Poverty – Key Concepts
Absolute Poverty refers to a minimum level of subsistence that no family should be expected to live below. The federal government’s poverty line is used to measure absolute poverty.
Relative Poverty is a floating standard of deprivation by which people at the bottom of a society, whatever their lifestyles, are judged to be disadvantaged in comparison with the nation as a whole.
Federal Poverty Line – a money income figure adjusted annually to reflect the consumption requirements of families based on their size and composition
2007 HHS Poverty Guidelines
Family Size Poverty Threshold
4 $18,850.00
5 $22,030.00
6 $25,210.00
Explaining Poverty – Functionalist Perspective
Herbert Gans (1995) identified a number of social, economic, and political functions that the poor perform for society.
• The presence of poor people means that society’s dirty work – physically dangerous or dirty, dead-end and underpaid, undignified and menial jobs – will be performed at low cost.
• Poverty creates jobs for occupations & professions that “service” the poor. It creates legal employment (caseworkers and counselors in private and state agencies, public health experts, probation officers & many other employees of Crime Control Industry). It creates illegal jobs (drug dealers, numbers “runners”).
• The identification & punishment of the poor as deviants upholds the legitimacy of conventional social norms and “mainstream values” regarding hard work, thrift, and honesty.
• Within a relatively hierarchical society, the existence of poor people guarantees the higher status for the more affluent. Affluent people may then justify inequality (and gain a measure of satisfaction) by “blaming the victim” of poverty for their disadvantaged condition (William Ryan, 1976).
• Because of the lack of political power, the poor often absorb the costs of social change. Under the policy of deinstitutionalization, the mentally ill have been “dumped” primarily into low-income communities & neighborhoods. Halfway houses for rehabilitated drug abusers, as well as Methadone clinics, are in poorer neighborhoods because they are not accepted by affluent communities (N.I.M.B.Y.). Middle-class men & women who have developed problems with alcohol or other drugs move to poorer neighborhoods because of lower housing costs and the possibility of social services.
Social Mobility refers to movement of individuals or groups from one position in society’s stratification system to another.
An open stratification system implies that the position of each individual is influenced by the person’s achieved status.
A closed stratification system allows for little or no possibility of moving up, and is based on the person’s ascribed status.
Types of Social Mobility
(1) Vertical Mobility – the movement from one social position to another of a different rank (upward or downward)
(2) Horizontal Mobility – the movement from one social position to another of the same rank (the same prestige ranking)
(3) Intergenerational Mobility – changes in the social position of children relative to their parents
(4) Intragenerational Mobility – changes in social position within a person’s adult life
• About 65% of males are employed in higher-ranked occupations than their fathers; but intergenerational mobility is declining because today’s college students are increasingly likely to have college educated parents.
• People who reach a different occupational level from their parents usually advance (of fall back) one or two out of eight possible occupational levels. Mobility is limited.
• Education plays a strong role in intergenerational mobility. 75% of college-educated men achieved some upward mobility, compared with 12% who received no higher education.
• An undergraduate degree serves less as a guarantee of upward mobility than it did ten to twenty years ago because more and more people hold these degrees, and more and more jobs are requiring advanced degrees.
• Women’s employment opportunities are much more limited than men’s. Modest salary ranges & small prospects for advancement limit upward mobility.
• Race remains a factor in upward mobility, with African Americans less likely to advance. There has been a growing black middle-class throughout the country, but advances are significantly slower than white men and white women
Individual Mobility is most likely to take place when there is Cultural and Social Capitol (an accumulation of advantages). Key advantages are –
1. familial income (wealth)
2. level of education
3. occupation and family connections
4. supportive home environment, including parental expectations
5. financial resources to pay for higher education, extracurricular activities, tutoring, etc.; financial support to decrease or eliminate employment while in training program or higher education
Poverty in the United States
Moving Recipients Into the Workforce and Ending Welfare Dependency
The 1996 Welfare Reform Law – a combination of the Earned Income Tax Credit and new welfare rules – brought about the welfare revolution. Previously, only the nonworking poor had received cash assistance, but the money often wasn’t enough to live on and many recipients had held jobs they didn’t report. Under the new law, the poor are expected to work, and when they do, they receive a supplement to their wages – the earned income tax credit – that is 100 percent federally financed and more substantial than welfare in some states ever provided. In other words, the poor can now do exactly what the old system prohibited: work and receive additional public support to get them out of poverty. What is missing, besides stability of employment, is chiefly health insurance and child care for working mothers in low-pay jobs. The reforms are viewed as necessary and successful but incomplete. In the first four years (during the high prosperity) of 1996-2000, welfare rolls dropped by 60%, while the numbers of Americans in poverty also fell. But numbers in poverty have increased every year since 2000, while welfare rolls and median family incomes have fallen. Welfare rolls have remained stagnant, which is an excellent sign to experts – no resurgence in welfare.
Hunger In America
Stratification in the World
World Systems Theory (Immanuel Wallerstein)
Core Countries – Certain industrialized nations (among them the United States, Japan, and Germany) and their global corporations dominate economic & political relationships with other countries, control and consume the vast majority of resources.
Semi-Peripheral Countries – Certain typically semi-industrial nations (such as South Korea, Ireland, and Israel) have marginal economic status.
Peripheral Countries – They are poor developing countries in Asia, Africa, and South America. They are routinely exploited by Core Countries and their corporations.
Dependency Theory – even as developing countries make economic gains, they remain weak & subservient to Core Countries and corporations in an increasingly intertwined global economy.
Globalization – the worldwide integration of government policies, cultures, social movements, and financial networks through trade and the exchange of ideas.
It is a natural result of advances in communications technology, particularly the Internet and satellite transmission of the mass media.
It allows multinational corporations to expand unchecked. Outsourcing of higher wage jobs from Core to Semi-Peripheral countries is an example.
Multinational Corporations – commercial organizations that are headquartered in one country but do business throughout the world
“Global Factories” – factories throughout the developing world (many in Peripheral countries) that are run by multinational corporations
What Holds Some Semi-Peripheral & Peripheral
Countries Back From Advancement?
1. Core values, including work ethic
2. Technology resources
3. Natural resources
4. Climate, other environmental hindrances
5. Acceptance of their economic reality
6. Religious beliefs, interventions
7. War or civil discord
8. Wealth and poverty, starvation and famine
9. Health care needs
10. Education and literacy
11. Energy consumption, availability
12. AIDS, other diseases
13. Frustration > Anger > Aggression > Violence
“Clothes make the poor invisible...America has the
Best-dressed poverty the world has ever seen.”
- Michael Harrington
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