There are many different opinions on what causes poverty. For instance, according to the structural functionalist perspective, poverty is caused by institutional breakdown. Examples of this are economic institutions that don’t provide enough jobs or pay, education institutions that don’t provide the members of society with enough education and skills to find good employment, family institutions, and government institution that fail to offer enough support. According to the conflict perspective, poverty results from the power of the Bourgeoisie (the employer) over the proletariat (the worker). …show more content…
They are not irresponsible, lazy, or personally lacking as other people like to label “the poor” (as previously stated in the Symbolic Interactionist approach). Many people believe because of these labels “the poor” are undeserving of help, which has made welfare into a bad thing, aid that the beneficiary should be ashamed of recieving. One of the most common views of “the poor” is that they are jobless, unwilling, or unable to work. Contrary to that belief, the poor people in the United States are mainly teenagers and adults considered to be working poor, which are individuals who work or are looking for work at least 27 weeks per year. Other causes of poverty are the lack of jobs, lack of higher education, female-dominated occupations, discrimination, and the region in which someone …show more content…
Another source of poverty are the individuals stuck in a low income job. This is because of the lack of available jobs out there, in the end leading to those individuals being forced to rely on benefits in order to scrape by. However one looks at it, poverty is a major problem. In 2012 15 percent of the U.S. population, or 46.5 million Americans, lived below the poverty line. More than half of Americans between the ages of 20 and 75 will spend at least on year in poverty.
d. People see problems differently. Survey on your own or find stats on it. Who sees the problem differently? Men, women, older people, teens, politics?
e. Definitions of problems change over time. Find research on your problem of comparison of it in the past and now. For example how was the family depicted on TV 50 years ago compared to today?
For centuries, poverty was seen as inevitable. 84% of the earth’s population was estimated to live in complete poverty in the 1820s. One of the main reasons poverty was thought to be necessary was the abundance of cheap labor it created (back to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat). It was thought to keep the economic system balanced. These view started to change in the late 18th