Three Theories Of Poverty Essay

There are three major theories of poverty; these include: individual theory, culture of poverty, and structural theory.
Individual theory of poverty as known as the expectancy model is the focus on the individual’s responsibility and who they are as a person. Individual theory of poverty looks at how society sees these people as a human capital, loss of sense of control, and physiological deficit. The poor are seen as human capital because higher up companies feed of them and oppress them to keep control and dominance over them. A functionalist thinker would say its ok that we have poverty, there will always be poverty. There is a notion that not everyone can be successful or compete. Society likes to tell people to strive for a higher class …show more content…
The culture of poverty sates that there are certain types of values, patterns, and beliefs that are different from the bigger society. There are four factors that associate with culture they are; not really integrated into major institutions, strong feelings of marginality, little organization within family, and child rearing. It is believed that because they come from a poverty culture they lack outside knowledge. Poverty culture is seen as a sub-culture to society. Society is blaming the victim in this case because we are saying it’s the person’s fault for falling into a poverty community and thinking like a poverty person. A functionalist ideology would say everyone likes this social set up including public policy makers. Conservatives and liberals would argue about strengthening and changing the environment, strive for equality, fix the class system, racism, and to most importantly level the playing field. What it means to level the playing field is to help out the person they can strive to become independent but once they are able to they become independent they are on their …show more content…
Structural theory of poverty states individuals acting of society and the source of the problem is in social institutions. Here we can see that the victim is no longer being blames but society is. The poverty system is a vicious cycle, the class system reproduces itself, the organization of the economy needs to be fixed and there is a discrimination against age, sexuality, racial and historical. The conflict theory supports the inequality between the upper and lower class and feminization of poverty. Conflict theory is the limitations to social instructions and resources to maintain social order by showing power and dominance. Poverty communities get the left overs of society, they tend to have limited resources, limited accesses to proper education or higher up education and many other social institutions that forbid them from excelling. For example, by lacking in education they are unable to get a high paying job thus they can’t make ends meet and become either dependent on welfare or homeless. Thus society likes to trap people into falling into the poverty system and never getting out because society refused to help the poor instead we give false hops and fabricated ideas to make them think we are helping them but in reality they just continue a continuous cycle. A radicalistic person will believe that to prevent inequality we need to change society completely. This is also known as a