problem of poverty essay

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2.4 The Consequences of Poverty

Learning objectives.

• Describe the family and housing problems associated with poverty.
• Explain how poverty affects health and educational attainment.

Regardless of its causes, poverty has devastating consequences for the people who live in it. Much research conducted and/or analyzed by scholars, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations has documented the effects of poverty (and near poverty) on the lives of the poor (Lindsey, 2009; Moore, et. al., 2009; Ratcliffe & McKernan, 2010; Sanders, 2011). Many of these studies focus on childhood poverty, and these studies make it very clear that childhood poverty has lifelong consequences. In general, poor children are more likely to be poor as adults, more likely to drop out of high school, more likely to become a teenaged parent, and more likely to have employment problems. Although only 1 percent of children who are never poor end up being poor as young adults, 32 percent of poor children become poor as young adults (Ratcliffe & McKernan, 2010).

Poor children are more likely to have inadequate nutrition and to experience health, behavioral, and cognitive problems.

Kelly Short – Poverty: “Damaged Child,” Oklahoma City, OK, USA, 1936. (Colorized). – CC BY-SA 2.0.

A recent study used government data to follow children born between 1968 and 1975 until they were ages 30 to 37 (Duncan & Magnuson, 2011). The researchers compared individuals who lived in poverty in early childhood to those whose families had incomes at least twice the poverty line in early childhood. Compared to the latter group, adults who were poor in early childhood

• had completed two fewer years of schooling on the average;
• had incomes that were less than half of those earned by adults who had wealthier childhoods;
• received $826 more annually in food stamps on the average;
• were almost three times more likely to report being in poor health;
• were twice as likely to have been arrested (males only); and
• were five times as likely to have borne a child (females only).

We discuss some of the major specific consequences of poverty here and will return to them in later chapters.

Family Problems

The poor are at greater risk for family problems, including divorce and domestic violence. As Chapter 9 “Sexual Behavior” explains, a major reason for many of the problems families experience is stress. Even in families that are not poor, running a household can cause stress, children can cause stress, and paying the bills can cause stress. Families that are poor have more stress because of their poverty, and the ordinary stresses of family life become even more intense in poor families. The various kinds of family problems thus happen more commonly in poor families than in wealthier families. Compounding this situation, when these problems occur, poor families have fewer resources than wealthier families to deal with these problems.

Children and Our Future

Getting under Children’s Skin: The Biological Effects of Childhood Poverty

As the text discusses, childhood poverty often has lifelong consequences. Poor children are more likely to be poor when they become adults, and they are at greater risk for antisocial behavior when young, and for unemployment, criminal behavior, and other problems when they reach adolescence and young adulthood.

According to growing evidence, one reason poverty has these consequences is that it has certain neural effects on poor children that impair their cognitive abilities and thus their behavior and learning potential. As Greg J. Duncan and Katherine Magnuson (Duncan & Magnuson, 2011, p. 23) observe, “Emerging research in neuroscience and developmental psychology suggests that poverty early in a child’s life may be particularly harmful because the astonishingly rapid development of young children’s brains leaves them sensitive (and vulnerable) to environmental conditions.”

In short, poverty can change the way the brain develops in young children. The major reason for this effect is stress. Children growing up in poverty experience multiple stressful events: neighborhood crime and drug use; divorce, parental conflict, and other family problems, including abuse and neglect by their parents; parental financial problems and unemployment; physical and mental health problems of one or more family members; and so forth. Their great levels of stress in turn affect their bodies in certain harmful ways. As two poverty scholars note, “It’s not just that poverty-induced stress is mentally taxing. If it’s experienced early enough in childhood, it can in fact get ‘under the skin’ and change the way in which the body copes with the environment and the way in which the brain develops. These deep, enduring, and sometimes irreversible physiological changes are the very human price of running a high-poverty society” (Grusky & Wimer, 2011, p. 2).

One way poverty gets “under children’s skin” is as follows (Evans, et. al., 2011). Poor children’s high levels of stress produce unusually high levels of stress hormones such as cortisol and higher levels of blood pressure. Because these high levels impair their neural development, their memory and language development skills suffer. This result in turn affects their behavior and learning potential. For other physiological reasons, high levels of stress also affect the immune system, so that poor children are more likely to develop various illnesses during childhood and to have high blood pressure and other health problems when they grow older, and cause other biological changes that make poor children more likely to end up being obese and to have drug and alcohol problems.

The policy implications of the scientific research on childhood poverty are clear. As public health scholar Jack P. Shonkoff (Shonkoff, 2011) explains, “Viewing this scientific evidence within a biodevelopmental framework points to the particular importance of addressing the needs of our most disadvantaged children at the earliest ages.” Duncan and Magnuson (Duncan & Magnuson, 2011) agree that “greater policy attention should be given to remediating situations involving deep and persistent poverty occurring early in childhood.” To reduce poverty’s harmful physiological effects on children, Skonkoff advocates efforts to promote strong, stable relationships among all members of poor families; to improve the quality of the home and neighborhood physical environments in which poor children grow; and to improve the nutrition of poor children. Duncan and Magnuson call for more generous income transfers to poor families with young children and note that many European democracies provide many kinds of support to such families. The recent scientific evidence on early childhood poverty underscores the importance of doing everything possible to reduce the harmful effects of poverty during the first few years of life.

Health, Illness, and Medical Care

The poor are also more likely to have many kinds of health problems, including infant mortality, earlier adulthood mortality, and mental illness, and they are also more likely to receive inadequate medical care. Poor children are more likely to have inadequate nutrition and, partly for this reason, to suffer health, behavioral, and cognitive problems. These problems in turn impair their ability to do well in school and land stable employment as adults, helping to ensure that poverty will persist across generations. Many poor people are uninsured or underinsured, at least until the US health-care reform legislation of 2010 takes full effect a few years from now, and many have to visit health clinics that are overcrowded and understaffed.

As Chapter 12 “Work and the Economy” discusses, it is unclear how much of poor people’s worse health stems from their lack of money and lack of good health care versus their own behavior such as smoking and eating unhealthy diets. Regardless of the exact reasons, however, the fact remains that poor health is a major consequence of poverty. According to recent research, this fact means that poverty is responsible for almost 150,000 deaths annually, a figure about equal to the number of deaths from lung cancer (Bakalar, 2011).

Poor children typically go to rundown schools with inadequate facilities where they receive inadequate schooling. They are much less likely than wealthier children to graduate from high school or to go to college. Their lack of education in turn restricts them and their own children to poverty, once again helping to ensure a vicious cycle of continuing poverty across generations. As Chapter 10 “The Changing Family” explains, scholars debate whether the poor school performance of poor children stems more from the inadequacy of their schools and schooling versus their own poverty. Regardless of exactly why poor children are more likely to do poorly in school and to have low educational attainment, these educational problems are another major consequence of poverty.

Housing and Homelessness

The poor are, not surprisingly, more likely to be homeless than the nonpoor but also more likely to live in dilapidated housing and unable to buy their own homes. Many poor families spend more than half their income on rent, and they tend to live in poor neighborhoods that lack job opportunities, good schools, and other features of modern life that wealthier people take for granted. The lack of adequate housing for the poor remains a major national problem. Even worse is outright homelessness. An estimated 1.6 million people, including more than 300,000 children, are homeless at least part of the year (Lee, et. al., 2010).

Crime and Victimization

As Chapter 7 “Alcohol and Other Drugs” discusses, poor (and near poor) people account for the bulk of our street crime (homicide, robbery, burglary, etc.), and they also account for the bulk of victims of street crime. That chapter will outline several reasons for this dual connection between poverty and street crime, but they include the deep frustration and stress of living in poverty and the fact that many poor people live in high-crime neighborhoods. In such neighborhoods, children are more likely to grow up under the influence of older peers who are already in gangs or otherwise committing crime, and people of any age are more likely to become crime victims. Moreover, because poor and near-poor people are more likely to commit street crime, they also comprise most of the people arrested for street crimes, convicted of street crime, and imprisoned for street crime. Most of the more than 2 million people now in the nation’s prisons and jails come from poor or near-poor backgrounds. Criminal behavior and criminal victimization, then, are other major consequences of poverty.

Lessons from Other Societies

Poverty and Poverty Policy in Other Western Democracies

To compare international poverty rates, scholars commonly use a measure of the percentage of households in a nation that receive less than half of the nation’s median household income after taxes and cash transfers from the government. In data from the late 2000s, 17.3 percent of US households lived in poverty as defined by this measure. By comparison, other Western democracies had the rates depicted in the figure that follows. The average poverty rate of the nations in the figure excluding the United States is 9.5 percent. The US rate is thus almost twice as high as the average for all the other democracies.

This graph illustrates the poverty rates in western democracies (i.e., the percentage of persons living with less than half of the median household income) as of the late 2000s

Source: Data from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2011). Society at a glance 2011: OECD social indicators. Retrieved July 23, 2011, from http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/soc_glance-2011-en/06/02/index.html;jsessionid=erdqhbpb203ea.epsilon?contentType=&itemId=/content/chapter/soc_glance-2011-17-en&containerItemId=/content/se .

Why is there so much more poverty in the United States than in its Western counterparts? Several differences between the United States and the other nations stand out (Brady, 2009; Russell, 2011). First, other Western nations have higher minimum wages and stronger labor unions than the United States has, and these lead to incomes that help push people above poverty. Second, these other nations spend a much greater proportion of their gross domestic product on social expenditures (income support and social services such as child-care subsidies and housing allowances) than does the United States. As sociologist John Iceland (Iceland, 2006) notes, “Such countries often invest heavily in both universal benefits, such as maternity leave, child care, and medical care, and in promoting work among [poor] families…The United States, in comparison with other advanced nations, lacks national health insurance, provides less publicly supported housing, and spends less on job training and job creation.” Block and colleagues agree: “These other countries all take a more comprehensive government approach to combating poverty, and they assume that it is caused by economic and structural factors rather than bad behavior” (Block et, al., 2006).

The experience of the United Kingdom provides a striking contrast between the effectiveness of the expansive approach used in other wealthy democracies and the inadequacy of the American approach. In 1994, about 30 percent of British children lived in poverty; by 2009, that figure had fallen by more than half to 12 percent. Meanwhile, the US 2009 child poverty rate, was almost 21 percent.

Britain used three strategies to reduce its child poverty rate and to help poor children and their families in other ways. First, it induced more poor parents to work through a series of new measures, including a national minimum wage higher than its US counterpart and various tax savings for low-income workers. Because of these measures, the percentage of single parents who worked rose from 45 percent in 1997 to 57 percent in 2008. Second, Britain increased child welfare benefits regardless of whether a parent worked. Third, it increased paid maternity leave from four months to nine months, implemented two weeks of paid paternity leave, established universal preschool (which both helps children’s cognitive abilities and makes it easier for parents to afford to work), increased child-care aid, and made it possible for parents of young children to adjust their working hours to their parental responsibilities (Waldfogel, 2010). While the British child poverty rate fell dramatically because of these strategies, the US child poverty rate stagnated.

In short, the United States has so much more poverty than other democracies in part because it spends so much less than they do on helping the poor. The United States certainly has the wealth to follow their example, but it has chosen not to do so, and a high poverty rate is the unfortunate result. As the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman (2006, p. A25) summarizes this lesson, “Government truly can be a force for good. Decades of propaganda have conditioned many Americans to assume that government is always incompetent…But the [British experience has] shown that a government that seriously tries to reduce poverty can achieve a lot.”

Key Takeaways

• Poor people are more likely to have several kinds of family problems, including divorce and family conflict.
• Poor people are more likely to have several kinds of health problems.
• Children growing up in poverty are less likely to graduate high school or go to college, and they are more likely to commit street crime.

For Your Review

• Write a brief essay that summarizes the consequences of poverty.
• Why do you think poor children are more likely to develop health problems?

Bakalar, N. (2011, July 4). Researchers link deaths to social ills. New York Times , p. D5.

Block, F., Korteweg, A. C., & Woodward, K. (2006). The compassion gap in American poverty policy. Contexts, 5 (2), 14–20.

Brady, D. (2009). Rich democracies, poor people: How politics explain poverty . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Duncan, G. J., & Magnuson, K. (2011, winter). The long reach of early childhood poverty. Pathways: A Magazine on Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy , 22–27.

Evans, G. W., Brooks-Gunn, J., & Klebanov, P. K. (2011, winter). Stressing out the poor: Chronic physiological stress and the income-achievement gap. Pathways: A Magazine on Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy , 16–21.

Grusky, D., & Wimer, C.(Eds.). (2011, winter). Editors’ note. Pathways: A Magazine on Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy , 2.

Iceland, J. (2006). Poverty in America: A handbook . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Krugman, P. (Krugman, 2006). Helping the poor, the British way. New York Times , p. A25.

Lee, B., Tyler, K. A., & Wright, J. D. ( 2010). The new homelessness revisited. Annual Review of Sociology, 36 , 501–521.

Lindsey, D. (2009). Child poverty and inequality: Securing a better future for America’s children . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Moore, K. A., Redd, Z., Burkhauser, M., Mbawa, K., & Collins, A. (2009). Children in poverty: Trends, consequences, and policy options . Washington, DC: Child Trends. Retrieved from http://www.childtrends.org/Files//Child_Trends-2009_04_07_RB_ChildreninPoverty.pdf .

Ratcliffe, C., & McKernan, S.-M. (2010). Childhood poverty persistence: Facts and consequences . Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press.

Russell, J. W. ( 2011). Double standard: Social policy in Europe and the United States (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Sanders, L. (2011). Neuroscience exposes pernicious effects of poverty. Science News, 179 (3), 32.

Shonkoff, J. P. (2011, winter). Building a foundation for prosperity on the science of early childhood development. Pathways: A Magazine on Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy , 10–14.

Waldfogel, J. (2010). Britain’s war on poverty . New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

Social Problems Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Poverty Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on poverty essay.

“Poverty is the worst form of violence”. – Mahatma Gandhi.

How Poverty is Measured?

For measuring poverty United nations have devised two measures of poverty – Absolute & relative poverty.  Absolute poverty is used to measure poverty in developing countries like India. Relative poverty is used to measure poverty in developed countries like the USA. In absolute poverty, a line based on the minimum level of income has been created & is called a poverty line.  If per day income of a family is below this level, then it is poor or below the poverty line. If per day income of a family is above this level, then it is non-poor or above the poverty line. In India, the new poverty line is  Rs 32 in rural areas and Rs 47 in urban areas.

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Causes of Poverty

According to the Noble prize winner South African leader, Nelson Mandela – “Poverty is not natural, it is manmade”. The above statement is true as the causes of poverty are generally man-made. There are various causes of poverty but the most important is population. Rising population is putting the burden on the resources & budget of countries. Governments are finding difficult to provide food, shelter & employment to the rising population.

The other causes are- lack of education, war, natural disaster, lack of employment, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc. For instance- lack of employment opportunities makes a person jobless & he is not able to earn enough to fulfill the basic necessities of his family & becomes poor. Lack of education compels a person for less paying jobs & it makes him poorer. Lack of infrastructure means there are no industries, banks, etc. in a country resulting in lack of employment opportunities. Natural disasters like flood, earthquake also contribute to poverty.

In some countries, especially African countries like Somalia, a long period of civil war has made poverty widespread. This is because all the resources & money is being spent in war instead of public welfare. Countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. are prone to natural disasters like cyclone, etc. These disasters occur every year causing poverty to rise.

Ill Effects of Poverty

Poverty affects the life of a poor family. A poor person is not able to take proper food & nutrition &his capacity to work reduces. Reduced capacity to work further reduces his income, making him poorer. Children from poor family never get proper schooling & proper nutrition. They have to work to support their family & this destroys their childhood. Some of them may also involve in crimes like theft, murder, robbery, etc. A poor person remains uneducated & is forced to live under unhygienic conditions in slums. There are no proper sanitation & drinking water facility in slums & he falls ill often &  his health deteriorates. A poor person generally dies an early death. So, all social evils are related to poverty.

Government Schemes to Remove Poverty

The government of India also took several measures to eradicate poverty from India. Some of them are – creating employment opportunities , controlling population, etc. In India, about 60% of the population is still dependent on agriculture for its livelihood. Government has taken certain measures to promote agriculture in India. The government constructed certain dams & canals in our country to provide easy availability of water for irrigation. Government has also taken steps for the cheap availability of seeds & farming equipment to promote agriculture. Government is also promoting farming of cash crops like cotton, instead of food crops. In cities, the government is promoting industrialization to create more jobs. Government has also opened  ‘Ration shops’. Other measures include providing free & compulsory education for children up to 14 years of age, scholarship to deserving students from a poor background, providing subsidized houses to poor people, etc.

Poverty is a social evil, we can also contribute to control it. For example- we can simply donate old clothes to poor people, we can also sponsor the education of a poor child or we can utilize our free time by teaching poor students. Remember before wasting food, somebody is still sleeping hungry.

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Why Poverty Persists in America

A Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist offers a new explanation for an intractable problem.

A mother and son living in a Walmart parking lot in North Dakota in 2012. Credit... Eugene Richards

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By Matthew Desmond

• Published March 9, 2023 Updated April 3, 2023

In the past 50 years, scientists have mapped the entire human genome and eradicated smallpox. Here in the United States, infant-mortality rates and deaths from heart disease have fallen by roughly 70 percent, and the average American has gained almost a decade of life. Climate change was recognized as an existential threat. The internet was invented.

On the problem of poverty, though, there has been no real improvement — just a long stasis. As estimated by the federal government’s poverty line, 12.6 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1970; two decades later, it was 13.5 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent; and in 2019, it was 10.5 percent. To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills. The line curves slightly up, then slightly down, then back up again over the years, staying steady through Democratic and Republican administrations, rising in recessions and falling in boom years.

What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result. When the government began reporting the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, designed to overcome many of the flaws of the Official Poverty Measure, including not accounting for regional differences in costs of living and government benefits, the United States officially gained three million more poor people. Possible reductions in poverty from counting aid like food stamps and tax benefits were more than offset by recognizing how low-income people were burdened by rising housing and health care costs.

The American poor have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most.

Any fair assessment of poverty must confront the breathtaking march of material progress. But the fact that standards of living have risen across the board doesn’t mean that poverty itself has fallen. Forty years ago, only the rich could afford cellphones. But cellphones have become more affordable over the past few decades, and now most Americans have one, including many poor people. This has led observers like Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, to assert that “access to certain consumer goods,” like TVs, microwave ovens and cellphones, shows that “the poor are not quite so poor after all.”

No, it doesn’t. You can’t eat a cellphone. A cellphone doesn’t grant you stable housing, affordable medical and dental care or adequate child care. In fact, as things like cellphones have become cheaper, the cost of the most necessary of life’s necessities, like health care and rent, has increased. From 2000 to 2022 in the average American city, the cost of fuel and utilities increased by 115 percent. The American poor, living as they do in the center of global capitalism, have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most. As Michael Harrington put it 60 years ago: “It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed or doctored.”

Why, then, when it comes to poverty reduction, have we had 50 years of nothing? When I first started looking into this depressing state of affairs, I assumed America’s efforts to reduce poverty had stalled because we stopped trying to solve the problem. I bought into the idea, popular among progressives, that the election of President Ronald Reagan (as well as that of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom) marked the ascendancy of market fundamentalism, or “neoliberalism,” a time when governments cut aid to the poor, lowered taxes and slashed regulations. If American poverty persisted, I thought, it was because we had reduced our spending on the poor. But I was wrong.

Reagan expanded corporate power, deeply cut taxes on the rich and rolled back spending on some antipoverty initiatives, especially in housing. But he was unable to make large-scale, long-term cuts to many of the programs that make up the American welfare state. Throughout Reagan’s eight years as president, antipoverty spending grew, and it continued to grow after he left office. Spending on the nation’s 13 largest means-tested programs — aid reserved for Americans who fall below a certain income level — went from $1,015 a person the year Reagan was elected president to $3,419 a person one year into Donald Trump’s administration, a 237 percent increase.

Most of this increase was due to health care spending, and Medicaid in particular. But even if we exclude Medicaid from the calculation, we find that federal investments in means-tested programs increased by 130 percent from 1980 to 2018, from $630 to $1,448 per person.

“Neoliberalism” is now part of the left’s lexicon, but I looked in vain to find it in the plain print of federal budgets, at least as far as aid to the poor was concerned. There is no evidence that the United States has become stingier over time. The opposite is true.

This makes the country’s stalled progress on poverty even more baffling. Decade after decade, the poverty rate has remained flat even as federal relief has surged.

If we have more than doubled government spending on poverty and achieved so little, one reason is that the American welfare state is a leaky bucket. Take welfare, for example: When it was administered through the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program, almost all of its funds were used to provide single-parent families with cash assistance. But when President Bill Clinton reformed welfare in 1996, replacing the old model with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), he transformed the program into a block grant that gives states considerable leeway in deciding how to distribute the money. As a result, states have come up with rather creative ways to spend TANF dollars. Arizona has used welfare money to pay for abstinence-only sex education. Pennsylvania diverted TANF funds to anti-abortion crisis-pregnancy centers. Maine used the money to support a Christian summer camp. Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents.

We’ve approached the poverty question by pointing to poor people themselves, when we should have been focusing on exploitation.

A fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them. But this does not fully solve the puzzle of why poverty has been so stubbornly persistent, because many of the country’s largest social-welfare programs distribute funds directly to people. Roughly 85 percent of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program budget is dedicated to funding food stamps themselves, and almost 93 percent of Medicaid dollars flow directly to beneficiaries.

There are, it would seem, deeper structural forces at play, ones that have to do with the way the American poor are routinely taken advantage of. The primary reason for our stalled progress on poverty reduction has to do with the fact that we have not confronted the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor, housing and financial markets.

As a theory of poverty, “exploitation” elicits a muddled response, causing us to think of course and but, no in the same instant. The word carries a moral charge, but social scientists have a fairly coolheaded way to measure exploitation: When we are underpaid relative to the value of what we produce, we experience labor exploitation; when we are overcharged relative to the value of something we purchase, we experience consumer exploitation. For example, if a family paid $1,000 a month to rent an apartment with a market value of $20,000, that family would experience a higher level of renter exploitation than a family who paid the same amount for an apartment with a market valuation of $100,000. When we don’t own property or can’t access credit, we become dependent on people who do and can, which in turn invites exploitation, because a bad deal for you is a good deal for me.

Our vulnerability to exploitation grows as our liberty shrinks. Because labor laws often fail to protect undocumented workers in practice, more than a third are paid below minimum wage, and nearly 85 percent are not paid overtime. Many of us who are U.S. citizens, or who crossed borders through official checkpoints, would not work for these wages. We don’t have to. If they migrate here as adults, those undocumented workers choose the terms of their arrangement. But just because desperate people accept and even seek out exploitative conditions doesn’t make those conditions any less exploitative. Sometimes exploitation is simply the best bad option.

Consider how many employers now get one over on American workers. The United States offers some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world. A larger share of workers in the United States make “low pay” — earning less than two-thirds of median wages — than in any other country belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. According to the group, nearly 23 percent of American workers labor in low-paying jobs, compared with roughly 17 percent in Britain, 11 percent in Japan and 5 percent in Italy. Poverty wages have swollen the ranks of the American working poor, most of whom are 35 or older.

One popular theory for the loss of good jobs is deindustrialization, which caused the shuttering of factories and the hollowing out of communities that had sprung up around them. Such a passive word, “deindustrialization” — leaving the impression that it just happened somehow, as if the country got deindustrialization the way a forest gets infested by bark beetles. But economic forces framed as inexorable, like deindustrialization and the acceleration of global trade, are often helped along by policy decisions like the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it easier for companies to move their factories to Mexico and contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs. The world has changed, but it has changed for other economies as well. Yet Belgium and Canada and many other countries haven’t experienced the kind of wage stagnation and surge in income inequality that the United States has.

Those countries managed to keep their unions. We didn’t. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, nearly a third of all U.S. workers carried union cards. These were the days of the United Automobile Workers, led by Walter Reuther, once savagely beaten by Ford’s brass-knuckle boys, and of the mighty American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations that together represented around 15 million workers, more than the population of California at the time.

In their heyday, unions put up a fight. In 1970 alone, 2.4 million union members participated in work stoppages, wildcat strikes and tense standoffs with company heads. The labor movement fought for better pay and safer working conditions and supported antipoverty policies. Their efforts paid off for both unionized and nonunionized workers, as companies like Eastman Kodak were compelled to provide generous compensation and benefits to their workers to prevent them from organizing. By one estimate, the wages of nonunionized men without a college degree would be 8 percent higher today if union strength remained what it was in the late 1970s, a time when worker pay climbed, chief-executive compensation was reined in and the country experienced the most economically equitable period in modern history.

It is important to note that Old Labor was often a white man’s refuge. In the 1930s, many unions outwardly discriminated against Black workers or segregated them into Jim Crow local chapters. In the 1960s, unions like the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America enforced segregation within their ranks. Unions harmed themselves through their self-defeating racism and were further weakened by a changing economy. But organized labor was also attacked by political adversaries. As unions flagged, business interests sensed an opportunity. Corporate lobbyists made deep inroads in both political parties, beginning a public-relations campaign that pressured policymakers to roll back worker protections.

A national litmus test arrived in 1981, when 13,000 unionized air traffic controllers left their posts after contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration broke down. When the workers refused to return, Reagan fired all of them. The public’s response was muted, and corporate America learned that it could crush unions with minimal blowback. And so it went, in one industry after another.

Today almost all private-sector employees (94 percent) are without a union, though roughly half of nonunion workers say they would organize if given the chance. They rarely are. Employers have at their disposal an arsenal of tactics designed to prevent collective bargaining, from hiring union-busting firms to telling employees that they could lose their jobs if they vote yes. Those strategies are legal, but companies also make illegal moves to block unions, like disciplining workers for trying to organize or threatening to close facilities. In 2016 and 2017, the National Labor Relations Board charged 42 percent of employers with violating federal law during union campaigns. In nearly a third of cases, this involved illegally firing workers for organizing.

Corporate lobbyists told us that organized labor was a drag on the economy — that once the companies had cleared out all these fusty, lumbering unions, the economy would rev up, raising everyone’s fortunes. But that didn’t come to pass. The negative effects of unions have been wildly overstated, and there is now evidence that unions play a role in increasing company productivity, for example by reducing turnover. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics measures productivity as how efficiently companies turn inputs (like materials and labor) into outputs (like goods and services). Historically, productivity, wages and profits rise and fall in lock step. But the American economy is less productive today than it was in the post-World War II period, when unions were at peak strength. The economies of other rich countries have slowed as well, including those with more highly unionized work forces, but it is clear that diluting labor power in America did not unleash economic growth or deliver prosperity to more people. “We were promised economic dynamism in exchange for inequality,” Eric Posner and Glen Weyl write in their book “Radical Markets.” “We got the inequality, but dynamism is actually declining.”

As workers lost power, their jobs got worse. For several decades after World War II, ordinary workers’ inflation-adjusted wages (known as “real wages”) increased by 2 percent each year. But since 1979, real wages have grown by only 0.3 percent a year. Astonishingly, workers with a high school diploma made 2.7 percent less in 2017 than they would have in 1979, adjusting for inflation. Workers without a diploma made nearly 10 percent less.

Lousy, underpaid work is not an indispensable, if regrettable, byproduct of capitalism, as some business defenders claim today. (This notion would have scandalized capitalism’s earliest defenders. John Stuart Mill, arch advocate of free people and free markets, once said that if widespread scarcity was a hallmark of capitalism, he would become a communist.) But capitalism is inherently about owners trying to give as little, and workers trying to get as much, as possible. With unions largely out of the picture, corporations have chipped away at the conventional midcentury work arrangement, which involved steady employment, opportunities for advancement and raises and decent pay with some benefits.

As the sociologist Gerald Davis has put it: Our grandparents had careers. Our parents had jobs. We complete tasks. Or at least that has been the story of the American working class and working poor.

Poor Americans aren’t just exploited in the labor market. They face consumer exploitation in the housing and financial markets as well.

There is a long history of slum exploitation in America. Money made slums because slums made money. Rent has more than doubled over the past two decades, rising much faster than renters’ incomes. Median rent rose from $483 in 2000 to $1,216 in 2021. Why have rents shot up so fast? Experts tend to offer the same rote answers to this question. There’s not enough housing supply, they say, and too much demand. Landlords must charge more just to earn a decent rate of return. Must they? How do we know?

We need more housing; no one can deny that. But rents have jumped even in cities with plenty of apartments to go around. At the end of 2021, almost 19 percent of rental units in Birmingham, Ala., sat vacant, as did 12 percent of those in Syracuse, N.Y. Yet rent in those areas increased by roughly 14 percent and 8 percent, respectively, over the previous two years. National data also show that rental revenues have far outpaced property owners’ expenses in recent years, especially for multifamily properties in poor neighborhoods. Rising rents are not simply a reflection of rising operating costs. There’s another dynamic at work, one that has to do with the fact that poor people — and particularly poor Black families — don’t have much choice when it comes to where they can live. Because of that, landlords can overcharge them, and they do.

A study I published with Nathan Wilmers found that after accounting for all costs, landlords operating in poor neighborhoods typically take in profits that are double those of landlords operating in affluent communities. If down-market landlords make more, it’s because their regular expenses (especially their mortgages and property-tax bills) are considerably lower than those in upscale neighborhoods. But in many cities with average or below-average housing costs — think Buffalo, not Boston — rents in the poorest neighborhoods are not drastically lower than rents in the middle-class sections of town. From 2015 to 2019, median monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the Indianapolis metropolitan area was $991; it was $816 in neighborhoods with poverty rates above 40 percent, just around 17 percent less. Rents are lower in extremely poor neighborhoods, but not by as much as you would think.

Yet where else can poor families live? They are shut out of homeownership because banks are disinclined to issue small-dollar mortgages, and they are also shut out of public housing, which now has waiting lists that stretch on for years and even decades. Struggling families looking for a safe, affordable place to live in America usually have but one choice: to rent from private landlords and fork over at least half their income to rent and utilities. If millions of poor renters accept this state of affairs, it’s not because they can’t afford better alternatives; it’s because they often aren’t offered any.

You can read injunctions against usury in the Vedic texts of ancient India, in the sutras of Buddhism and in the Torah. Aristotle and Aquinas both rebuked it. Dante sent moneylenders to the seventh circle of hell. None of these efforts did much to stem the practice, but they do reveal that the unprincipled act of trapping the poor in a cycle of debt has existed at least as long as the written word. It might be the oldest form of exploitation after slavery. Many writers have depicted America’s poor as unseen, shadowed and forgotten people: as “other” or “invisible.” But markets have never failed to notice the poor, and this has been particularly true of the market for money itself.

The deregulation of the banking system in the 1980s heightened competition among banks. Many responded by raising fees and requiring customers to carry minimum balances. In 1977, over a third of banks offered accounts with no service charge. By the early 1990s, only 5 percent did. Big banks grew bigger as community banks shuttered, and in 2021, the largest banks in America charged customers almost $11 billion in overdraft fees. Previous research showed that just 9 percent of account holders paid 84 percent of these fees. Who were the unlucky 9 percent? Customers who carried an average balance of less than $350. The poor were made to pay for their poverty.

In 2021, the average fee for overdrawing your account was $33.58. Because banks often issue multiple charges a day, it’s not uncommon to overdraw your account by $20 and end up paying $200 for it. Banks could (and do) deny accounts to people who have a history of overextending their money, but those customers also provide a steady revenue stream for some of the most powerful financial institutions in the world.

Every year: almost $11 billion in overdraft fees, $1.6 billion in check-cashing fees and up to $8.2 billion in payday-loan fees.

According to the F.D.I.C., one in 19 U.S. households had no bank account in 2019, amounting to more than seven million families. Compared with white families, Black and Hispanic families were nearly five times as likely to lack a bank account. Where there is exclusion, there is exploitation. Unbanked Americans have created a market, and thousands of check-cashing outlets now serve that market. Check-cashing stores generally charge from 1 to 10 percent of the total, depending on the type of check. That means that a worker who is paid $10 an hour and takes a $1,000 check to a check-cashing outlet will pay $10 to $100 just to receive the money he has earned, effectively losing one to 10 hours of work. (For many, this is preferable to the less-predictable exploitation by traditional banks, with their automatic overdraft fees. It’s the devil you know.) In 2020, Americans spent $1.6 billion just to cash checks. If the poor had a costless way to access their own money, over a billion dollars would have remained in their pockets during the pandemic-induced recession.

Poverty can mean missed payments, which can ruin your credit. But just as troublesome as bad credit is having no credit score at all, which is the case for 26 million adults in the United States. Another 19 million possess a credit history too thin or outdated to be scored. Having no credit (or bad credit) can prevent you from securing an apartment, buying insurance and even landing a job, as employers are increasingly relying on credit checks during the hiring process. And when the inevitable happens — when you lose hours at work or when the car refuses to start — the payday-loan industry steps in.

For most of American history, regulators prohibited lending institutions from charging exorbitant interest on loans. Because of these limits, banks kept interest rates between 6 and 12 percent and didn’t do much business with the poor, who in a pinch took their valuables to the pawnbroker or the loan shark. But the deregulation of the banking sector in the 1980s ushered the money changers back into the temple by removing strict usury limits. Interest rates soon reached 300 percent, then 500 percent, then 700 percent. Suddenly, some people were very interested in starting businesses that lent to the poor. In recent years, 17 states have brought back strong usury limits, capping interest rates and effectively prohibiting payday lending. But the trade thrives in most places. The annual percentage rate for a two-week $300 loan can reach 460 percent in California, 516 percent in Wisconsin and 664 percent in Texas.

Roughly a third of all payday loans are now issued online, and almost half of borrowers who have taken out online loans have had lenders overdraw their bank accounts. The average borrower stays indebted for five months, paying $520 in fees to borrow $375. Keeping people indebted is, of course, the ideal outcome for the payday lender. It’s how they turn a $15 profit into a $150 one. Payday lenders do not charge high fees because lending to the poor is risky — even after multiple extensions, most borrowers pay up. Lenders extort because they can.

Every year: almost $11 billion in overdraft fees, $1.6 billion in check-cashing fees and up to $8.2 billion in payday-loan fees. That’s more than $55 million in fees collected predominantly from low-income Americans each day — not even counting the annual revenue collected by pawnshops and title loan services and rent-to-own schemes. When James Baldwin remarked in 1961 how “extremely expensive it is to be poor,” he couldn’t have imagined these receipts.

“Predatory inclusion” is what the historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls it in her book “Race for Profit,” describing the longstanding American tradition of incorporating marginalized people into housing and financial schemes through bad deals when they are denied good ones. The exclusion of poor people from traditional banking and credit systems has forced them to find alternative ways to cash checks and secure loans, which has led to a normalization of their exploitation. This is all perfectly legal, after all, and subsidized by the nation’s richest commercial banks. The fringe banking sector would not exist without lines of credit extended by the conventional one. Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase bankroll payday lenders like Advance America and Cash America. Everybody gets a cut.

Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that. When we ignore the role that exploitation plays in trapping people in poverty, we end up designing policy that is weak at best and ineffective at worst. For example, when legislation lifts incomes at the bottom without addressing the housing crisis, those gains are often realized instead by landlords, not wholly by the families the legislation was intended to help. A 2019 study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that when states raised minimum wages, families initially found it easier to pay rent. But landlords quickly responded to the wage bumps by increasing rents, which diluted the effect of the policy. This happened after the pandemic rescue packages, too: When wages began to rise in 2021 after worker shortages, rents rose as well, and soon people found themselves back where they started or worse.

Antipoverty programs work. Each year, millions of families are spared the indignities and hardships of severe deprivation because of these government investments. But our current antipoverty programs cannot abolish poverty by themselves. The Johnson administration started the War on Poverty and the Great Society in 1964. These initiatives constituted a bundle of domestic programs that included the Food Stamp Act, which made food aid permanent; the Economic Opportunity Act, which created Job Corps and Head Start; and the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which founded Medicare and Medicaid and expanded Social Security benefits. Nearly 200 pieces of legislation were signed into law in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s first five years in office, a breathtaking level of activity. And the result? Ten years after the first of these programs were rolled out in 1964, the share of Americans living in poverty was half what it was in 1960.

But the War on Poverty and the Great Society were started during a time when organized labor was strong, incomes were climbing, rents were modest and the fringe banking industry as we know it today didn’t exist. Today multiple forms of exploitation have turned antipoverty programs into something like dialysis, a treatment designed to make poverty less lethal, not to make it disappear.

This means we don’t just need deeper antipoverty investments. We need different ones, policies that refuse to partner with poverty, policies that threaten its very survival. We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets, instead of being captured by companies whose low wages are subsidized by government benefits, or by landlords who raise the rents as their tenants’ wages rise, or by banks and payday-loan outlets who issue exorbitant fines and fees. Unless we confront the many forms of exploitation that poor families face, we risk increasing government spending only to experience another 50 years of sclerosis in the fight against poverty.

The best way to address labor exploitation is to empower workers. A renewed contract with American workers should make organizing easy. As things currently stand, unionizing a workplace is incredibly difficult. Under current labor law, workers who want to organize must do so one Amazon warehouse or one Starbucks location at a time. We have little chance of empowering the nation’s warehouse workers and baristas this way. This is why many new labor movements are trying to organize entire sectors. The Fight for $15 campaign, led by the Service Employees International Union, doesn’t focus on a single franchise (a specific McDonald’s store) or even a single company (McDonald’s) but brings together workers from several fast-food chains. It’s a new kind of labor power, and one that could be expanded: If enough workers in a specific economic sector — retail, hotel services, nursing — voted for the measure, the secretary of labor could establish a bargaining panel made up of representatives elected by the workers. The panel could negotiate with companies to secure the best terms for workers across the industry. This is a way to organize all Amazon warehouses and all Starbucks locations in a single go.

Sectoral bargaining, as it’s called, would affect tens of millions of Americans who have never benefited from a union of their own, just as it has improved the lives of workers in Europe and Latin America. The idea has been criticized by members of the business community, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has raised concerns about the inflexibility and even the constitutionality of sectoral bargaining, as well as by labor advocates, who fear that industrywide policies could nullify gains that existing unions have made or could be achieved only if workers make other sacrifices. Proponents of the idea counter that sectoral bargaining could even the playing field, not only between workers and bosses, but also between companies in the same sector that would no longer be locked into a race to the bottom, with an incentive to shortchange their work force to gain a competitive edge. Instead, the companies would be forced to compete over the quality of the goods and services they offer. Maybe we would finally reap the benefits of all that economic productivity we were promised.

We must also expand the housing options for low-income families. There isn’t a single right way to do this, but there is clearly a wrong way: the way we’re doing it now. One straightforward approach is to strengthen our commitment to the housing programs we already have. Public housing provides affordable homes to millions of Americans, but it’s drastically underfunded relative to the need. When the wealthy township of Cherry Hill, N.J., opened applications for 29 affordable apartments in 2021, 9,309 people applied. The sky-high demand should tell us something, though: that affordable housing is a life changer, and families are desperate for it.

We could also pave the way for more Americans to become homeowners, an initiative that could benefit poor, working-class and middle-class families alike — as well as scores of young people. Banks generally avoid issuing small-dollar mortgages, not because they’re riskier — these mortgages have the same delinquency rates as larger mortgages — but because they’re less profitable. Over the life of a mortgage, interest on $1 million brings in a lot more money than interest on $75,000. This is where the federal government could step in, providing extra financing to build on-ramps to first-time homeownership. In fact, it already does so in rural America through the 502 Direct Loan Program, which has moved more than two million families into their own homes. These loans, fully guaranteed and serviced by the Department of Agriculture, come with low interest rates and, for very poor families, cover the entire cost of the mortgage, nullifying the need for a down payment. Last year, the average 502 Direct Loan was for $222,300 but cost the government only $10,370 per loan, chump change for such a durable intervention. Expanding a program like this into urban communities would provide even more low- and moderate-income families with homes of their own.

We should also ensure fair access to capital. Banks should stop robbing the poor and near-poor of billions of dollars each year, immediately ending exorbitant overdraft fees. As the legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran has pointed out, when someone overdraws an account, banks could simply freeze the transaction or could clear a check with insufficient funds, providing customers a kind of short-term loan with a low interest rate of, say, 1 percent a day.

States should rein in payday-lending institutions and insist that lenders make it clear to potential borrowers what a loan is ultimately likely to cost them. Just as fast-food restaurants must now publish calorie counts next to their burgers and shakes, payday-loan stores should publish the average overall cost of different loans. When Texas adopted disclosure rules, residents took out considerably fewer bad loans. If Texas can do this, why not California or Wisconsin? Yet to stop financial exploitation, we need to expand, not limit, low-income Americans’ access to credit. Some have suggested that the government get involved by having the U.S. Postal Service or the Federal Reserve issue small-dollar loans. Others have argued that we should revise government regulations to entice commercial banks to pitch in. Whatever our approach, solutions should offer low-income Americans more choice, a way to end their reliance on predatory lending institutions that can get away with robbery because they are the only option available.

In Tommy Orange’s novel, “There There,” a man trying to describe the problem of suicides on Native American reservations says: “Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping.” The poverty debate has suffered from a similar kind of myopia. For the past half-century, we’ve approached the poverty question by pointing to poor people themselves — posing questions about their work ethic, say, or their welfare benefits — when we should have been focusing on the fire. The question that should serve as a looping incantation, the one we should ask every time we drive past a tent encampment, those tarped American slums smelling of asphalt and bodies, or every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is simply: Who benefits? Not: Why don’t you find a better job? Or: Why don’t you move? Or: Why don’t you stop taking out payday loans? But: Who is feeding off this?

Those who have amassed the most power and capital bear the most responsibility for America’s vast poverty: political elites who have utterly failed low-income Americans over the past half-century; corporate bosses who have spent and schemed to prioritize profits over families; lobbyists blocking the will of the American people with their self-serving interests; property owners who have exiled the poor from entire cities and fueled the affordable-housing crisis. Acknowledging this is both crucial and deliciously absolving; it directs our attention upward and distracts us from all the ways (many unintentional) that we — we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college-educated, the protected, the lucky — also contribute to the problem.

Corporations benefit from worker exploitation, sure, but so do consumers, who buy the cheap goods and services the working poor produce, and so do those of us directly or indirectly invested in the stock market. Landlords are not the only ones who benefit from housing exploitation; many homeowners do, too, their property values propped up by the collective effort to make housing scarce and expensive. The banking and payday-lending industries profit from the financial exploitation of the poor, but so do those of us with free checking accounts, as those accounts are subsidized by billions of dollars in overdraft fees.

Living our daily lives in ways that express solidarity with the poor could mean we pay more; anti-exploitative investing could dampen our stock portfolios. By acknowledging those costs, we acknowledge our complicity. Unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation and refusing to live as enemies of the poor will require us to pay a price. It’s the price of our restored humanity and renewed country.

Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University and a contributing writer for the magazine. His latest book, “Poverty, by America,” from which this article is adapted, is being published on March 21 by Crown.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the legal protections for undocumented workers. They are afforded rights under U.S. labor laws, though in practice those laws often fail to protect them.

An earlier version of this article implied an incorrect date for a statistic about overdraft fees. The research was conducted between 2005 and 2012, not in 2021.

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7 Essays About Poverty: Example Essays and Prompts

Essays about poverty give valuable insight into the economic situation that we share globally. Read our guide with poverty essay examples and prompts for your paper.

In the US, the official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5 percent, with 37.9 million people living below the poverty line. With a global pandemic, cost of living crisis, and climate change on the rise, we’ve seen poverty increase due to various factors. As many of us face adversity daily, we can look to essays about poverty from some of the world’s greatest speakers for inspiration and guidance.

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

Writing a poverty essay can be challenging due to the many factors contributing to poverty and the knock-on effects of living below the poverty line . For example, homelessness among low-income individuals stems from many different causes.

It’s important to note that poverty exists beyond the US, with many developing countries living in extreme poverty without access to essentials like clean water and housing. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

Essays About Poverty: Top Examples

1. pensioner poverty: fear of rise over decades as uk under-40s wealth falls, 2. the surprising poverty levels across the u.s., 3. why poverty persists in america, 4. post-pandemic poverty is rising in america’s suburbs.

• 5. The Basic Facts About Children in Poverty
• 6. The State of America’s Children 
• 7. COVID-19: This is how many Americans now live below the poverty line

10 Poverty Essay Topics

1. the causes of poverty, 2. the negative effects of poverty, 3. how countries can reduce poverty rates, 4. the basic necessities and poverty, 5. how disabilities can lead to poverty, 6. how the cycle of poverty unfolds , 7. universal basic income and its relationship to poverty, 8. interview someone who has experience living in poverty, 9. the impact of the criminal justice system on poverty, 10. the different ways to create affordable housing.

There is growing concern about increasing pensioner poverty in the UK in the coming decades. Due to financial challenges like the cost of living crisis, rent increases, and the COVID-19 pandemic, under 40s have seen their finances shrink.

Osborne discusses the housing wealth gap in this article, where many under the 40s currently pay less in a pension due to rent prices. While this means they will have less pension available, they will also retire without owning a home, resulting in less personal wealth than previous generations. Osborne delves into the causes and gaps in wealth between generations in this in-depth essay.

“Those under-40s have already been identified as  facing the biggest hit from rising mortgage rates , and last week a study by the financial advice firm Hargreaves Lansdown found that almost a third of 18- to 34-year-olds had stopped or cut back on their pension contributions in order to save money.” Hilary Osborne,  The Guardian

In this 2023 essay, Jeremy Ney looks at the poverty levels across the US, stating that poverty has had the largest one-year increase in history. According to the most recent census, child poverty has more than doubled from 2021 to 2022.

Ney states that the expiration of government support and inflation has created new financial challenges for US families. With the increased cost of living and essential items like food and housing sharply increasing, more and more families have fallen below the poverty line. Throughout this essay, Ney displays statistics and data showing the wealth changes across states, ethnic groups, and households.

“Poverty in America reflects the inequality that plagues U.S. households. While certain regions have endured this pain much more than others, this new rising trend may spell ongoing challenges for even more communities.” Jeremy Ney,  TIME

In this New York Times article, a Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist explores why poverty exists in North America.

The American poor have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most. Matthew Desmond,  The New York Times

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released its annual data on poverty, revealing contrasting trends for 2022. While one set of findings indicated that the overall number of Americans living in poverty remained stable compared to the previous two years, another survey highlighted a concerning increase in child poverty. The rate of child poverty in the U.S. doubled from 2021 to 2022, a spike attributed mainly to the cessation of the expanded child tax credit following the pandemic. These varied outcomes underscore the Census Bureau’s multifaceted methods to measure poverty.

“The nation’s suburbs accounted for the majority of increases in the poor population following the onset of the pandemic” Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube,  Brookings

5.  The Basic Facts About Children in Poverty

Nearly 11 million children are living in poverty in America. This essay explores ow the crisis reached this point—and what steps must be taken to solve it.

“In America, nearly 11 million children are poor. That’s 1 in 7 kids, who make up almost one-third of all people living in poverty in this country.” Areeba Haider,  Center for American Progress

6.  The State of America’s Children  

This essay articles how, despite advancements, children continue to be the most impoverished demographic in the U.S., with particular subgroups — such as children of color, those under five, offspring of single mothers, and children residing in the South — facing the most severe poverty levels.

“Growing up in poverty has wide-ranging, sometimes lifelong, effects on children, putting them at a much higher risk of experiencing behavioral, social, emotional, and health challenges. Childhood poverty also plays an instrumental role in impairing a child’s ability and capacity to learn, build skills, and succeed academically.” Children’s Defense Fund

7.  COVID-19: This is how many Americans now live below the poverty line

This essay explores how the economic repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic 2020 led to a surge in U.S. poverty rates, with unemployment figures reaching unprecedented heights. The writer provides data confirming that individuals at the lowest economic strata bore the brunt of these challenges, indicating that the recession might have exacerbated income disparities, further widening the chasm between the affluent and the underprivileged.

“Poverty in the U.S. increased in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic hammered the economy and unemployment soared. Those at the bottom of the economic ladder were hit hardest, new figures confirm, suggesting that the recession may have widened the gap between the rich and the poor.” Elena Delavega,  World Econmic Forum

If you’re tasked with writing an essay about poverty, consider using the below topics. They offer pointers for outlining and planning an essay about this challenging topic.

One of the most specific poverty essay topics to address involves the causes of poverty. You can craft an essay to examine the most common causes of extreme poverty. Here are a few topics you might want to include:

• Racial discrimination, particularly among African Americans, has been a common cause of poverty throughout American history. Discrimination and racism can make it hard for people to get the education they need, making it nearly impossible to get a job.
• A lack of access to adequate health care can also lead to poverty. When people do not have access to healthcare, they are more likely to get sick. This could make it hard for them to go to work while also leading to major medical bills.
• Inadequate food and water can lead to poverty as well. If people’s basic needs aren’t met, they focus on finding food and water instead of getting an education they can use to find a better job.

These are just a few of the most common causes of poverty you might want to highlight in your essay. These topics could help people see why some people are more likely to become impoverished than others. You might also be interested in these essays about poverty .

Poverty affects everyone, and the impacts of an impoverished lifestyle are very real. Furthermore, the disparities when comparing adult poverty to child poverty are also significant. This opens the doors to multiple possible essay topics. Here are a few points to include:

• When children live in poverty, their development is stunted. For example, they might not be able to get to school on time due to a lack of transportation, making it hard for them to keep up with their peers. Child poverty also leads to malnutrition, which can stunt their development.
• Poverty can impact familial relationships as well. For example, members of the same family could fight for limited resources, making it hard for family members to bond. In addition, malnutrition can stunt the growth of children.
• As a side effect of poverty, people have difficulty finding a safe place to live. This creates a challenging environment for everyone involved, and it is even harder for children to grow and develop.
• When poverty leads to homelessness, it is hard for someone to get a job. They don’t have an address to use for physical communication, which leads to employment concerns.

These are just a few of the many side effects of poverty. Of course, these impacts are felt by people across the board, but it is not unusual for children to feel the effects of poverty that much more. You might also be interested in these essays about unemployment .

Different countries take different approaches to reduce the number of people living in poverty

The issue of poverty is a major human rights concern, and many countries explore poverty reduction strategies to improve people’s quality of life. You might want to examine different strategies that different countries are taking while also suggesting how some countries can do more. A few ways to write this essay include:

• Explore the poverty level in America, comparing it to the poverty level of a European country. Then, explore why different countries take different strategies.
• Compare the minimum wage in one state, such as New York, to the minimum wage in another state, such as Alabama. Why is it higher in one state? What does raising the minimum wage do to the cost of living?
• Highlight a few advocacy groups and nonprofit organizations actively lobbying their governments to do more for low-income families. Then, talk about why some efforts are more successful than others.

Different countries take different approaches to reduce the number of people living in poverty. Poverty within each country is such a broad topic that you could write a different essay on how poverty could be decreased within the country. For more, check out our list of simple essays topics for intermediate writers .

You could also write an essay on the necessities people need to survive. You could take a look at information published by the United Nations , which focuses on getting people out of the cycle of poverty across the globe. The social problem of poverty can be addressed by giving people the necessities they need to survive, particularly in rural areas. Here are some of the areas you might want to include:

• Affordable housing
• Fresh, healthy food and clean water
• Access to an affordable education
• Access to affordable healthcare

Giving everyone these necessities could significantly improve their well-being and get people out of absolute poverty. You might even want to talk about whether these necessities vary depending on where someone is living.

There are a lot of medical and social issues that contribute to poverty, and you could write about how disabilities contribute to poverty. This is one of the most important essay topics because people could be disabled through no fault of their own. Some of the issues you might want to address in this essay include:

• Talk about the road someone faces if they become disabled while serving overseas. What is it like for people to apply for benefits through the Veterans’ Administration?
• Discuss what happens if someone becomes disabled while at work. What is it like for someone to pursue disability benefits if they are hurt doing a blue-collar job instead of a desk job?
• Research and discuss the experiences of disabled people and how their disability impacts their financial situation.

People who are disabled need to have money to survive for many reasons, such as the inability to work, limitations at home, and medical expenses. A lack of money, in this situation, can lead to a dangerous cycle that can make it hard for someone to be financially stable and live a comfortable lifestyle.

Many people talk about the cycle of poverty, yet many aren’t entirely sure what this means or what it entails. A few key points you should address in this essay include:

• When someone is born into poverty, income inequality can make it hard to get an education.
• A lack of education makes it hard for someone to get into a good school, which gives them the foundation they need to compete for a good job. 
• A lack of money can make it hard for someone to afford college, even if they get into a good school.
• Without attending a good college, it can be hard for someone to get a good job. This makes it hard for someone to support themselves or their families. 
• Without a good paycheck, it is nearly impossible for someone to keep their children out of poverty, limiting upward mobility into the middle class.

The problem of poverty is a positive feedback loop. It can be nearly impossible for those who live this every day to escape. Therefore, you might want to explore a few initiatives that could break the cycle of world poverty and explore other measures that could break this feedback loop.

Many business people and politicians have floated the idea of a universal basic income to give people the basic resources they need to survive. While this hasn’t gotten a lot of serious traction, you could write an essay to shed light on this idea. A few points to hit on include:

• What does a universal basic income mean, and how is it distributed?
• Some people are concerned about the impact this would have on taxes. How would this be paid for?
• What is the minimum amount of money someone would need to stay out of poverty? Is it different in different areas?
• What are a few of the biggest reasons major world governments haven’t passed this?

This is one of the best essay examples because it gives you a lot of room to be creative. However, there hasn’t been a concrete structure for implementing this plan, so you might want to afford one.

Another interesting topic you might want to explore is interviewing someone living in poverty or who has been impoverished. While you can talk about statistics all day, they won’t be as powerful as interviewing someone who has lived that life. A few questions you might want to ask during your interview include:

• What was it like growing up?
• How has living in poverty made it hard for you to get a job?
• What do you feel people misunderstand about those who live in poverty?
• When you need to find a meal, do you have a place you go to? Or is it somewhere different every day?
• What do you think is the main contributor to people living in poverty?

Remember that you can also craft different questions depending on your responses. You might want to let the interviewee read the essay when you are done to ensure all the information is accurate and correct.

The criminal justice system and poverty tend to go hand in hand. People with criminal records are more likely to be impoverished for several reasons. You might want to write an essay that hits on some of these points:

• Discuss the discriminatory practices of the criminal justice system both as they relate to socioeconomic status and as they relate to race.
• Explore just how hard it is for someone to get a job if they have a criminal record. Discuss how this might contribute to a life of poverty.
• Dive into how this creates a positive feedback loop. For example, when someone cannot get a job due to a criminal record, they might have to steal to survive, which worsens the issue.
• Review what the criminal justice system might be like for someone with resources when compared to someone who cannot afford to hire expert witnesses or pay for a good attorney.

You might want to include a few examples of disparate sentences for people in different socioeconomic situations to back up your points. 

Affordable housing can make a major difference when someone is trying to escape poverty

Many poverty-related problems could be reduced if people had access to affordable housing. While the cost of housing has increased dramatically in the United States , some initiatives exist to create affordable housing. Here are a few points to include:

• Talk about public programs that offer affordable housing to people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
• Discuss private programs, such as Habitat for Humanity , doing similar things.
• Review the positive impacts that stable housing has on both adults and children.
• Dive into other measures local and federal governments could take to provide more affordable housing for people.

There are a lot of political and social angles to address with this essay, so you might want to consider spreading this out across multiple papers. Affordable housing can make a major difference when trying to escape poverty. If you want to learn more, check out our essay writing tips !

Meet Rachael, the editor at Become a Writer Today. With years of experience in the field, she is passionate about language and dedicated to producing high-quality content that engages and informs readers. When she's not editing or writing, you can find her exploring the great outdoors, finding inspiration for her next project.

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Essay on Poverty: Samples in 100, 200, 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Oct 14, 2023

Poverty is a deep-rooted problem that continues to affect a large portion of the world’s population today. It touches on several aspects of human life including but not limited to political, economic, and social elements. Even though there are several methods to escape poverty, still issues arise due to a lack of adequate unity among the country’s citizens. Here are some essays on poverty which will give you insights about this topic.

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on Poverty in 100 words
• 2 Essay on Poverty in 200 words
• 3.1 Reasons Behind Poverty
• 3.2 World Poverty Conditions
• 3.3 Role of NGOs to Eradicate Poverty
• 3.4 What Can be Done by Us?

Essay on Poverty in 100 words

Poverty is defined as a state of scarcity, and the lack of material possessions to such an extreme extent that people have difficulties in fulfilling their basic needs. Robert McNamara, a former World Bank President, states that extreme poverty is limited by illiteracy, malnutrition, disease, high infant mortality rate, squalid conditions of living, and low life expectancy.

In order to eradicate poverty in a country, strict measures need to be taken on all levels. The political system needs to address this issue with utmost sincerity and strategic implementation in such a way that it improves the lives of people, especially the ones living below the poverty line. 

Also Read: Speech on Made in India

Essay on Poverty in 200 words

Poverty is like a parasite that degrades its host and eventually causes a lot of damage to the host. It is basically the scarcity of basic needs that leads to an extremely degraded life and even low life expectancy. It includes a lack of food, shelter, medication, education, and other basic necessities. Poverty is a more serious circumstance where people are forced to starve. It can be caused by a variety of factors depending upon the country. 

Every country that is hit with pandemic diseases, experiences an increase in poverty rates. This is because of the fact that poor people are unable to receive adequate medical care and hence are unable to maintain their health. This renders the people powerless and even puts their liberty in jeopardy. This is because of the fact that poor people can become trapped in a vicious cycle of servitude. The condition of poverty is a distressing one that causes pain, despair, and grief in the lives of the ones it affects. 

This is also a negative scenario that prevents a child from attending basic education. It’s the lack of money that prevents people from living sufficiently. Also, it is the cause of more serious social concerns such as slavery, child labour, etc. Hence action is needed on the same with utmost sincerity. 

Essay on Poverty in 300 words

Poverty is a multifaceted concept that includes several aspects such as social aspects, political elements, economic aspects, etc. It is basically associated with undermining a variety of essential human attributes such as health, education, etc. Despite the growth and development of the economies of countries, poverty still exists in almost every one of them. 

Reasons Behind Poverty

There are several contributing reasons behind poverty in a nation. Some of them are mentioned below:-

• Lack of literacy among citizens
• Lack of Capital in the country
• Large families and a rapidly growing population
• Limited employment opportunities

There are even urban areas where the slum population is increasing. These are deprived of many basic amenities such as sanitation, drainage systems, and low-cost water supply, etc. 

World Poverty Conditions

According to UNICEF , around 22000 children lose their lives each day due to poverty. There are approximately 1.9 billion children in developing countries in the world and India is also among them. Out of these, approximately 640 million don’t have a proper shelter, 270 million are living without medical facilities, and approximately 400 million don’t have access to safe water. This worldwide situation is growing at a fast pace. 

Role of NGOs to Eradicate Poverty

The approaches by NGOs basically include helping the poor by providing various public services such as medical services etc.

They also play a major role in mobilizing the services recommended by the government. They have various approaches and strategies that directly help the poor in various ways.

What Can be Done by Us?

We help in eradicating poverty by increasing employment opportunities.

Ensuring financial services and providing the same is another such measure that can be taken.

Recognizing social entrepreneurs as people of influence, conveying to them the seriousness of this situation, and then eventually making people aware of the same is another thing that can be done. 

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Writing an essay on poverty in 200 words requires you to describe various aspects of this topic such as what causes poverty, how it affects individuals and society as a whole, etc. The condition of poverty is a distressing one that causes pain, despair, and grief in the lives of the ones it affects.

An essay on poverty may be started as follows:- Poverty is a deep-rooted problem that continues to affect a large portion of the world’s population today. It touches on several aspects of human life including but not limited to political, economic, and social elements. Even though there are several methods to escape poverty, still issues arise due to a lack of adequate unity among the country’s citizens.

Poverty in 100 words: Poverty is defined as a state of scarcity, and the lack of material possessions to such an extreme extent that people have difficulties in fulfilling their basic needs. Robert McNamara, a former World Bank President, states that extreme poverty is limited by illiteracy, malnutrition, disease, high infant mortality rate, squalid conditions of living, and low life expectancy. In order to eradicate poverty in a country, strict measures need to be taken on all levels. The political system needs to address this issue with utmost sincerity and strategic implementation in such a way that it improves the lives of people, especially the ones living below the poverty line.

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Deepansh Gautam

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• Poverty Essay for Students in English

Essay on Poverty

Poverty is a disease that has no cure. The deeper this disease is, the deeper its wound. By the way, man lives under compulsion. But usually one wants to avoid it. Poverty is a condition of extreme poverty for any person or human being. This is a situation when a person starts to lack important things in his life such as the roof, necessary food, clothes, medicines, etc. to continue his life.

The causes of poverty are excessive population, fatal and contagious diseases, natural disasters, low agricultural yields, unemployment, casteism, illiteracy, gender inequality, environmental problems, changing trends in the economy of the country, untouchability, little or limited access to people's rights, Problems such as political violence, sponsored crime, corruption, lack of encouragement, inaction, ancient social beliefs, etc. have to be faced.

Poverty has become a big problem of the world, efforts are being made across the world today to remove poverty, but the problem is that it does not take the name of ending. This problem affects a human's economic and daily life. Poverty teaches man to live like a slave in which he has to change the place over time, in this situation due to the lack of education of the poor, his nature and speech also make a difference. Living in a world of poor people has become a curse. Getting enough money to get food is like getting relief from a curse for the poor, that's why they do not have access to education.

Reasons of Poverty

There are many reasons that have continued with carrying it for a long time. Because of this,  freedom, mental and physical fitness, and lack of security in a person remains. It is very important that in order to live a normal life, the country and the whole world will have to work together to bring proper physical and mental health, complete education, a home for everyone, and other important things.

In today's time, there is the problem of poverty which gives all the pain, pain, and despair to the poor. Due to the lack of money from poverty, I show the lack of many things. Poverty makes children spend life in compulsion. If forced to make bread, sometimes in bringing children's books. At that time he is also unable to raise children.

We can tell poverty in many ways like it has become a common thing in India. Most of the people here are unable to get the things they need. Here a vast section of the population is illiterate, hungry, and forced to live without clothes and a home. About half of India's population suffers from this epidemic of poverty.

A poor person lives his life without possession of basic things like food for two times, clean water, house, clothes, proper education, etc. There are many reasons for poverty in India. Incorrect distribution of national income is also a reason. People in the low-income group are much poorer than those in the high-income group. Children of poor families never get proper education, nutrition, and a happy childhood environment. The main cause of poverty is illiteracy, corruption, growing population, weak agriculture, the growing gap between rich and poverty, etc.

Measures to Control Poverty

Corruption has to be erased.

Unemployed will have to give proper employment

A growing population will have to be stopped

Farmers have to be given proper facilities for farming

Education should be provided to children for proper education

Poverty is not just a human problem but it is a national problem. It should be solved by implementing some effective methods on a quick basis. Every person should be united by ending corruption. A problem has been created in which he does not get even the basics. That is why at present, many measures are being taken to prevent poverty so that the standard of living of people around the world can be improved.

Short Essays on Poverty

Poverty is akin to being a slave, as a person cannot achieve anything he desires. It has various faces that alter depending on who you are, where you are, and when. It can be defined in various ways depending on how a person feels or experiences it.

Poverty is a state that no one wants to be in, but it must be removed owing to cultural norms, natural disasters, or a lack of adequate education. The individual who is experiencing it frequently wishes to flee. Poverty is a call for poor people to earn enough money to eat, have access to education, have adequate shelter, dress appropriately, and take steps to protect themselves from social and political violence.

It's a problem that goes unnoticed yet significantly impacts a person's social life. Poverty is an entirely avoidable problem, but there are various reasons why it has persisted in the past.

Poverty robs people of their freedom, mental health, physical well-being, and security. Everyone must strive to eradicate poverty from the country and the world, ensuring appropriate physical and mental health, full literacy, a home for all, and other necessities for living a simple life.

When a person cannot do anything according to his will, he is said to be in poverty. Many different faces alter depending on who you are, where you are, and time. It can be characterized in a variety of ways, depending on how the person feels or what they have achieved. Poverty is a circumstance that no one wants to be in, even if it is forced upon them due to a lack of experience, nature, natural disasters, or a lack of suitable education. Humans have won it, but they prefer to stay away from it. Poverty is a call for needed clothing and protection against social and political violence for the poor to earn enough money to buy food, receive an education, and find a suitable place to live.

This is an unseen problem that harms a person's social life. Even though numerous factors have contributed to its long-term persistence, poverty is a perfectly preventable problem. As a result, a person's freedom, mental and physical well-being, and sense of security are all compromised. It is critical to bring poverty and poverty from worldwide to work together to live everyday life, provide adequate physical and mental health, complete education, a home for everyone, and other essential things.

FAQs on Poverty Essay for Students in English

1. What are the Effects of Poverty?

When people are not able to afford their basic necessities. For example medications and hospital fees are impossible to afford for that means they choose crook ways of obtaining money i.e. stealing, robbery, etc.  

2. What are the Possible Ways to Remove Poverty?

Since India is a developing country, eliminating poverty here is much tougher than in other countries but still some measures can be taken and government assistance would be much helpful in this step which requires some relevant planning and policies for those who fall under the poverty line. Another major factor of poverty is illiteracy and unemployment. Therefore education is the most efficient tool to confine the poverty line in the country. 

3. What is the Poverty Line?

The Below Poverty Line (BPL) signifies the state of people who fall under poverty status. It also symbolizes an economic drawback. In addition, it is used for people who are in need of help and assistance from the government.

4. What are the causes of poverty?

Poverty has several causes, including a lack of access to essentials such as water, food, shelter, education, and healthcare. Poverty is also caused by inequities such as gender or ethnic discrimination, bad governance, conflict, exploitation, and domestic violence. These disparities not only cause a person or a society to fall into poverty, but they can also prevent people from receiving social assistance that could help them get out of it. Due to political upheaval, past or present conflict, corrupt authorities, and lousy infrastructure that restricts access to education, clean water, healthcare, and other essentials, children and communities in fragile states confront greater poverty rates.

5. What can we do to put an end to extreme poverty?

We can aid in the eradication of extreme poverty by determining what causes it in a particular community and then determining what needs to change. Because poverty manifests itself differently in different regions and is caused by different circumstances, the work to end extreme poverty differs depending on the situation. More economic resources are needed to assist people in increasing their income and better providing for themselves and their families. To ensure that poverty does not return, the work must be sustainable, regardless of the solution. As a result, the community must be involved at every stage.

6. What criteria are used to assess poverty?

Each country's government determines poverty levels by conducting home surveys of its citizens. The World Bank, for example, assists and may conduct their surveys, although data collecting is time-consuming and slow. New high-frequency surveys are being created and tested, leveraging estimations and mobile phone technologies. If you want to learn more about these topics, download the Vedantu App that has been specifically designed and curated for students by experts.

7. What is the poverty cycle?

Poverty can be a catch-22 situation. To escape poverty, a person requires access to possibilities such as education, clean water, local medical services, and financial means. Poverty creates a generational cycle if these critical factors are not there. If parents cannot afford to take their children to school, they will struggle to find work when they grow up. Even natural disasters and conflicts can exacerbate the poverty cycle by bringing more people.

8. What are the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of goals for countries worldwide to work together in a global partnership for the benefit of people, the environment, and prosperity. The Sustainable Development Goals aim to abolish extreme poverty for all people everywhere by 2030 and to reduce the proportion of people living in poverty in all forms by at least half. In September 2015, the United Nations member states accepted this objective as one of 17 to end extreme poverty.

5 Essays About Poverty Everyone Should Know

Poverty is one of the driving forces of inequality in the world. Between 1990-2015, much progress was made. The number of people living on less than $1.90 went from 36% to 10%. However, according to the World Bank , the COVID-19 pandemic represents a serious problem that disproportionately impacts the poor. Research released in February of 2020 shows that by 2030, up to ⅔ of the “global extreme poor” will be living in conflict-affected and fragile economies. Poverty will remain a major human rights issue for decades to come. Here are five essays about the issue that everyone should know:

“We need an economic bill of rights” –  Martin Luther King Jr.

The Guardian published an abridged version of this essay in 2018, which was originally released in Look magazine just after Dr. King was killed. In this piece, Dr. King explains why an economic bill of rights is necessary. He points out that while mass unemployment within the black community is a “social problem,” it’s a “depression” in the white community. An economic bill of rights would give a job to everyone who wants one and who can work. It would also give an income to those who can’t work. Dr. King affirms his commitment to non-violence. He’s fully aware that tensions are high. He quotes a spiritual, writing “timing is winding up.” Even while the nation progresses, poverty is getting worse.

This essay was reprinted and abridged in The Guardian in an arrangement with The Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King. Jr. The most visible representative of the Civil Rights Movement beginning in 1955, Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. His essays and speeches remain timely.

“How Poverty Can Follow Children Into Adulthood” – Priyanka Boghani

This article is from 2017, but it’s more relevant than ever because it was written when 2012 was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. That’s no longer the case. In 2012, around ¼ American children were in poverty. Five years later, children were still more likely than adults to be poor. This is especially true for children of colour. Consequences of poverty include anxiety, hunger, and homelessness. This essay also looks at the long-term consequences that come from growing up in poverty. A child can develop health problems that affect them in adulthood. Poverty can also harm a child’s brain development. Being aware of how poverty affects children and follows them into adulthood is essential as the world deals with the economic fallout from the pandemic.

Priyanka Boghani is a journalist at PBS Frontline. She focuses on U.S. foreign policy, humanitarian crises, and conflicts in the Middle East. She also assists in managing Frontline’s social accounts.

“5 Reasons COVID-19 Will Impact the Fight to End Extreme Poverty” – Leah Rodriguez

For decades, the UN has attempted to end extreme poverty. In the face of the novel coronavirus outbreak, new challenges threaten the fight against poverty. In this essay, Dr. Natalie Linos, a Harvard social epidemiologist, urges the world to have a “social conversation” about how the disease impacts poverty and inequality. If nothing is done, it’s unlikely that the UN will meet its Global Goals by 2030. Poverty and COVID-19 intersect in five key ways. For one, low-income people are more vulnerable to disease. They also don’t have equal access to healthcare or job stability. This piece provides a clear, concise summary of why this outbreak is especially concerning for the global poor.

Leah Rodriguez’s writing at Global Citizen focuses on women, girls, water, and sanitation. She’s also worked as a web producer and homepage editor for New York Magazine’s The Cut.

“Climate apartheid”: World’s poor to suffer most from disasters” – Al Jazeera and news Agencies

The consequences of climate change are well-known to experts like Philip Alston, the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. In 2019, he submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Council sounding the alarm on how climate change will devastate the poor. While the wealthy will be able to pay their way out of devastation, the poor will not. This will end up creating a “climate apartheid.” Alston states that if climate change isn’t addressed, it will undo the last five decades of progress in poverty education, as well as global health and development .

“Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America” – Barbara Ehrenreich

In this excerpt from her book Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich describes her experience choosing to live undercover as an “unskilled worker” in the US. She wanted to investigate the impact the 1996 welfare reform act had on the working poor. Released in 2001, the events take place between the spring of 1998 and the summer of 2000. Ehrenreich decided to live in a town close to her “real life” and finds a place to live and a job. She has her eyes opened to the challenges and “special costs” of being poor. In 2019, The Guardian ranked the book 13th on their list of 100 best books of the 21st century.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 21 books and an activist. She’s worked as an award-winning columnist and essayist.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

202 Poverty Essay Topics & Examples

Poverty is one of the most pressing global issues affecting millions of individuals. We want to share some intriguing poverty essay topics and research questions for you to choose the titles of your paper correctly. With the help of this collection, you can explore the intricate dimensions of poverty, its causes, consequences, and potential solutions. Have a look at our poverty topics to get a deeper understanding of poverty and its implications.

💸 TOP 10 Poverty Essay Topics

🏆 best poverty essay examples, 👍 catchy poverty research topics, 🧐 thought-provoking poverty topics, 🎓 interesting poverty essay topics, ❓ research questions about poverty.

• Poverty: Causes and Solutions to Problem
• Poverty as a Social Problem
• Homelessness and Poverty in Developed and Developing Countries
• The Eliminating Poverty Strategies
• Poverty Effects on an Individual
• How Access to Clean Water Influences the Problem of Poverty
• Correlation Between Poverty and Juvenile Delinquency
• Urbanization and Poverty in “Slumdog Millionaire” Film Boyle’s movie, “Slumdog Millionaire,” is one of many successful attempts to depict the conditions in which people who are below the poverty level live.
• Poverty Effects on Mental Health This paper examines the link between poverty and mental health, the literature findings on the topic, and proposes a potential solution.
• Poverty and Theories of Its Causes Poverty in schools is a significant barrier to education that needs to be overcome to improve teaching and learning.
• Global Poverty and Nursing Intervention It is evident that poor health and poverty are closely linked. Community nurses who are conversant with the dynamics of the health of the poor can run successful health promotion initiatives.
• Relationship Between Poverty and Crime The paper makes the case and discusses inequality rather than poverty being the prime reason for people committing crimes.
• Degrading Consequences of Poverty in “The Pearl” by John Steinbeck Poverty is identity in John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, and the main character Kino, a poor fisherman, manifests a transformation in his identity,
• Vicious Circle of Poverty In this essay, the author describes the problem of poverty, its causes and ways of optimizing the economy and increasing production efficiency.
• Effects of Poverty on Education in the USA Colleges It is clear that poverty affects not only the living standards and lifestyle of people but also the college education in the United States of America.
• The Orthodox and Alternative Poverty Explanations Comparison Poverty has over the years become a worldwide subject of concern for economies. This essay will explore two theories- the orthodox and the alternative theories to poverty.
• How Does Poverty Affect Crime Rates? On the basis of this research question, the study could be organized and conducted to prove the following hypothesis – when poverty increases, crime rates increase as well.
• Poverty from Functionalist and Rational Choice Perspectives Poverty is a persistent social phenomenon, which can be examined from both the functionalist and rational choice perspectives.
• “What Is Poverty” by Dalrymple The purpose of this paper is to present Dalrymple point of view and analyze it by applying philosophical concepts.
• Poverty from Christian Perspective Christians perceive poverty differently than people without faith, noting the necessity for integrated support to help those in need.
• The Poverty as an Ethical Issue Looking at poverty as an ethical issue, we have to consider the fact that there are people who control resource distribution, which then leads to wealth or poverty in a community.
• Empowerment and Poverty Reduction The objective of this essay will be to highlight the health issues caused by poverty and the strategies needed to change the situation of poor people through empowerment.
• Poverty in “Serving in Florida” and “Dumpster Diving” “Serving in Florida” by Barbara Ehrenreich describes the harsh reality of living in poverty while concentrating on the pragmatic dimension of the issue
• Bullying in Poverty and Child Development Context The aim of the present paper is to investigate how Bullying, as a factor associated with poverty, affects child development.
• Poverty and Homelessness in Jackson, Mississippi This paper will review the statistics and information about poverty and homelessness in Jackson, MS. The community of Black Americans is suffering from poverty and homelessness.
• Poverty in Young and Middle Adulthood According to functionalism, poverty is a dysfunctional aspect of interrelated components, which is the result of improper structuring.
• Poverty in “On Dumpster Diving” by Lars Eighner Essay “On Dumpster Diving” by Lars Eighner evokes compassion and prompts individuals to think about social problems existing nowadays.
• Effects of Divorce and Poverty in Families In the event of a divorce children are tremendously affected and in most cases attention is not given to them the way it should.
• Diana George’s Changing the Face of Poverty Book Diana George’s book, Changing the Face of Poverty, begins with a summary of several Thanksgiving commercials and catalogs.
• Poverty: Behavioral, Structural, Political Factors The research paper will primarily argue that poverty is a problem caused by a combination of behavioral, structural, and political systems.
• The Analysis of Henry George’s “Crime of Poverty” Reviewing Henry George’s Crime of Poverty, which was written in 1885, in its historical context can shed light on socio-political developments within the country.
• Poverty in the “LaLee’s Kin” Documentary In this paper, the author will analyse poverty as a social problem in the Mississippi Delta. The issue will be analysed from the perspective of the documentary “LaLee’s Kin”.
• Racial Discrimination and Poverty Racial discrimination and poverty have resulted in health disparities and low living standards among African Americans in the United States.
• Lessons Learned From the Poverty Simulation The main lesson learned from the poverty simulation is that poverty is far more serious than depicted in the media, which carelessly documents the numbers of poor people.
• The Problem of Poverty in Art of Different Periods Artists have always been at the forefront of addressing social issues, by depicting them in their works and attempting to draw the attention of the public to sensitive topics.
• Poverty in Ghana: Reasons and Solution Strategy The analysis provided in the paper revealed some internal and external factors that deter better economic and human development in Ghana.
• Love and Poverty in My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke The present paper includes a brief analysis of the poem ‘My Papa’s Waltz’ with a focus on imagery and figurative language.
• Child’s Development and Education: Negative Effects of Poverty Some adverse effects of poverty on a child’s development and education are poor performance academically, stagnant physical development, and behavioral issues.
• Poverty and Inequality: Income and Wealth Inequality The Stanford Center of Poverty and Inequality does an in-depth job of finding causes and capturing statistics on poverty and inequality.
• How Poverty Impacts on Life Chances, Experiences and Opportunities for Young People The paper specifically dwells on the social exclusion, class, and labeling theories to place youth poverty in its social context.
• Can Marriage End Poverty? Marriages to some degree alleviate poverty, but not all marriages can do so. Only marriages build on sound principles can achieve such a feat.
• Poverty and Its Negative Impact on Society Poverty affects many people globally, experiencing poor living conditions, limited access to education, unemployment, poor infrastructure, malnutrition, and child labor.
• The Concept of Poverty This work is aimed at identifying the key aspects associated with poverty and its impact on the lives of people in different contexts.
• The Ideal Society: Social Stratification and Poverty The paper argues social classes exist because of the variations in socioeconomic capacities in the world; however, an ideal society can eliminate them.
• Global Poverty and Education Economic theories like liberalization, deregulation, and privatization were developed to address global poverty.
• Global Issues of World Poverty: Reasons and Solutions The term ‘world poverty’ refers to poverty around the world and is not only limited to developing and under-developed nations.
• Poverty, Faith, and Justice: ”Liberating God of Life” by Elizabeth Johnson “Liberating God of Life Context: Wretched Poverty” by Johnson constructs that the main goal of human beings is to combat structural violence toward the poor.
• Poverty Relation With Immigrants Poverty-related immigration is usually caused by population pressures; as the natural land becomes less productive due to the increased technology and industrial production.
• Poverty and Homelessness in Canada Poverty and homelessness figure prominently in government policies and the aims of many social service organizations even in a country like Canada.
• Poverty: “$2.00 a Day” Book by Edin and Schaefer In their book “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” Edin and Schaefer investigate problems that people who live in poverty face every day.
• How Poverty Affects Early Education? A number of people live in poor conditions. According to the researchers of the Department of Education in the United States, poverty influences academic performance in an adverse way.
• The Issue of Poverty in Savannah, Georgia The paper addresses a serious issue that still affects Savannah, Georgia, and it is poverty. This problem influences both individuals and society.
• Human Trafficking and Poverty Issues in Modern Society The problem of human trafficking affects people all over the world, which defines the need for a comprehensive approach to this issue from the criminology perspective.
• Poverty: Resilience and Intersectionality Theories This paper assesses the impact of poverty on adult life, looking at risk and protective factors and the impact of power and oppression on the experience of poverty.
• Carl Hart’s Talk on Racism, Poverty, and Drugs In his TED Talk, Carl Hart, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University who studies drug addiction, exposes a relationship between racism, poverty, and drugs.
• Global Poverty and Human Development Poverty rates across the globe continue to be a major issue that could impair the progress of humanity as a whole.
• Donald Trump’s Policies of Poverty and Human Rights One of the events related to an acute social issue of poverty in the United States involves the U.N. report on extreme U.S. poverty and human rights in the context of Donald Trump’s policies.
• Immigrant Children and Poverty Immigrant child poverty poses considerable social predicaments, because it is related to several long lasting school and development linked difficulties.
• Poverty in 1930s Europe and in the 21st Century US The true face of poverty may be found in rural portions of the United States’ South and Southwest regions, where living standards have plummeted, and industries have yet to begin.
• Rutger Bregman’s Statement of Poverty The paper states that Bregman’s approach to poverty and the proposal of guaranteed regular income is more suitable for developing countries.
• The Impact of Poverty on Children and Minority Groups The problem of poverty, not only among children but also among adults, has plagued this planet for a long time.
• Habitat for the Homeless: Poverty The paper states that Habitat for the Homeless comes to fulfill American values by ensuring that Americans can afford houses at a low price.
• Wealth, Poverty, and Systems of Economic Class By examining wealth, poverty, and economic classes from the perspective of social justice, the socioeconomic inequalities persistent in society will become clear.
• Poverty: Causes and Reduction Measures Poverty is a global disaster and that a large percentage of the population has insufficient income or material possessions to satisfy their basic needs.
• The U.S. Education: Effect of Poverty Poverty effects on education would stretch to other aspects of life and this justifies that, poverty in United States not only affects social lifestyles but also college education.
• Global Poverty, Inequality, and Mass Migration Such global issues as poverty and inequality and mass migration are significant today since many people are involved in them.
• Household Energy Use and Poverty In many developing countries, as well as among disadvantaged populations of the industrial states, the lack or absence of energy for household use is an everyday reality.
• Utilitarianism: Poverty Reduction Through Charity This paper shows that poverty levels can be reduced if wealthy individuals donate a part of their earnings, using the main principles of the utilitarian theory.
• School System: Poverty and Education This short assessment presents at least three examples of differences between the schools that lead to disadvantages in the education system and finally provides a suggestion to help bridge the gap.
• Human Trafficking and Poverty Discussion This paper synthesize information on human trafficking and poverty by providing an annotated bibliography of relevant sources.
• Evaluating the “Expertness” of the Southern Law Poverty Center The Southern Law Poverty Center has garnered controversy for its list of so-called “hate groups” and how it spends its half-billion-dollar budget.
• Chronic Poverty and Disability in the UK The country exhibits absolute poverty and many other social issues associated with under-developed states. The issue is resolvable through policy changes.
• Should People Be Ashamed of Poverty? People on welfare should not feel ashamed because the definition of poverty does not necessarily place them in the category of the poor.
• Wealth and Poverty Sources in America This paper explains the causes and consequences of poverty in the United States, programs and systems to combat it, and government benefits to support families in distress.
• Poverty and Mental Health Correlation The analysis of the articles provides a comprehensive understanding of the poverty and mental health correlation scale and its current state.
• Attitudes to Poverty: Singer’s Arguments Singer argues against the observation by the rich than helping one poor person can repeat over and over again until the rich eventually becomes poor.
• Poverty: The Negative Effects on Children Poor children often do not have access to quality healthcare, so they are sicker and more likely to miss school. Poor children are less likely to have weather-appropriate clothes.
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• Poverty and How This Problem Can Be Solved Poverty is one of the global social problems of our time, existing even in the countries of the first world despite the generally high standard of living of people.
• Poverty: An Interplay of Social and Economic Psychology The paper demonstrates an interplay of social and economic psychology to scrutinize the poverty that has given rise to a paycheck-to-paycheck nation.
• Refugees: Poverty, Hunger, Climate Change, and Violence Individuals struggling with poverty, hunger, climate change, and gender-based violence and persecution may consider fleeing to the United States.
• The Extent of Poverty in the United States The paper states that the issue of poverty in the USA is induced by a butterfly effect, starting with widespread discrimination and lack of support.
• Poverty in Puerto Rico and Eradication Measures Studying Puerto Rican poverty as a social problem is essential because it helps identify the causes, effects, and eradication measures in Puerto Rico and other nations.
• The City of Atlanta, Georgia: Poverty and Homelessness This project goal is to address several issues in the community of the City of Atlanta. Georgia. The primary concern is the high rate of poverty and homelessness in the city.
• Poverty and Homelessness Among African Americans Even though the U.S. is wealthy and prosperous by global measures, poverty has persisted in the area, with Blacks accounting for a larger share.
• Economic Inequality and Its Relationship to Poverty This research paper will discuss the problem of economic inequality and show how this concept relates to poverty.
• Discussion of Poverty and Social Trends The advances and consequent demands on society grounded on social class and trends profoundly influence poverty levels.
• Life of Humanity: Inequality, Poverty, and Tolerance The paper concerns the times in which humanity, and especially the American people, live, not forgetting about inequality, poverty, and tolerance.
• Poverty, Its Social Context, and Solutions Understanding past and present poverty statistics is essential for developing effective policies to reduce the rate of poverty at the national level.
• Poverty in the US: “Down and Out in Paris and London” by Orwell The essay compares the era of George Orwell to the United States today based on the book “Down and Out in Paris and London” in terms of poverty.
• Is It Possible to Reduce Poverty in the United States? Reducing poverty in the United States is possible if such areas as education, employment, and health care are properly examined and improved for the public’s good.
• Poverty Among Seniors Age 65 and Above The social problem is the high poverty rate among older people aged 65 and above. Currently, there are millions of elderly who are living below the poverty line.
• Social Issue of Poverty in America The paper states that poverty is not an individual’s fault but rather a direct result of social, economic, and political circumstances.
• Poverty, Housing, and Community Benefits The community will benefit from affordable housing and business places, creating job opportunities for the residents and mentoring and apprenticeship.
• The Uniqueness of the Extent of the Poverty Rate in America The United States ranked near the top regarding poverty and inequality, and compared to other developed countries, income and wealth disparity in the United States is high.
• Globalization and Poverty: Trade Openness and Poverty Reduction in Nigeria Globalization can be defined as the process of interdependence on the global culture, economy, and population. It is brought about by cross-border trade.
• Inequality and Poverty in the United States One of the most common myths is that the United States (US) is a meritocracy, where anyone can succeed if they maintain industriousness.
• Poverty, Politics, and Profit as US Policy Issue Poverty remains one of the most intractable problems to deal with, both in the international community and in the United States.
• Christian Perspective on Poverty Several Christian interpretations have different ideas about poverty and wealth. This paper aims to discuss the Christian perspective on poverty.
• Poverty and Problematic Housing in California The question is what are the most vulnerable aspects of the administrative system that lead to an aggravation of the situation of homelessness.
• Race, Poverty, and Incarceration in the United States The American justice system, in its current form, promotes disproportionally high incarceration rates among blacks and, to a lesser degree, Latinos from poor urban neighborhoods.
• Global Poverty and Factors of Influence This paper introduces a complex perspective on the issue of global poverty, namely, incorporating economic, social, cultural, and environmental factors into the analysis.
• Poverty Causes and Solutions in Latin America This paper aims to understand the importance of the interference of Europe in Latin American affairs and its referring to the general principles of poverty.
• Christ’s Relationships with Wealth and Poverty This paper attempts to examine Christ’s relationships with wealth, money and poverty and provide an analysis of these relationships.
• Gary Haugen’s Speech on Violence and Poverty In his speech, Gary Haugen discusses the causes of poverty and concludes that violence is a hidden problem that should be addressed and eliminated.
• The Child Poverty Problem in Alabama Alabama has a very high rate of child poverty, where a quarter or 24% of all children can be categorized as poor.
• Poverty Among Blacks in America
• Hard Questions About Living in Poverty or Slavery
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• Solving the Problem of Poverty in Mendocino County
• “Promises and Poverty”: Starbucks Conceals Poverty and Deterioration of the Environment
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• Global Poverty and Economic Globalization Relations
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• African American Families in Poverty
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• “8 Million Have Slipped Into Poverty Since May as Federal Aid Has Dried Up” by Jason DeParle
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These essay examples and topics on Poverty were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on January 8, 2024 .

Education and Poverty in Education

This essay about the intricate relationship between education and poverty explores how each influences and perpetuates the other in a cyclic exchange. It discusses the barriers poverty creates for quality education and the transformative potential education holds in breaking the cycle of poverty. Highlighting disparities in access and efforts to address them, the essay emphasizes the importance of comprehensive solutions that go beyond traditional boundaries. Ultimately, it underscores the promise of education in shaping a brighter future for all, irrespective of their circumstances.

How it works

In the intricate fabric of societal challenges, the convergence of education and poverty unfolds a narrative both nuanced and profound, sculpting destinies with its myriad intricacies. Here, the interplay between education and poverty isn’t a straightforward path but rather a cyclic exchange, where each facet influences and perpetuates the other in a dance of mutual dependence. Within this elaborate dance lies the potential for profound metamorphosis, where education emerges as both a victim and a driving force, capable of shattering chains and nurturing hope amidst adversity.

At the nucleus of this intricate relationship lies an undeniable verity: poverty constructs formidable barriers to quality education, while education stands as a potent remedy to poverty’s clutches. In impoverished communities, these barriers manifest in myriad forms. Economic deprivation strips children of the essential prerequisites for learning—access to adequate nutrition, healthcare, and an environment conducive to education. For many, the stark decision between attending school and contributing to the family’s income isn’t a choice at all but a harsh reality dictated by uncontrollable circumstances.

The repercussions of this deprivation reverberate across generations. Children born into poverty often inherit a legacy of restricted opportunities and constrained possibilities. Without access to quality education, their potential remains untapped, perpetuating the cycle of poverty for yet another generation. Thus, poverty becomes not merely an economic condition but also a formidable barrier to social mobility and human flourishing.

Furthermore, disparities in educational access deepen the abyss, widening the chasm between the privileged and the marginalized. In schools deprived of resources, where outdated textbooks and overcrowded classrooms prevail, learning becomes an arduous task rather than a joyful exploration. Quality educators gravitate towards more affluent areas, leaving marginalized communities underserved and neglected. The resulting disparity in educational resources exacerbates socioeconomic inequalities, perpetuating a cycle where advantage begets advantage and disadvantage begets further disadvantage.

Yet, amidst the shadows, glimmers of hope emerge—testimonies to the transformative power of education. Across the globe, grassroots movements and innovative initiatives are challenging the status quo, dismantling barriers and fostering inclusivity. From community-driven literacy campaigns to initiatives leveraging technology for remote learning, imaginative solutions are reshaping the educational landscape in impoverished settings.

Moreover, the acknowledgment of education as a fundamental human right has spurred global action to ensure universal access. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasize the pivotal role of education in poverty eradication, advocating for inclusive and equitable quality education for all. Initiatives such as UNESCO’s Education for All movement and the Malala Fund have mobilized resources and advocated for policy reforms to prioritize education in the fight against poverty.

Nevertheless, the journey towards educational equity is fraught with challenges. Deep-rooted systemic issues, from entrenched inequality to inadequate infrastructure, necessitate comprehensive solutions that transcend conventional boundaries. Effective policies must address not only access to education but also the quality and relevance of learning, equipping individuals with the skills and knowledge necessary to thrive in a rapidly evolving world.

Furthermore, addressing poverty in education demands a multi-faceted approach that acknowledges the interconnectedness of social, economic, and cultural factors. Investments in healthcare, nutrition, and social protection are indispensable complements to educational initiatives, ensuring that children enter classrooms prepared to learn and succeed. Empowering communities and amplifying grassroots voices are vital steps towards fostering sustainable change from the ground up.

In this intricate interplay between education and poverty, each step forward signifies a triumph over adversity—a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. As we navigate the complexities of this relationship, let us remain unwavering in our commitment to unlocking the full potential of every individual, regardless of their circumstances. For within the pursuit of education lies the promise of a brighter future—not solely for a select few, but for all who dare to envision a world where poverty is not destiny but a challenge to be conquered.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Poverty in America — The Problem of Poverty and an Urgent Need to Fix It

The Problem of Poverty and an Urgent Need to Fix It

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Published: Jan 8, 2020

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The Problem of Poverty in Africa Essay

Introduction, background of the study, problem statement, research questions, hypotheses and variables, theoretical framework, works cited.

The paper is a proposal on how the problem of poverty in Africa can be solved. The study will use a mixed research approach in attaining its goals (Creswell, 2009). The major aim of the study is to identify the causes of poverty and propose best strategies that can help Africans come out of poverty.

Africa has long been known to suffer from a number of calamities such as floods, drought among others; however the issue of poverty seems to have brushed the continents the wrong way leaving thousands of individuals dead. According to Adato et al., 2006 Currently poverty is seen as a long problem that will continue to be with us, as long as the world remains. Mahatma Gandhi had some of the most creative insights into this problem with regards to India. Mao Tse Tung was similarly quite creative on this issue in China, as was John Kenneth Galbraith with regards to affluent society. There are numerous people who have lost many a night’s sleep on this matter in Africa.

[Poverty is relative, not absolute. It is about getting basic needs, not huge material surpluses. It is about having enough resources for meeting basic needs for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. It is about none material satisfaction not excess material goods of little intrinsic value] (Adato et al., 2006: 23).

There is no doubt that there exist large volumes of material regarding poverty in Africa. With this there are a number of solutions that have been brought forth with the aim of curbing poverty in the continent. Despite the fact that the majority of the authors have tried to address the causes so that they can develop best strategies, their is a gap in trying to establish how best the proposed strategies will be implemented based on the variation in a number of issues such as population, policies in each and every country. The study will thus seek not only to bring out the causes of poverty and how to curb it but propose how to implement the strategies based on the country’s needs.

The research question that will guide the study is what the major ways of curbing poverty in Africa are. From this, the three main objectives of the study are:

• To find out how prevalent is poverty in Africa
• To establish the major causes of poverty in Africa
• To find out the best strategies to curb the issue of poverty in Africa.

The hypotheses for the study are:

• H o There is a significant difference in causes of poverty.
• H o There is a significance difference in strategies used in curbing poverty in Africa and its reduction
• H o There is significant difference in the prevalence of poverty in Africa.

The dependent variable in the study is poverty. It is worth noting that this is the variable the research will try to predict its variation in presence of certain variable known to be independent is important. The independent variable will include all the causes of poverty and the strategies used to curb the same (Reynolds, 2007).

It has been argued that the world food production is enough to feed the world populations. The major problem associated with poverty has been deemed to be unequal distribution of wealth and the natural resources plus the opportunity to access financial resources for investments (Creswell, 2009).

It is human understanding that wealth is generated by labour upon acting on natural resources. From this notion it is evident that if the same is made available to each and everyone and the individuals are encouraged, able and at will to work tirelessly, then poverty could be history. Nonetheless, this is not the case as this vital resource lies in the hands of a few individuals who exercise monopoly over them. Another problem that has caused poverty is the unfair market prices of goods and services from the continent. It is postulated that equal distribution of natural resources and fair market policies will help the poor in Africa to have enough to eat, shelter, clothing and education (Adato et al., 2006.).

Adato, M., Carter, M. & May, J. 2006. Exploring poverty traps and social exclusion in South Africa using qualitative and quantitative data. Journal of Development Studies , 42(1): 226 – 247.

Creswell, J. 2009. Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Reynolds, P. 2007. A primer in theory construction. Boston: Pearson Education.

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Fixing America's poverty problem starts with telling a new story

In 2019, when I was mayor of Stockton, California, I launched the  Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration , the first major guaranteed income program in any American city. The pilot provided 125 randomly selected residents with $500 per month for two years — no strings attached and no work requirements. To be eligible, an individual only had to be at least 18 years old, reside in Stockton and live in a neighborhood with a median income at or below the city’s then-median household income of $46,033.

I was motivated to try something radically different because the status quo was unacceptable to me: Stockton’s median household income was far lower than the state median of about  $62,000 ; we were also  among the worst  in the nation when it came to child poverty.

The racial wealth gap didn't happen by accident.

The  findings  of our pilot were significant: Compared to the control group, the people receiving the benefit experienced significantly  less income volatility , so they were able to  plan , pay for unexpected expenses and pay down debt. They were also  healthier , exhibited less depression and anxiety and reported enhanced well-being. Recipients spent the money on  essentials  like food, utilities and transportation. And full-time employment  increased dramatically  for residents who were part of the pilot program (from 28 percent to 40 percent) as folks were able to stop working multiple jobs and take some time to find a single, better   job.

Many of these findings fly in the face of stereotypes that this nation has maintained for generations about people who are struggling, and particularly about people of color. However, for me, someone who grew up in poverty, the findings were not all that surprising. I’ve long known talent and intellect are universal, but resources and opportunities are not. 

Indeed the results of giving people more resources were so positive that now more than 60  mayors across the country  have committed to guaranteed income as a tool to abolish poverty, with about half already running pilots in their own cities.

We absolutely can implement bold policies on the local, state and federal levels that will dramatically change the trajectory of people’s lives, eliminate poverty and improve the nation’s productivity. But we can only achieve that kind of change if we disrupt and replace the current narrative on poverty based on racist, classist, sexist and xenophobic stereotypes. It’s a narrative that  blames  people for their struggles — labeling them as lazy, corrupt, unintelligent or worse — and deems them  undeserving  of our trust, our investment or even their own  dignity .

This framing allows politicians to ignore and maintain blatantly unjust systems that keep people trapped in poverty — like jobs that pay  unlivable wages  or students at poor schools not having adequate, if any, access to resources like  guidance counselors  and  extracurricular activities  that affluent schools provide.

We absolutely can implement bold policies on the local, state and federal levels that will dramatically change the trajectory of people’s lives.

By viewing poor people as less than wealthier people — or even as  disposable  — actions like treating their communities as America’s  dumping ground for hazardous waste  and  pollution  will continue, all while leaving them barren of  health care infrastructure . 

A narrative that blames people for not rising out of poverty also permits policymakers to look the other way as so many  young people  are denied access or priced out of continuing education, even when we know higher education is necessary (though  not a silver bullet ) for advancing in today’s economy. It’s a narrative that contributes to continual mass incarceration that breaks up families and strips talent and potential from Black and brown communities.

But what would happen if we were to replace this false and destructive narrative with an authentic one that centers the experiences of people who actually live in poverty? These are people like my mother, grandmother and aunt — my “three moms,” as I refer to them in my memoir  “The Deeper the Roots ”   — who together raised me while my father served a sentence of 25 years to life due to a  draconian  “Three strikes, you’re out” law. A fundamental shift in how communities like the one I grew up in are talked about would recognize the strengths, assets and dignity of individuals and families. It would look squarely at how people are set up for failure through under-resourced schools, low pay with no benefits, over policing and much more, and it would therefore create space for new policies that would, as I call it, upset the setup. 

The stakes for a new narrative, new politics and new policy around poverty couldn’t be higher. That’s why I launched that seemingly radical policy pilot in Stockton and why lawmakers from both parties in cities across the U.S. are now following suit. 

A fundamental shift in how communities like the one I grew up in are talked about would recognize the strengths, assets and dignity of individuals and families.

With approximately  37 million people  in the U.S. living below the official poverty line ($26,496 for a family of four) — a woefully  inadequate measure  that doesn’t account for the true cost of living — we are at a pivotal moment when we will make significant progress or retreat in the face of backlash. Government assistance in response to the pandemic kept 53 million people above the poverty line in 2020, according to a  Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis  of Census Bureau data. Stimulus checks (cash), expanded help with food, emergency rental assistance and extended unemployment insurance all played important roles and, in many cases, literally provided people with a lifeline. And since the child tax credit was expanded in July, 3 million children have been kept out of poverty each month, according to estimations from  Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy .

Yet we already see the backlash. As the Biden administration and most Democrats work to make the  child tax credit permanent  through the Build Back Better Act, others are urging to include  work requirements  and questioning whether parents are deserving of this benefit without some kind of extra  effort .

There is no harder work than raising children in poverty. Nothing demands greater effort: from advocating in schools to cobbling together transportation, child care and other essentials; dealing with dangerous health impacts from the environment; trying to keep your kids safe from state and neighborhood violence; juggling bills and multiple jobs in the formal or informal economy; and navigating byzantine bureaucracies to get a little help. 

Moreover, we’ve seen that hard work doesn’t necessarily guarantee anything but more hard work. You can do everything right and still not receive the promised payoff. The proverb “If you work hard and play by the rules, anyone can make it” just isn’t true.

What is true is that a little assistance can go a long way —  and we’ve known that for a long time . So it is past time to end paternalistic and stigmatizing policy and instead pursue bold solutions that are  morally just and economically smart . 

 In addition to giving people cash, other bold policies include creating  baby bonds  so everyone has access to capital to pursue education, entrepreneurship or home ownership when they reach adulthood. The  racial wealth gap  didn’t happen by accident: Among the contributing factors were Black and brown people being excluded from  Social Security  and New Deal labor protections, barred from  GI benefits , denied mortgages through  redlining , targeted by  job  and pay discrimination and  blocked from accessing capital  to create, sustain or expand small businesses.

 We also need to create good jobs with family-supporting wages and benefits — and if you visit any poor community in the country, that’s one of the first things they will say they want (the other likely being more resources for their schools). If the private sector can’t do it, then the government should provide a job. Call it a job guarantee or a Green New Deal (the climate change proposal  includes a federal jobs guarantee ) — call it whatever you want — but there is needed work to be done in many fields like elder and child care; public transit and infrastructure; building, rehabilitating and retrofitting affordable, energy-efficient housing; creating parks and green space; and more.

Finally, we will never eliminate poverty unless we create a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people already here — the vast majority of whom are already contributing to our economy and communities every day. Citizenship is one of the  clearest routes out of poverty . Compared to work authorization programs like Temporary Protected Status, it offers greater protection against  exploitation  by employers, ends the fear of deportation (as well as its abuse for political gain) and allows individuals and families access to support when they need it. Remember how undocumented immigrants — many of whom pay taxes and were front-line essential workers during the height of the pandemic — were deemed  ineligible for stimulus checks ?

How will we pay for these and other new policies? We can start by demanding —  as most Americans do  — that  wealthy corporations and people finally pay their fair share  in taxes. We can also revamp an upside-down tax code that largely rewards the already wealthy, drives economic inequality and widens racial inequities, according to  Prosperity Now .

When I was a child, my mother used to say to me, “Don’t tell nobody our business.” That was based in part on a sense of shame that she and many others absorbed just for having to struggle. Since then, I’ve learned that telling the truth in fact sets us free. It did for me in my life, it has in fits and starts for our nation and it can again if we resolve to identify and dismantle the systems that create, sustain and perpetuate poverty.

 It all begins with telling a new and authentic story.

Michael Tubbs is the author of the new memoir  “The Deeper the Roots ,” currently serves as the special adviser to California Gov. Gavin Newsom for economic mobility. He is the founder of  End Poverty in California , or EPIC, and founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income . He is the former mayor of Stockton, California.