Poverty

Introduction

Poverty as a social phenomenon has been a problem at every step of civilisation. Although the portion of poor people in society fluctuates in comparison to other times, poverty always remained as a problem. Moreover, the policies used to eradicate poverty generally dealt with the reason-result relationship, none of them looked at the dialectic relationship between poverty and society. Usual definitions of poverty are based on lack of money, and annual income is the measure most commonly used. There are two general approaches defining poverty: the absolute approach and the relative approach. (Adelman, 39)

Discussion

The absolute approach holds that a certain amount of goods and services are essential to and individual. Those who do not have this minimum amount are viewed as poor. But there is a problem with this approach because our definition of a minimum acceptable standard of living is itself likely to change over time. The relative approach, on the other hand, states that a person is poor when his or her income is substantially less than the average income of the population. With this approach poverty will persist as long income inequality exists. The weakness of this approach is that it tells us nothing about how badly, or how well, the people at the bottom of the income distribution actually live. When we deal with poverty we should know how many people are poor and how desperate conditions they live in.

In most of the European countries and in the other parts the world; the absolute approach is used in defining poverty. The poverty line defined and this line is raised each year according to inflation. However, one way or another there are many individuals and families suffering from poverty independent from in what way you define them. And the main concerns of us should be the reasons ...