(Article: “How we Cured “the culture of Poverty”, not Poverty itself) The article says that in his book “The Other America” Harrington describes poor people as: “different from the rest of us, radically different, not just in the sense of disadvantaged or poorly housed, or poorly fed. They felt different, too, thought differently…” This shows that problem of poverty for him is not just insufficient goods and services for them, but also being in the margins of society. Some of them have problems such as: addiction, drinking, etc. He says that there is “a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor” and he uses the terminology “culture of poverty” to describe this. He defines poverty as not only material problem, but also psychological problem and to show this he explains that “We need to find some way to help the poor, but also need to understand that there is something wrong with them.” So the solution for poverty isn’t only “straightforward redistribution of wealth” or “collecting stuff, stuff, stuff and heaping it on the heads of a materially deprived family” (from the weight of Mercy), but also and most important is to help them psychologically, give them education, or maybe just talk with them. This point of view is similar to what Mother Teresa said: “We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest …show more content…
The article views poverty as a result of having no education and consequently, having no jobs or having low-paying jobs and no money to have “a life”. We are introduced 2 particular examples of how education transformed poor people’s lives. It shows the way from being a poor immigrant welfare mother to being a faculty member in the university and having PhD – how to be “born as a new person with visions, dreams, hopes, opportunities and fulfillment.” Because this article considers main cause and main problem of poverty having no college education, from this perspective the best solution is to give education to the poor people and thus, give them “a route out of poverty”. Here we see that high education is “key ingredient in poor women’s struggles to survive” and not only survive, but also to have “a real life”, to have lives they want.
Third viewpoint about poverty is that it is just having no money or having insufficient money “to play the role in your community”. And the key in this case is to set a certain “poverty line” and measure economic poverty in various ways. For instance, consumption, relative income, “capability”, etc. poverty. When we see a poverty as a problem of only not having food, home, some stuff, then the solution of it is to give poor people things which are essential to survive. In this situation, we don’t take into consideration