitate rather than hinder structural explanations of inequality among their clients? Using ethnographic observation, in-depth interviews, and analysis of art and writing by young adults experiencing homelessness, I investigate the prevalence of structural explanations of poverty among clients at a large homeless youth service organization. I find that the organization’s liberal assimilationist narratives about “youth” facilitate more critical analyses of poverty and inequality among homeless participants. As the organization’s public-facing communications emphasize the positive meanings of youth to assert clients’ deservingness, homeless clients leverage the organization’s assimilationist discourse to advance more radical critiques of the systems that oppress them. Building on scholarship about the medicalization of homelessness and the nonprofit industrial complex, this case study demonstrates how multiple ideologies and practices spanning the continuum from repressive to mobilizing can take hold within a single organization, and by extension, the nonprofit service industry.

Individualism or Structuralism–Differences in the Public Perception of Poverty between the United States and East-Central Europe

ABSTRACT Public perception of poverty is assumed to have a significant effect on the legitimacy and viability of welfare policies. The paper compares the public perceptions of poverty in the United States and in East-Central Europe and tests whether they reflect the individualism–structuralism dimension. It examines attributions for poverty in a preselected county in each area. Primary data collection is carried out using the methods of systematic data collection. These methods first certify a certain level of cultural competence in the field of interest, then provide reliable results with the use of a significantly smaller sample than mainstream social science methods. The paper concludes that the structural and individual explanations of poverty are endorsed to the same extent in both countries. Public perception of poverty does not reflect the differences of the welfare systems. The distinction between the two examined areas is sharpest with respect to health and health care-related items, to the family size, and to the role of friends. Policy makers need to be aware that it is vital to keep their minds open to both individualism and structuralism when working out anti-poverty strategies.

Racial Metaphors

Racial Metaphors Nikhil Pal Singh (bio) Barack Obama sought the middle of the road. "It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly in my lifetime," he told an interviewer in 2015. But, he added, "the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution in our lives … that's still part of our DNA that's passed on." Nikole Hannah-Jones is not so optimistic. "Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country," she wrote in the lead essay for the 1619 Project. The bequest of slavery, conjoined at the founding with America's vaunted claims to freedom and self-government, yielded a racial inheritance that we have not yet, and maybe never will, overcome. Saying "racism is in our DNA" is to speak metaphorically. The argument is not that racism is literally programmed in the genes. At the same time, the reference is curious, given the long, invidious association of genetics with the idea of "race" as embodied differences in moral character and cognitive ability. It is arguable that every instance of modern racism depends upon and returns to this intellectual source code. One might ask, then, why would anti-racists go there? To answer this question, we need a better account of the racial policy regimes and conflicts of the post–civil rights era. By the 1990s, three competing approaches with different conceptual vocabularies and legal arguments had emerged: one embraced the language of colorblindness, another emphasized the persistence of explicit racial bias, and a third focused on both more subtle and expansive notions of institutional or systemic racism. Until quite recently, colorblindness had won the law and policy argument. A curious metaphor in its own right, colorblindness suggests that the best way to address the stubborn and unpleasant fact of racial difference is by not seeing it with our full-spectrum capacities, if at all. Such a tortured conception belies an aggressive political project, inverting applications of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment to restrict antidiscrimination law, limit affirmative action and proactive school [End Page 103] desegregation, and provide race-neutral justifications for mass incarceration and voting rights restrictions. In the Obama years, whatever political truce had been forged among U.S. elites over colorblindness unraveled, particularly once states moved to limit voting after the Supreme Court's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder released them from federal oversight under the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, the persistent problem of racial disparities in police violence and criminal punishment erupted with a new intensity. The rise of Black Lives Matter protests gave decisive impetus to longstanding criticisms of the colorblind legal and policy regime, reinforcing the perception of racial stalemate during the post–civil rights era, with America's penal complex, according to a popular title, described as tantamount to a "new Jim Crow." The resurgent idea that "racism is in our DNA" has emerged as a shorthand for thinking about the historical continuities of racial domination and overturning the colorblind legal and policy approach. If colorblindness rests on the claim that the civil rights movement changed everything, the idea that racism is in our DNA borders on a fatalistic proposition that it changed little or nothing. Colorblindness counseled "benign neglect" in the face of persistent racial disparity, viewing the latter as a "tangle of pathology," which Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously argued was now "capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world." The claim that "racism is in our DNA" insists instead that racial disparities are evidence of social injustice produced by racism, demanding policy remediation. The metaphors we live by tell us a lot about our predicament. Colorblindness—an impairment of the senses—was always more about sanctioned indifference to racial inequality than ensuring fairness. To explain away enduring racial disparities, colorblind partisans reopened the door to racist science and culturalist explanations of poverty. But those who focus exclusively on racial disparity risk falling into a trap of their own by treating racial differentiation as if it stands outside of history and determines its course. The bitter irony is that essentialist thinking about racial inheritance has crept back into contemporary life, as we can see in the turn to epigenetic trauma, DNA...

A Poverty Simulation's Impact on Nursing and Social Work Students' Attitudes Towards Poverty and Health.

Currently, about 40 million people in the United States live in poverty, one of the most significant social determinants of health. Nurses and social workers must understand the effect of living in poverty on their clients' health and quality of life. Nurses and social workers will encounter persons living in poverty. Therefore, beginning in their undergraduate education, health professions students must be aware of their attitudes towards poverty and how poverty affects health. The Community Action Poverty Simulation was conducted with nursing and social work students at a small liberal arts institution. The Attitudes toward Poverty-Short Form (ATP-SF) and Beliefs Related to Poverty and Health (BRPH) tools were used pre- and postsimulation to assess students' attitudes about poverty and beliefs about the relationship between poverty and health. An emotional response plan was created to address participants' emotional responses by providing a separate space on-site and information about future resources. The ATP-SF showed a significant overall difference (p < .001) between pre- and postsimulation surveys, indicating a shift toward a structural explanation of poverty; the BRPH showed that participants believed poverty is the result of illness and inability to work (p < .01). This study supports poverty simulation use to promote awareness of attitudes towards those living in poverty and how poverty impacts health. Recommendations include using more community resource volunteers with first-hand poverty experience, allowing students to role-play adults or older teens in the simulation, and including other health professions students.

An Evaluation of Government Policies on Poverty Eradication: A Case Study of NAPEP in Ogbadibo LGA of Benue State

This study started with the foresight of the entire study comprising the introduction of the subject matter of the research work which is An Evaluation of Government Policies on Poverty Eradication. A case study of NAPEP in Ogbadibo LGA. In the review of literature, it was discovered that there are various opinions to the explanation of poverty in Nigeria. While some see poverty as the lack of basic amenities, others see poverty as poor investment in human capital on the whole; there was a convergence among different authors that Nigerians are poor. The survey study shows that the awareness level of NAPEP and her programmes are quite okay, but the implementation level remains very minimal in Ogbadibo LGA. Hypotheses were tested at 0.05 significance level with a degree of freedom (R - 1) (C - 1). The study revealed that National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) has not impacted significantly on poverty reduction or eradication in Ogbadibo LGA. This conclusion was drawn from an empirical analysis using chi-square which led to rejecting the alternative hypothesis that National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) has impacted significantly on poverty eradication in Ogbadibo LGA.

Poverty Removal Measures of Amartya Sen and the Smithian Dilemma

La historia de la civilización humana hasta ahora conocida ha sido marcada con logros gloriosos e injusticias abyectas caracterizadas por la pobreza, la desigualdad y las privaciones. La explicación más coherente de la pobreza y la injusticia se encuentra en las obras de Karl Marx y Frederick Engels. Ellos asociaron la pobreza y la injusticia con la propiedad privada, la división del trabajo, el intercambio, la competencia, la familia y el Estado. Amartya Sen ha considerado la democracia pluralista como la forma más deseable de gobierno que podría garantizar el crecimiento con justicia social junto con la libertad humana. Aunque son mejores que las formas autoritarias de gobierno en muchos aspectos, las democracias basadas en partidos políticos están sobrecargadas con una corrupción generalizada basada en la alianza criminal-sindical-política. Sen enfatiza el papel de los medios de comunicación y la conciencia de la gente común para romper este círculo vicioso y hacer que los políticos, los gobiernos, trabajen de manera deseable.Lamentablemente, esta nota optimista de Sen se ha topado con un serio obstáculo señalado por Adam Smith hace mucho tiempo. Según Smith, una psicosis común a la mayoría de las personas, cualesquiera que sean sus propias posiciones, es que admiran a los poderosos y a los ricos (cualesquiera que sean los medios de sus logros) en lugar de los realmente dignos, a saber: El honesto y virtuoso que no ha logrado el poder y la riqueza. Esto, de hecho, ha explicado una perspectiva sombría para la raza humana.

The Rhetoric of Recessions: How British Newspapers Talk about the Poor When Unemployment Rises, 1896–2000

Recessions appear to coincide with an increasingly stigmatising presentation of poverty in parts of the media. Previous research on the connection between high unemployment and media discourse has often relied on case studies of periods when stigmatising rhetoric about the poor was increasing. We build on earlier work on how economic context affects media representations of poverty by creating a unique dataset that measures how often stigmatising descriptions of the poor are used in five centrist and right-wing British newspapers between 1896 and 2000. Our results suggest stigmatising rhetoric about the poor increases when unemployment rises, except at the peak of very deep recessions (e.g. the 1930s and 1980s). This pattern is consistent with the idea that newspapers deploy deeply embedded Malthusian explanations for poverty when those ideas resonate with the economic context, and so this stigmatising rhetoric of recessions is likely to recur during future economic crises.