Why Does Poverty Still Exist?

 

 

Social inequality is the existence of unequal opportunities and rewards for different social classes or statuses within a group or society. Social inequality has several important dimensions. Income is the earnings from work or investments, while wealth is the total value of money and other assets minus debts. Other important dimensions include power, schooling, ancestry, and race and ethnicity.

There is little question that many people in the U.S. are better off than most other people in the world. That being said, poverty also impacts millions of people in the U.S. Why do such social inequalities exist?

You can look at the reason why believe poverty exists. One approach to explain poverty is to blame the poor - that the poor are responsible for their own poverty. There is some evidence to support this theory, because the main reason people are poor is the lack of employment. According to this view, society has plenty of opportunities for people to realize the American dream, and people are poor because they lack the motivation, skills, or schooling to find work. The so called “American Dream” is how it sounds, it’s just a dream. Without the proper education and experience half the available jobs you no longer quality for.

Another approach that people believe poverty exist is to blame society, that society is responsible for poverty. While it is true that unemployment is a main contributor to poverty, the reasons people don't work are more in line with this approach. Loss of jobs in the inner city is a major contributor to poverty. There simply isn't enough work to support families. This goes back to my last approach with the lack of education and skills you don’t even quality.

According to an article I read they mention that, “Social inequality is characterized by the existence of unequal opportunities and rewards for different social positions or statuses within a group or society. It contains structured and recurrent patterns of unequal distributions of goods, wealth, opportunities, rewards, and punishments. Racism, for example, is understood to be a phenomenon whereby access to rights and resources is unfairly distributed across racial lines. Conversely, "white privilege" is a concept developed by social scientist Peggy McIntosh to refer to the myriad ways in which white people benefit from racial inequality, in particular” (Crossman). This statement to me is very true and unfortunate.

Sources:

http://sociology.about.com/od/Disciplines/a/Sociology-Of-Social-Inequality.htm

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