laziness is the root cause of poverty essay

Why poverty is not a personal choice, but a reflection of society

Research Investigator of Psychiatry, Public Health, and Poverty Solutions, University of Michigan

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Shervin Assari does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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As the Senate prepares to modify its version of the health care bill, now is a good time to back up and examine why we as a nation are so divided about providing health care, especially to the poor.

I believe one reason the United States is cutting spending on health insurance and safety nets that protect poor and marginalized people is because of American culture, which overemphasizes individual responsibility. Our culture does this to the point that it ignores the effect of root causes shaped by society and beyond the control of the individual. How laypeople define and attribute poverty may not be that much different from the way U.S. policymakers in the Senate see poverty.

As someone who studies poverty solutions and social and health inequalities, I am convinced by the academic literature that the biggest reason for poverty is how a society is structured. Without structural changes, it may be very difficult if not impossible to eliminate disparities and poverty.

Social structure

About 13.5 percent of Americans are living in poverty. Many of these people do not have insurance, and efforts to help them gain insurance, be it through Medicaid or private insurance, have been stymied. Medicaid provides insurance for the disabled, people in nursing homes and the poor.

Four states recently asked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for permission to require Medicaid recipients in their states who are not disabled or elderly to work.

This request is reflective of the fact that many Americans believe that poverty is, by and large, the result of laziness , immorality and irresponsibility.

In fact, poverty and other social miseries are in large part due to social structure , which is how society functions at a macro level. Some societal issues, such as racism, sexism and segregation, constantly cause disparities in education, employment and income for marginalized groups. The majority group naturally has a head start, relative to groups that deal with a wide range of societal barriers on a daily basis. This is what I mean by structural causes of poverty and inequality.

Poverty: Not just a state of mind

We have all heard that the poor and minorities need only make better choices – work hard, stay in school, get married, do not have children before they can afford them. If they did all this, they wouldn’t be poor.

Just a few weeks ago, Housing Secretary Ben Carson called poverty “ a state of mind .” At the same time, his budget to help low-income households could be cut by more than US$6 billion next year.

This is an example of a simplistic view toward the complex social phenomenon. It is minimizing the impact of a societal issue caused by structure – macro‐level labor market and societal conditions – on individuals’ behavior. Such claims also ignore a large body of sociological science.

American independence

Americans have one of the most independent cultures on Earth. A majority of Americans define people in terms of internal attributes such as choices , abilities, values, preferences, decisions and traits.

This is very different from interdependent cultures , such as eastern Asian countries where people are seen mainly in terms of their environment, context and relationships with others.

A direct consequence of independent mindsets and cognitive models is that one may ignore all the historical and environmental conditions, such as slavery, segregation and discrimination against women, that contribute to certain outcomes. When we ignore the historical context, it is easier to instead attribute an unfavorable outcome, such as poverty, to the person.

Views shaped by politics

Many Americans view poverty as an individual phenomenon and say that it’s primarily their own fault that people are poor. The alternative view is that poverty is a structural phenomenon. From this viewpoint, people are in poverty because they find themselves in holes in the economic system that deliver them inadequate income.

The fact is that people move in and out of poverty. Research has shown that 45 percent of poverty spells last no more than a year, 70 percent last no more than three years and only 12 percent stretch beyond a decade.

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics ( PSID ), a 50-year longitudinal study of 18,000 Americans, has shown that around four in 10 adults experience an entire year of poverty from the ages of 25 to 60. The last Survey of Income and Program Participation ( SIPP ), a longitudinal survey conducted by the U.S. Census, had about one-third of Americans in episodic poverty at some point in a three-year period, but just 3.5 percent in episodic poverty for all three years.

Why calling the poor ‘lazy’ is victim blaming

If one believes that poverty is related to historical and environmental events and not just to an individual, we should be careful about blaming the poor for their fates.

Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially responsible for the harm that befell them. It is a common psychological and societal phenomenon. Victimology has shown that humans have a tendency to perceive victims at least partially responsible . This is true even in rape cases, where there is a considerable tendency to blame victims and is true particularly if the victim and perpetrator know each other.

I believe all our lives could be improved if we considered the structural influences as root causes of social problems such as poverty and inequality. Perhaps then, we could more easily agree on solutions.

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Is Laziness the Cause of Economic Inequality?

By Bruce Stokes, Director of Economic Attitudes, Pew Research Center

Special to Foreign Policy

Once, laments over economic inequality were the sole purview of the left.  But now the growing gap between the rich and the poor is a mainstream concern. “The distribution of income and wealth in the United States has been widening more or less steadily for several decades, to a greater extent than in most advanced countries,” Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen observed in a speech on October 17. And “I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history.

In a recent report, titled “Redistribution, Inequality and Growth,” the  International Monetary Fund (IMF) contended that economic inequality is an enemy of growth. And in his state of the union address  earlier this year, President Barack Obama acknowledged that, despite four straight years of economic growth, inequality in the United States has deepened. Now, a new Pew Research Center survey of the citizens in 44 countries has found that a median of 60 percent — including 46 percent of Americans — say inequality is a very big problem in their respective societies.

Read more at   Foreign Policy

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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The Causes of Laziness

Understanding the causes of our sloth can help us to overcome it..

Posted May 6, 2015 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

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[Article revised on 27 April 2020.]

Our nomadic ancestors had to conserve energy to compete for scarce resources and to fight or flee enemies and predators. Expending effort on anything other than short-term advantage could jeopardize their very survival. In any case, in the absence of modern conveniences such as antibiotics, banks, roads, and refrigeration, it made little sense to think long term.

Today, mere survival has fallen off the agenda, and, with ever increasing life expectancies, it is long-term strategizing and effort-making that leads to the best outcomes. Yet, our instinct, which has not caught up, is still for conserving energy, making us reluctant to expend effort on abstract projects with distant and uncertain payoffs.

Ambition and perspective can override instinct, and some people are more future-oriented than others, whom, from the heights of their success, they often deride as ‘lazy’. Indeed, laziness has become so intimately associated with poverty and failure that a poor person is commonly presumed to be lazy, no matter how little or much he actually works.

In general, people find it painful to expend effort on long-term goals that do not provide any immediate gratification. For them to embark on a project, they need to believe that the return on their labour is likely to exceed their loss of comfort. The problem is that they tend to distrust and discount a return that is distant or uncertain. People are poor calculators. Tonight they may eat and drink indiscriminately, without factoring in the longer-term consequences for their health, endurance, and appearance, or even tomorrow’s hangover.

The ancient philosopher Epicurus famously argued that pleasure is the highest good for man. However, he cautioned that not everything that is pleasurable should be pursued, and conversely, not everything that is painful should be avoided. Instead, a kind of hedonistic calculus should be applied to determine which things are most likely to result in the greatest pleasure over time, and it is above all this hedonistic calculus that people are unable to handle.

Many ‘lazy’ people are not intrinsically lazy, but are so because they have not found what they want to do, or because, for one reason or another, they are not doing it. To make matters worse, the job that pays their bills and fills their best hours may have become so abstract and specialized that they can no longer fully grasp its purpose or product, and, by extension, their part in improving other peoples’ lives. A builder can look with aching satisfaction upon the houses that he has built, and a doctor can take pride and joy in the restored health and gratitude of his patients, but an assistant deputy financial controller in a large corporation cannot be at all certain of the effect or end-product of his labour. So why should he bother?

Other factors that can lead to ‘laziness’ are fear and hopelessness. Some people fear success, or do not have enough self-esteem to feel comfortable with success, and laziness is a way of sabotaging themselves. Shakespeare conveyed this idea much more eloquently and succinctly in Antony and Cleopatra: ‘Fortune knows we scorn her most when most she offers blows.’ Conversely, other people fear failure, and laziness is preferable to failure because it is at one remove. “It’s not that I failed, it’s that I never tried.”

Yet other people are ‘lazy’ because they understand their situation as being so hopeless that they cannot even begin to think through it, let alone do something about it. As these people are unable to address their situation, it could be argued that they are not truly lazy, and, to some extent, the same could be said of all lazy people. In other words, the very concept of laziness presupposes the ability to choose not to be lazy—that is, presupposes the existence of free will .

I could close with a self-help pep talk or my top-10 tips for over-coming laziness, but, in the longer term, the only way to overcome laziness is to understand its nature and particular cause or causes: to think, think, and think, and over the years, slowly arrive at a better way of living.

Neel Burton is author of Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions and other books.

Neel Burton, M.D. , is a psychiatrist, philosopher, and writer who lives and teaches in Oxford, England.

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Society or the Individual: Root Causes of Poverty in America

The new Fishlinger Center for Public Policy Research at the University of Mount Saint Vincent seeks to foster meaningful dialog on key public policy issues through independent, objective public opinion research. This initial survey focuses on social issues in the United States. This is the third report from the survey; the first two reports concentrated on human trafficking and the lack of affordable health care. Additional reports on other social problems covered in the survey will be released in the coming months.

The poll was conducted online May 14 to 26 with 1,253 adults. Field work was conducted by IPSOS Public Affairs. Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians were sampled at a higher rate than their proportion of the population for reasons of analysis.

Importance of the Issue Three-quarters of the public describe poverty as an extremely or very important issue in the United States and about the same number consider it to be extremely or very serious.

Forty percent of the public say they are extremely or very interested in helping to reach a solution for poverty in the United States. But, only a third say they actually have personally tried to help poor people.

The Cause of Poverty Most Americans say poverty is the result of inequity in society rather than an individual’s own fault. Two-thirds of the public consider poverty a pervasive problem in the United States and more than a quarter consider themselves poor.

Nearly sixty percent of Americans say the basis for poverty in this country is an unequal society, while about forty percent say a lack of effort on the part of an individual is more to blame.

More than two-thirds of people who consider themselves poor see poverty as the product of society; people who do not think of themselves as impoverished are more closely divided on the cause of poverty.

Few Americans say the problem of poverty is being adequately addressed in this country. Only 21 percent say impoverishment is being tackled to any real extent.  Even a quarter if those who consider poverty an individual’s failing say the problem is not being dealt with very well or at all.

Experience with Poverty More than half of all Americans say they personally know someone who has experienced poverty. Sixty percent of African-Americans say they know someone who has been poor compared with 54 percent of whites. People aged 65 and older are less likely to say they know someone who has been poor than younger adults.

Using self-reported household income and U.S. Census definitions of poverty, the public can be divided into those below and above the poverty line. Eighty-five percent of survey respondents are above the poverty line, based on their reported household income; 15 percent are below the poverty line. This ratio is the same as reported by the Census Bureau for the country.

A third of those whose income may place them below the poverty level do not perceive themselves as poor. These people are younger, more likely to have never been married and less likely to have children than low income people who do consider themselves impoverished.

Survey Methodology The fieldwork for the Fishlinger Center poll was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs. Online interviews with 1,253 adults were collected May 14 to 26, 2015. Sampling for the survey used a blended approach, combining the Ipsos iSay panel with Ampario sample (a blend of external panel and non-panel sources). Ipsos measures the precision of its online surveys using a credibility interval to measure sampling error. The survey of 1,253 respondents has a credibility interval of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points. The credibility interval may be larger for subgroups. The poll is subject to other potential sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage and measurement error. Data were weighted to match the national population on age, sex, Hispanic origin and race. For purposes of analysis, black, Hispanic, and Asian respondents were oversampled. These groups were then weighted down to their proper proportion of the population.

View the survey results

About the Fishlinger Center for Public Policy The  Fishlinger Center for Public Policy Research  opened in February 2015 at the University of Mount Saint Vincent. The Center, a member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), conducts deep and broad studies of public opinion on key public policy concerns through independent and objective research conducted by students, faculty, and other members of the academic community.

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Overcoming poverty is a complex issue. By understanding and tackling the underlying reasons behind poverty, we can take strides toward creating a world where poverty is replaced with hope and opportunity.

Four Global Causes of Poverty:

• Structural Inequality: The first step is to recognize the impact of structural inequalities within societies. These inequalities create disparities in access to resources, opportunities, and decision-making power, and addressing them is essential for breaking the cycle of poverty.
• Limited Access to Education: Educational opportunities serve as a gateway out of poverty, yet millions encounter barriers such as inadequate infrastructure, gender-based discrimination, and economic constraints. Bridging the global education gap is vital for empowering communities and eliminating global poverty. We must ensure that every child goes to school and thrives in the educational environment. And actively commit to breaking down barriers and creating a pathway for a brighter future.
• Economic Injustice: Unfair economic systems contribute significantly to global poverty. Exploitative labor practices, unequal distribution of wealth, and limited access to credit and resources hinder the economic progress of vulnerable populations. Addressing these economic injustices is critical to a sustainable poverty solution.
• Social Discrimination and Exclusion:   Marginalized social groups often bear the brunt of poverty’s weight disproportionately. In our pursuit of a world where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive, combating social discrimination and fostering inclusivity becomes imperative. At the core of our mission lies the commitment to helping families thrive; we recognize that they are the heartbeat of flourishing communities. 

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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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COLUMN: Is Laziness the Cause of Economic Inequality?

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Is Laziness the Cause of Economic Inequality?

Americans and the british lean toward moral weakness, but the rest of the world blames government policies..

• North America

Once, laments over economic inequality were the sole purview of the left.  But now the growing gap between the rich and the poor is a mainstream concern. "The distribution of income and wealth in the United States has been widening more or less steadily for several decades, to a greater extent than in most advanced countries," Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen observed in a speech on October 17. And "I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation's history." 

Once, laments over economic inequality were the sole purview of the left.  But now the growing gap between the rich and the poor is a mainstream concern. "The distribution of income and wealth in the United States has been widening more or less steadily for several decades, to a greater extent than in most advanced countries," Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen observed in a speech on October 17. And "I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history." 

In a recent report, titled "Redistribution, Inequality and Growth," the International Monetary Fund (IMF) contended that economic inequality is an enemy of growth. And in his state of the union address earlier this year, President Barack Obama acknowledged that, despite four straight years of economic growth, inequality in the United States has deepened. Now, a new Pew Research Center survey of the citizens in 44 countries has found that a median of 60 percent — including 46 percent of Americans — say inequality is a very big problem in their respective societies.

When offered the chance to choose one out of six different causes for inequality — government economic policies, workers’ pay, the educational system, trade, the tax system and the poor’s work ethic — people around the world generally agree that the gap between the rich and the poor is a product of failed government policies and inadequate wages.

Poverty, they say, does not result from a poor work ethic among the disadvantaged. And this consensus that inequality is the result of inadequate policies and low wages suggests a potential course for narrowing the income and wealth divide. Government economic policies can be changed and wages can be raised. This means that the global public agrees that inequality is not the consequence of some character flaw of the poor. It is an economic condition that can be fixed.

Nearly equal portions of the public in advanced, emerging, and developing countries, cite the gap between the rich and the poor as a very big problem. And notably, it is the leading economic concern in the eyes of people in major economies such as China and Germany, at 42 and 39 percent, respectively, according to the new Pew Research survey. A global median of 29 percent say their government’s actions are to blame for inequality, making it the leading cause cited. People in advanced economies, in particular, believe that their governments are responsible for the rich getting richer and equally culpable for the poor becoming relatively poorer. A median of 32 percent in those nations blame government, three times the percentage that cite the failings of their educational system and double the share who blame their tax system. This includes 54 percent of Greeks, 52 percent of the Spanish, and 46 percent of South Koreans who say public policies are to blame. Notably, in comparison, only 24 percent of Americans fault government actions.

Low wages run a close second in the public eye as the cause of inequality. A global median of 23 percent cite the failure of companies to adequately compensate their workers. Significant percentages of those in advanced economies fault workers’ wages for the gap between the rich and the poor, including 29 percent in Japan and 26 percent in both France and Germany. Just 13 percent of Americans blame their paycheck, however, despite stagnating incomes in the United States.

Wage shortfalls are seen as a cause of inequality in a number of emerging markets, where significant portions of the populations in some key countries seem to think that recent national economic performance has not translated into adequate improvements in income. 44 percent of Poles (who weathered the Eurocrisis better than any other European Union member) and the same proportion of Brazilians say inadequate wages are the principle cause of inequality in their societies. There is similar blame cast by 39 percent of Colombians and Chileans alike.

Globally, only 11 percent of people point the finger at their educational system. 10 percent attribute inequality to a lack of individual hard work, while 8 percent blame trade between countries and the structure of the national tax system. Notably, the United States and Britain are two of the few places in the world that blame individuals’ lack of hard work — 24 percent — for the rising gap between the rich and the poor. (This is roughly on par with the level of blame at their own government’s policies: 24 percent in the United States and 23 percent in Britain).

Of those living in advanced economies, a median of 48 percent support higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations to fund programs for the poor that would fight inequality. This includes 61 percent of Germans, 54 percent of Spaniards, 53 percent of South Koreans, half of all Britons, and 49 percent of Americans. Not surprisingly, in the United States, 70 percent of liberals say high taxes are a more effective way to combat inequality, while just 33 percent of conservatives agree. 

Citizens in emerging and developing economies see things differently. In these places, people believe that low taxes on the rich and businesses to stimulate growth are a better way to address inequality. At least 60 percent of those in Brazil, Argentina, and Vietnam, express this opinion. Majorities in developing economies like Uganda, Ghana, Kenya, and Nicaragua also lean toward low taxes.

Inequality is squarely on the world’s economic agenda, especially now that many economists think it inhibits much-needed growth. And publics around the world say governments and corporations can do something about it by fixing national economic policies and raising wages. But a consensus about the specifics of those policy changes continues to elude us. Public support for reducing the gap between the rich and the poor may require a more complex set of policy initiatives, not one-size-fits-all prescriptions. 

Bruce Stokes is a visiting senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. Twitter:  @bruceestokes

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Why poverty is not a personal choice, but a reflection of society

A homeless camp in Los Angeles, where homelessness has risen 23 percent in the past year, in May 2017.

AP Photo/Richard Vogel

Shervin Assari , University of Michigan

As the Senate prepares to modify its version of the health care bill, now is a good time to back up and examine why we as a nation are so divided about providing health care, especially to the poor.

I believe one reason the United States is cutting spending on health insurance and safety nets that protect poor and marginalized people is because of American culture, which overemphasizes individual responsibility. Our culture does this to the point that it ignores the effect of root causes shaped by society and beyond the control of the individual. How laypeople define and attribute poverty may not be that much different from the way U.S. policymakers in the Senate see poverty.

As someone who studies poverty solutions and social and health inequalities, I am convinced by the academic literature that the biggest reason for poverty is how a society is structured. Without structural changes, it may be very difficult if not impossible to eliminate disparities and poverty.

Social structure

About 13.5 percent of Americans are living in poverty. Many of these people do not have insurance, and efforts to help them gain insurance, be it through Medicaid or private insurance, have been stymied. Medicaid provides insurance for the disabled, people in nursing homes and the poor.

Four states recently asked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for permission to require Medicaid recipients in their states who are not disabled or elderly to work.

This request is reflective of the fact that many Americans believe that poverty is, by and large, the result of laziness , immorality and irresponsibility.

In fact, poverty and other social miseries are in large part due to social structure , which is how society functions at a macro level. Some societal issues, such as racism, sexism and segregation, constantly cause disparities in education, employment and income for marginalized groups. The majority group naturally has a head start, relative to groups that deal with a wide range of societal barriers on a daily basis. This is what I mean by structural causes of poverty and inequality.

Poverty: Not just a state of mind

We have all heard that the poor and minorities need only make better choices – work hard, stay in school, get married, do not have children before they can afford them. If they did all this, they wouldn’t be poor.

Just a few weeks ago, Housing Secretary Ben Carson called poverty “ a state of mind .” At the same time, his budget to help low-income households could be cut by more than US$6 billion next year.

This is an example of a simplistic view toward the complex social phenomenon. It is minimizing the impact of a societal issue caused by structure – macro‐level labor market and societal conditions – on individuals’ behavior. Such claims also ignore a large body of sociological science.

American independence 

Americans have one of the most independent cultures on Earth. A majority of Americans define people in terms of internal attributes such as choices , abilities, values, preferences, decisions and traits.

This is very different from interdependent cultures , such as eastern Asian countries where people are seen mainly in terms of their environment, context and relationships with others.

A direct consequence of independent mindsets and cognitive models is that one may ignore all the historical and environmental conditions, such as slavery, segregation and discrimination against women, that contribute to certain outcomes. When we ignore the historical context, it is easier to instead attribute an unfavorable outcome, such as poverty, to the person.

Views shaped by politics

Many Americans view poverty as an individual phenomenon and say that it’s primarily their own fault that people are poor. The alternative view is that poverty is a structural phenomenon. From this viewpoint, people are in poverty because they find themselves in holes in the economic system that deliver them inadequate income.

The fact is that people move in and out of poverty. Research has shown that 45 percent of poverty spells last no more than a year, 70 percent last no more than three years and only 12 percent stretch beyond a decade.

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics ( PSID ), a 50-year longitudinal study of 18,000 Americans, has shown that around four in 10 adults experience an entire year of poverty from the ages of 25 to 60. The last Survey of Income and Program Participation ( SIPP ), a longitudinal survey conducted by the U.S. Census, had about one-third of Americans in episodic poverty at some point in a three-year period, but just 3.5 percent in episodic poverty for all three years.

Why calling the poor ‘lazy’ is victim blaming

If one believes that poverty is related to historical and environmental events and not just to an individual, we should be careful about blaming the poor for their fates.

Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially responsible for the harm that befell them. It is a common psychological and societal phenomenon. Victimology has shown that humans have a tendency to perceive victims at least partially responsible . This is true even in rape cases, where there is a considerable tendency to blame victims and is true particularly if the victim and perpetrator know each other.

Shervin Assari , Research Investigator of Psychiatry, Public Health, and Poverty Solutions, University of Michigan

This article was originally published on The Conversation . Read the original article .

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Poverty is not a deficit of life skills

W ho are the “just about managing” and why are they Jams? We might consider the million households identified by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) thinktank this week as in income crisis, meaning they can’t afford to pay two or more essential bills at any one time. They struggle with council tax, energy and water demands. Rent arrears were less common but hardly unknown: for many low-income tenants the very act of signing on to universal credit is a virtual guarantee of rent arrears .

Even if you manage to pay the rent, this can be at a price. The Food Standards Agency estimates that almost 4 million UK adults experience food insecurity , which means they don’t eat regularly or healthily because of a lack of money. These are “Jams” too (or perhaps more accurately, not really managing). And what about the 1.6 million people who, according to a recent National Audit Office study , disconnect their energy supply at least once a year because they can’t afford to top up prepayment meters?

The conventional government view is that this familiar juggling act performed by poorer Jams is their own fault. If only they earned more , had better money management skills , could cook , wore a second woolly jumper in winter, or held off giving birth to excessive numbers of children . Poverty, it is suggested, is a deficit of life skills caused by laziness and benefit dependency, fixable principally by work and the supposedly character-building withdrawal of social security support.

And yet the IPPR finds that two-thirds of households in income crisis have at least one adult in work; employment may help, but it doesn’t always solve a problem. One in six adults who worry the food cupboard will be empty before the next pay cheque arrives are in work. This is no surprise. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation , a record 7 million people in poverty are in working families. It found the causes transparently structural: lack of money, driven in part by the crushingly expensive and insecure rents in private housing.

So how to help? We still await a social justice green paper (known under previous management as the “Life Chances” paper), with its promised aim of addressing the root causes of poverty and disadvantage. In its continuing absence, this week we got the first of a series of initiatives designed to tackle “the problems that prevent families from getting on in life”. Its worthy, if painfully modest, aim is a £30m programme to reduce parental conflict. If you are not already underwhelmed, consider that ministers also promise an expansion of the disturbingly inadequate troubled families programme .

Consider instead what ministers are actively doing to make things harder for the Jams. Also this week (this list is not exhaustive) we see the introduction of the two-child limit to child tax credits (pitching 250,000 children into poverty, 70% from working families); the £30 a week cuts to some employment and support allowance payments (an incentive to find work, supposedly, for people who have been found unfit to work); a renewed freeze to benefit rates (making it harder for people to afford sufficient food, as Brexit-related inflation sends prices soaring); and a further local housing allowance rates freeze (making rents even more crushingly unaffordable).

“I don’t want any child to be defined by the circumstances of their birth,” the work and pensions secretary, Damian Green, declared this week, seemingly unaware that the multibillion social security cuts he is helming confer the scarring and restrictive legacy of poverty on millions of children from low-income households. What’s more, these cuts (like the slashing of universal credit work allowances , and giving away billions in tax breaks for the wealthy ) are inherited practically untouched from George Osborne. It’s feeble stuff. If Theresa May is serious about rebalancing society in favour of ordinary working people, she is going a funny way about it.

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Laziness: Its Effects and Results, Essay Example

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Introduction

When a person decides to put up everything for later or for the next day, then he is immediately considered to be coined as lazy or simply put: wanting to do nothing [for the moment]. Most individuals confronted with the need to complete so much often find themselves out of the mood to finish anything, thus making it harder for them to finish anything especially when they believe that there is still time to complete such tasks or responsibilities later on. Noticeably, through time and history, it has become obviously distinct that laziness affects the overall progress rate that communities take into account; based on individual attitude, laziness becomes a rather consistent matter that basically mandates how a particularly designed plan turns out.

In the discussion that follows, Ernest Smartt’s article on Traits that Define Lazy People shall be given specific attention to, especially in the aim of making a direct interpretation on how Smartt tried to put up a pattern of belief that could be used in identifying the real effects of laziness in the human society and how it thrives within the constraints of communal progress. Furthermore, this discussion shall also try to provide a definite sense of presentation on how laziness basically affects the overall being of a person; as well as that of his relationships and connection with other individuals he tends to be close with. Practically, the article to be analyzed in this written work shall be scrutinized based on the reality of its assumptive connection to how lazy individuals actually are and what elements contribute to such attitude among themselves.

What Laziness Means

Laziness is the state of not wanting to do anything; most often than not, this attitude is likened to that of one’s application of personal procrastination. These two negative attitudes, however, should not be interchanged as they have very distinct differences depending on how a person reacts with regards the value of human development that they imply to embrace. On one side, laziness suggests a condition of failure on the part of an individual tasked to complete something; but has rather become mindless of the situation which makes it easier for a person to neglect such responsibilities set for him to accomplish. On the other end, procrastination is one attitude that suggests a definite sense of condition by which a person puts up something for later, especially if he believes that he still has more time allotted for him to complete his duties accordingly.

Nonetheless, both attitudes are intertwined although not really belonging to the same level of application and realization. In Smartt’s article, he points out that laziness is rather a state of mind. The mind governs every move of a person; it suggests whether or not he should go for something. The power of the mind to provide interesting motivations in a person plays a great role on how one would view his responsibilities as well as other matters he is expected to accomplish.

Hence, being a state of mind, laziness could be controlled. However, because of the emergent changes happening in the world today, Smartt implicates that somehow, the environment too has a great impact on how one develops the point of laziness. The article further insists on the fact by which cognitive adjustments occur based on how one perceives his environment, and how much he lets external factors affect his internal being. This is where the condition of thinking comes in; a person learns to perceive on matters; may it be positive or not, based on how he intends to become more involved in a situation. When an individual decides that he does not have any connection on something, the interest starts to fall off and somehow, the desire to engage in such matter disintegrates accordingly.

Another factor pointed out by Smartt to affect the modern concept of laziness is the emergent rise of innovations designed to make human life more productive, more convenient and more acceptable for those who might not fully want to work themselves or put forward a distinct effort that would bring them better satisfaction from their work. The determination to embrace a sense of purpose among themselves is then lost and somehow, relaxation and the desire to live within a luxurious, if not comfortable lifestyle that allows them to do what they want to do and not what they have to accomplish. Some of these innovations include computerized systems that give them a better sense of the value of improvement that they want to embrace. Humans now depend on machines to complete most of the household chores that they have to accomplish in a day; from cooking, to washing clothes, to mopping the floor, to entertaining themselves with television, radio, or modern mobile phones and other carry-on gadgets, humans have learned to fully depend on technology and what it is ready to provide them with to be able to experience a certain level of ease from the many works and pressures they may already be experiencing from working.

Media is also considered as a highly influential tool that basically affects the overall vision of humans towards matters of putting forth an extra effort towards completing their tasks or simply putting matters off to face different conditions of situations in their lives. The promotion of laziness in media does not come as a direct invitation; however, with the presentation of how one could ease out from living within a tensed situation, humans are taught that it is easy if not necessary to escape from the many detectable sources of pressure in life. Facing challenges and difficulties in life and in everyday dealings of individuals have become a thing of the past; especially if there are certain short cuts made available for individuals to take notice of.

With media and the power of social construction placed within the picture, it is rather important to note of the fact that humans receive bombarding ideas about how they should live their lives and how they ought to face challenges and particular tests to their capacity to put their best foot forwards. The power of media to implicate the development of certain points of thinking among human individuals basically create a more responsive process by which media-development is seen to have the capacity to create a controlling factor that would determine how a specific community is likely to accept the terms of progress they are being offered with through time.

True, there are different elements that could contribute to one’s development of laziness [may it be in a personal or a more distinguished condition of development that a person undergoes]. Nonetheless, none of these elements could be used to justify the laziness of an individual. Being lazy is a choice that one makes on his own. His unwillingness to work is a personal decision. True to its sense, being lazy is only affected by the fact that a person allows himself to adjust to such attitude of comfort and relaxation. When a choice has been made, laziness becomes intertwined with the idea of concentrated proof that as one nourishes an idea, it becomes a main stay in the brain and somehow is already able to control the whole being of the person allowing himself to be directed by such desire to simply ‘relax’.

What Effects Laziness has on Individuals

  When one decides to not do anything; it does not mean he will never ever work on matters appointed for him to complete. Rather, it means that at the time being; he may not be in the right position nor mood for him to complete that of the tasks that have been assigned for him to accomplish. Nonetheless, when such option becomes highly available for a person to embrace most of the time, then such culture of laziness becomes highly effective on how a person views the value of time, effort and determination to do good. Noticeably, the lines quoted from the essay saying:

Laziness can be called one of the scourges of the modern world. Though often seen simply as a forgivable weakness, it can have a number of negative effects on a person. In terms of these consequences, it should be mentioned that laziness often leads to the worsening of one’s relationships at work and decreased work performance, which can result into job loss, excessive stress, and psychic disturbance.

…these lines prove that laziness serves as a definite hindrance to the ways by which individuals intend to take the option of growth that are available for them to embrace fully. Laziness makes it hard for individuals to take on the next step or at times even the first step towards success.

Relationships, Connections and Laziness

  Most lazy individuals develop a lower threshold for tension; making it easier for them to say ‘no’ rather than ‘let’s work it out’ when dealing with particular situations within the relationships they may have formed with friends and family. Once a person decides to be lazy, it is most of than not harder to break into.

Laziness, as mentioned earlier is highly affected by both internal and external elements surrounding a particular individual. External situations and elements of survival often create a mandate of tension’ however, it is the inner elements [primarily including the original attitude of a person] that basically affects the overall decision making of a person; including the choice of developing into a lazier individual or towards a person who tries the best to avoid such condition of thinking and work.

Overall, it could be agreed upon that a person may be affected by media, social situations and other points of pressure to embrace laziness as means of directive culture among themselves. Nevertheless, the role of one’s decision-making culture determines whether or not a specific person would willingly accept laziness as a personal culture. Some researchers even admittedly took into consideration the fact that there are individuals who may not know of the fact that they are lazy; because of the fact that they have been the same ever since and that laziness has become a common notable characteristic or social norm for their part.

Hence, to explain one’s laziness is easy, but to justify the works from which such individuals function in, ought to give a distinct sense of knowing whether or not a person is lazy in culture or in mind. Then again, it should not be forgotten how laziness is also considered as a state of mind; meaning it could be fully controlled with the emergence of ample assistance coming from the surrounding individuals who tend to support the needs of the people who tend to develop such attitude especially in completing particularly assigned tasks.

  Being a sense of mind-set in persons, laziness could be eliminated through changing one’s attitude towards life and its challenges. Improving the sense of interest and enthusiasm that one has over life and the elements making it up could help eliminate the condition of laziness in an individual. Practically, it could be understood that Smartt’s article gives a definite insistence on discussing the primary foundations of developing laziness among individuals. It is only the willingness of one to avoid the constrains of such situation as part of their life that could help them avoid the degrading situations brought about by laziness as well as the damages that it may have on the relationships they are to form in the future.

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Can Laziness Lead To Poverty

Laziness is something we all experience at some point in our lives. We all experience days where we have no energy or motivation to do anything and we just want to spend our time doing nothing.

While this is normal, there’s a link between laziness and poverty and if you’re not careful enough, being lazy can lead to a total loss of income. You can’t always control feelings of laziness, but you do have a say in how you respond to your laziness. In this article, we’ll be talking about everything you need to know about laziness and poverty.

How laziness can cause poverty

Laziness refers to lacking the motivation to do anything at all in a given period and this can easily affect your career and overall quality of life. If you aren’t careful, even a simple act of laziness can lead to bad decisions such as complacency in your income and overall career.

How laziness affects our total income

1. poor career performance.

When you’re consumed by laziness, it’s generally difficult to perform at your best in work and career tasks. Everything feels forced and obligatory, which is how laziness is directly proportional to income loss.

Since you have no energy or motivation to do anything, then you’ll either remain exactly where you are in your career for the rest of your life or you could potentially lose your job. No company would keep an employee when one of their qualities is laziness as companies need someone productive and driven enough to deliver deadlines and projects.

2. Bad career reputation

Being lazy causes you to make impulsive and rash decisions such as being late for a meeting or not being able to deliver projects in time. When you have a bad reputation at work, this will affect your income, and eventually, you could potentially lose all your hard work.

No company would keep an employee that doesn’t try in their careers and doesn’t deliver projects on time. You might think that your laziness only affects you, but it affects even your co-workers, which is why laziness is constantly frowned upon in any workplace.

3. Lack of growth or potential

It’s perfectly okay to have those days where you lack the motivation to do certain tasks, but when you feel that every day and it’s affecting your work and income, then that’s when it becomes a problem.

When you’re no longer growing into a better version of yourself, this can cause a loss of your income and eventually lead to poverty, which is the opposite of what you want.

4. Job loss

Lastly, the determining factor that makes laziness cause income loss is when you lose your job because of all the factors mentioned above combined, among other factors.

You will eventually lose your job when laziness becomes your identity and something you can no longer control in the workplace and your career. No matter what career field you’re in, laziness can’t be your personality trait, especially if you don’t want to lose your income entirely.

Find your inner balance between being lazy and working

Laziness is a difficult thing to deal with, especially if it gets in the way of a thriving and successful career. You need to find the balance between laziness and working with the realization that motivation isn’t something you naturally feel, but it’s something you choose.

You choose to have the motivation to get through your career, especially if you want to avoid the possibility of losing your job and source of income entirely. If you feel lazy because you’re overworking yourself, don’t hesitate to take a break, but remember to let yourself get back to work afterward. Laziness might be hard, but it’s not impossible to overcome and deal with.

In conclusion, I hope this article was able to shed insight into everything you needed to know about laziness and poverty. If you continue dwelling on laziness, poverty is going to be inevitable, which is why the best thing you can do is do everything you can to overcome laziness.

Even when you don’t have the motivation and drive to do anything, make it a point to really push yourself to accomplish something. You’ll be surprised how you can feel motivated by accomplishing even a simple task.

Nikola Stavrovski

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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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‘Laziness Is A Major Cause Of Poverty’

Rev. Fr. John Damian Adizie

Do you know that the main reason why people are suffering today is as a result of laziness? Do you know that laziness has rendered so many families and even nation poor? Do you know that an unbeliever is better than a lazy person? Do you know that the number of lazy people in the world is far more than the number of those who are hardworking? Do you know that laziness is a disease? Do you even know that so many people have lost their lives to this disease called laziness?

Yes, Laziness is the worst disease on earth! It is the most infectious disease on earth. So, many people has been afflicted with this disease.

Unfortunately, this disease is spreading wider than any other disease on earth. Laziness is the major cause of poverty.

The major problems we are facing in our world today, such as economic crisis, economic meltdown, the problem of refugees and migrants, and even the shortage of food, are all caused by laziness.

The author of the book of Proverbs 6:9-11 describes Laziness as the major cause of poverty: “How long will you slumber, O sluggard? When will you rise from your sleep? 10 A little sleep, a little slumber, A little folding of the hands to sleep— 11 So shall your poverty come on you like a prowler, And your need like an armed man.”

The Lazy ones have little or nothing to contribute. When you offer a lazy man an egg, he will want you to peel it for him. Sam Veda describes laziness as the worst thing that can happen to anybody:   “Laziness erodes a person of his enthusiasm and energy. As a result the person loses all opportunities and finally becomes dejected and frustrated.

The worst thing is that he stops believing in himself.” A person who does not believe in himself can never believe in anybody. Charity begins at home! No one can give what he or she does not have. A lazy person is a hopeless person. 

An idle mind is devil’s workshop. The Devil, according to Benjamin Whichcote often finds work for them who find none for themselves.

Marcus Porcius Cato declares, “In doing nothing men learn to do evil.” An evil doer is the product of laziness. A lazy man has nothing to offer except evil thought and evil actions. A poor nation is a nation that is predominantly made up of lazy people.

In his Second letter to the Thessalonians St. Paul wrote, “For you yourselves know how you ought to follow us, for we were not disorderly among you; 8 nor did we eat anyone’s bread free of charge, but worked with labor and toil night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, 9 not because we do not have authority, but to make ourselves an example of how you should follow us.”

The early apostles lived an exemplary life.   They were not just hardworking, God used them to empower as many people as possible.

An idle Man of God is a burden to the people of God. Men of God are not suppose to be idle or burdensome to the people.

Unfortunately, we have so many men of God that rely totally on their members for their upkeep and their entire wellbeing.

Some men of God have even impoverish their members   in the name of Seed Sowing. St. Paul boldly declares that he was not a burden on the Thessalonians. Even as a Man of God or a minister of the gospel he worked hard day and night in order not to be a burden for his members. We, the present day men of God need to learn from St. Paul. We are called to empower people and not to impoverish them.

St. Paul further condemns all forms of laziness not just amongst Men of God but also among the entire children of God. In the same letter to the Thessalonians he reminded his followers, “10 For even when we were with you, we commanded you this: If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat. 11 For we hear that there are some who walk among you in a disorderly manner, not working at all, but are busybodies. 12 Now those who are such we command and exhort through our Lord Jesus Christ that they work in quietness and eat their own bread.” There is no food for a lazy man or woman.

For St. Paul an unbeliever is far more better than a lazy person. In his first Letter to Timothy 5:8 St. Paul declares, “If anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

When God created man, the first thing He did was to commit man. He did everything possible to ensure that man does not live a lazy life. In the book of Genesis 2:15 the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. At first He even blessed them, and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28) Man was created to be fruitful. There was no room for laziness.

Our Lord Jesus Christ went as far as telling his disciples that a lazy person cannot be his disciple: “ By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples” (John 15:8). God is glorified not through our laziness but through hard work and fruitfulness. You cannot be a disciple of Jesus Christ unless you are fruitful and hard working. 

The worst thing Laziness does is that it leads one into hellfire. In the parable of the Talent the lazy one who received the one talent buried his own talent out of laziness. As others were presenting their talents to their master the lazy servant said to his master, ‘Lord, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered seed. 25 And I was afraid, and went and hid your talent in the ground. Look, there you have what is yours.’

26 “But his lord answered and said to him, ‘You wicked and lazy servant, you knew that I reap where I have not sown, and gather where I have not scattered seed. 27 So you ought to have deposited my money with the bankers, and at my coming I would have received back my own with interest. 28 So take the talent from him, and give it to him who has ten talents.

29 ‘For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away. 30 And cast the unprofitable servant into the outer darkness.

There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ Imagine, the only crime this servant committed that led him into hell fire was laziness. Laziness is not just a sin, it is an act of wickedness. It is a direct ticket to hellfire.

Hard work on the other hand, is profitable. The author of the book of Proverbs 14:23-24 declares, “All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.

The wealth of the wise is their crown, but the folly of fools yields folly.” Hard work is not just   profitable it is the most rewarding and most fruitful act of humanity.

In his second letter to Timothy 2:6 St. Paul wrote, “The hardworking farmer must be first to partake of the crops.” Child of God, as long as you are hardworking you will never labour in vain. You will live to reap the fruit of your labour. And it shall be well with you in Jesus name – Amen!

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Criminal Behavior — Poverty Is The Root Of Crime

How Poverty is The Main Cause of Crime

• Categories: Criminal Behavior

About this sample

Words: 593 |

Published: Dec 16, 2021

Words: 593 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

• brooklyn eagle. (2019,October 15). New York's most desperate caught up in 'crimes of poverty'. Retrieved from https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2019/10/15/new-yorks-most-desperate-caught-up-in-crimes-of-poverty/
• Ginni Correa. (2020,june 18). Addiction center. Retrieved from https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/low-income-americans/
• OSAC. (6/18/2019). Venezuela 2019 Crime & Safety Report. Retrieved from https://www.osac.gov/Country/Venezuela/Content/Detail/Report/b0933dac-4154-4dc2-89c1-160ca3b2c4c2
• Tom Mack. (3 JAN 2020). Leicestershire live . Retrieved from https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/man-stealing-metal-feed-family-3699993

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