poverty and how to solve it essay

7 Essays About Poverty: Example Essays and Prompts

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

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

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

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

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

Essays About Poverty: Top Examples

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

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

10 Poverty Essay Topics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5.  The Basic Facts About Children in Poverty

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

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

6.  The State of America’s Children  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View all posts

Solutions to Poverty

Subscribe to the center for economic security and opportunity newsletter, isabel v. sawhill isabel v. sawhill senior fellow emeritus - economic studies , center for economic security and opportunity @isawhill.

April 26, 2007

Thank you for inviting me to testify on what might be done to reduce poverty in America. As a Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the Center on Children and Families at Brookings, I have done extensive work on these issues; although I should note that the views I will express are my own and should not be attributed to other staff, trustees, or funders of the Brookings Institution. Let me first summarize my testimony.

First, I strongly believe that reducing poverty requires a focus both on what government needs to do and on what individuals need to do. We need a combination of responsible policies and responsible behavior.

Second, although there are many things that might be done to reduce poverty in the U.S., I want to argue for a focus on three priorities: getting a good education, not having children before you marry, and working full-time. Government should expect people to make real efforts to comply with each of these norms. When they do, then government should reward such behavior by making sure that those who play by the rules will not be poor. The analysis we have done at Brookings shows that individuals who play by these rules are much less likely to be poor than those who don’t.

Third, one of the most effective policies we could put in place to ensure that everyone gets a good education would be to provide very high-quality early education to all children from low-income families. Many people believe that education in the preschool years only affects young children. In fact, the evidence from both neuroscience and from carefully done program evaluations shows that preschool experiences have long-lasting effects and may be the most cost-effective way to insure that more children are successful in the K-12 years, graduate from high school, go on to college, and earn more as adults. The federal government could further this goal by providing matching funding to states that are willing to invest in high-quality early education for those living in low-income neighborhoods, starting in the first year of life.

Fourth, too many of our teens and young adults are having children before they are married and before they are ready to be good parents. In my view, the solution to this problem resides as much in the larger culture-in what parents, the media, faith communities and key adults say and do-as it does in any shift in government policy per se. However, government can help by providing resources to those fighting this battle in the nongovernmental sector, by insuring that its own policies do not inadvertently encourage childbearing outside of marriage, and by supporting programs that have had some success in reducing early, out-of-wedlock childbearing.

Finally, encouraging and rewarding work is also very important. I support the idea of work requirements in welfare, and perhaps in other programs as well, but I fear that the kind of increased employment we’ve seen among welfare mothers will be a Pyrrhic victory if we don’t find ways to provide more assistance in the form of a higher minimum wage, a more generous EITC, and additional child care and health care assistance. In my testimony today-at the suggestion of your staff-I will focus especially on preschool education and on the need to decrease childbearing outside of marriage and increase the share of children growing up in two-parent, married families. But I have written elsewhere about the importance of providing additional work supports for low-income working families.

Economic Studies

Center for Economic Security and Opportunity

Simon Hodson

May 8, 2024

Richard V. Reeves, Ember Smith

April 26, 2024

Tara Watson, Simran Kalkat

April 10, 2024

Content Search

Solutions to poverty to get us to 2030.

What would zero poverty look like for the world in 2030?

We’re officially 10 years away from the deadline to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals — number one being “End poverty in all its forms everywhere.” No small feat, but also not impossible.

There are some key solutions to poverty that are key to making this goal a reality. Here are the top 7.

1. EQUALITY AND REPRESENTATION FOR ALL

One of the main causes of extreme poverty is marginalization — the systemic barriers that lead to groups of people going without representation in their communities. In order for a community or country to work its way out of poverty, all groups must be involved in the decision-making process — especially when it comes to having a say in the things that determine your place in society.

According to the UN’s High-Level Panel for Women’s Economic Empowerment , women’s unpaid labor adds up to $10 trillion per year — 13% of the global GDP. Likewise, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization , women own less than 20% of agricultural land, yet make up 60% of the agricultural workforce in parts of Africa and Asia. Former FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said in 2016 that “women are the backbone of our work in agriculture… when women have opportunities, the yields on their farms increase – also their incomes. Natural resources are better managed. Nutrition is improved. And livelihoods are more secured.”

Ensuring that all marginalized communities have a seat at the table and are given the tools they need to succeed is key to all other solutions to poverty.

2. BUILDING RESILIENCE — CLIMATE AND OTHERWISE…

Poverty is most likely to occur when there is a high combination of marginalization and risk — with risk being its own combination of a person or group’s level of vulnerability and the hazards they face. For instance, the DRC has suffered ongoing conflict since declaring independence from France in 1960.

This means that millions of Congolese are already vulnerable, being away from home in temporary shelters while still facing the threat of conflict. Those hazards are compounded, however, when you take into account other crises that affect the country, such as the DRC’s current Ebola epidemic (history’s second-largest outbreak of the virus).

To offset this, we need to ensure that the most vulnerable people and communities are able to build resilience — whether it’s preventative education and treatment support during an epidemic, recovery and resilience interventions in the face of climate disasters, or health, nutrition, and shelter resources for refugees and IDPs .

3. …BUT ESPECIALLY FOCUSING ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Resilience against climate change is especially important and deserves its own mention. According to the World Bank , climate change could force an additional 100 million people into extreme poverty over the next decade without any urgent action taken.

From Cyclone Idai to droughts in the Sahel to floods in Bangladesh, we can’t prevent many of the current disasters afflicting the world. But we can help the communities most vulnerable to these crises become better prepared in order to protect their farms, their homes, their loved ones, and their livelihoods. Eco-friendly farming techniques such as climate-smart agriculture preserve vital topsoil, allowing land to recover from degradation, and better adapt to extreme weather.

4. INCREASE ACCESS TO EDUCATION

According to UNESCO, if all students in low-income countries had just basic reading skills (nothing else), an estimated 171 million people could escape extreme poverty. If all adults completed secondary education, we could cut the global poverty rate by more than half. Education develops skills and abilities, corrects some of the imbalances that come out of marginalization, and decreases both risk and vulnerability.

Some of the key areas of focus for making sure that education is truly for all involve breaking down the barriers to education — creating access in remote areas, supporting teachers in their work to deliver quality education , and making sure that education is available to children living in fragile contexts.

5. IMPROVE FOOD SECURITY AND ACCESS TO CLEAN WATER

Simply eating three meals a day and getting a healthy amount of calories and nutrients can go a long way to addressing the cycle of poverty . When a person doesn’t have enough to eat, they lack the strength and energy needed to work. Contaminated water can lead to debilitating illnesses.

What’s more, improving access to clean water can mean that those who live in rural communities (often women and girls — see our first point on marginalization and equality) will save time walking to their nearest water point. Current estimates suggest that women and girls collectively spend 200 million hours every day walking long distances to fetch water. Adequate healthcare options for all goes hand-in-hand with this solution, and represents a larger need for governments to offer the basic social protections and services to keep their citizens healthy, and give them affordable treatment options when they aren’t.

6. END WAR AND CONFLICT

No war means that budgets allocated to cover the cost of conflict can be used to deliver public services. It also reduces risks faced by the most vulnerable communities, and ensures that goals towards equality and inclusion can be maintained.

We’ve seen this play out time and again: While estimates around data for the country vary, Syria’s poverty rate has increased from approximately 12% in 2007 to 83% in 2019. Conversely, in Nepal, a decade-long civil war came to a close in 2006, which correlates with a sharp increase in gross national income (GNI) and gross domestic product (GDP) year over year.

Likewise, the establishment of a United Nations peacekeeping operation in Cambodia in 1992 (following a deadly civil war and war with Vietnam) helped to forge stability within the country and grow its middle class: The country’s poverty rate dropped from 47.8% in 2007 to 13.5% by 2014.

7. EMBRACE CASH AND MICROFINANCE

One of the ways Cambodia’s transition from wartime to peace (including the repatriation of over 300,000 Cambodian refugees) was so smooth was thanks to the idea of buying on credit. While such an influx of returnees could place a strain on resources and create financial dire straits, microfinancing models introduced into the country helped to establish savings, loans, insurance, and cash transfer services in communities that need them the most, allowing people to purchase the tools and services they need in order to become self-sufficient. Between 1998 and 2018, Cambodia’s economy grew by an average of 8% each year, and its middle class began to flourish.

Cash seems like an even more obvious solution to poverty. While the traditional image of humanitarian aid may be crates of supplies like food, water, and tents, distributing cash has become more common. It’s cheaper and faster to get into a country, gives its recipients the autonomy to make their own purchasing decisions, and supports local and national economies.

Sometimes, a small startup grant (even as small as $100) is all it takes to help a family living below the poverty line to launch a new business while keeping on top of their bills and keeping their children fed. The net effect is that they are able to lift themselves out of poverty in a sustainable manner, like Stawa James in Malawi.

Related Content

World + 1 more

Norway’s Humanitarian Strategy 2024–2029

World + 12 more

The Impact of Climate Change on Education and what to do about it

Asia and the pacific sdg progress report: showcasing transformative actions 2024, 2024 será un año difícil para los niños del mundo.

December 2022 - You are accessing an archived version of our website. This website is no longer maintained or updated. The Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform has been migrated here: https://sdgs.un.org/

You will be redirected to the new Partnership Platform in 10 seconds.

• A/69/700 - The road to dignity by 2030: ending poverty, transforming all lives and protecting the planet [Arabic] [Chinese] [English] [French] [Russian] [Spanish]
• 2017 HLFP Thematic Review of SDG 1: End Poverty in All its Forms Everywhere

• improving access to sustainable livelihoods, entrepreneurial opportunities and productive resources;
• providing universal access to basic social services;
• empowering people living in poverty and their organizations;
• addressing the disproportionate impact of poverty on women;
• working with interested donors and recipients to allocate increased shares of ODA to poverty eradication; and
• intensifying international cooperation for poverty eradication.

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

Supported by

• Share full article

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.

How we handle corrections

Advertisement

Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go?

The world has made immense progress against extreme poverty, but it is still the reality for almost one in ten people worldwide..

Two centuries ago, the majority of the world population was extremely poor. Back then, it was widely believed that widespread poverty was inevitable. But this turned out to be wrong. Economic growth is possible, and poverty can decline. The world has made immense progress against extreme poverty.

But even after two centuries of progress, extreme poverty is still the reality for every tenth person in the world. This is what the ‘international poverty line’ highlights – this metric plays an important (and successful) role in focusing the world’s attention on the very poorest people in the world.

The poorest people today live in countries that have achieved no economic growth. This stagnation of the world’s poorest economies is one of the largest problems of our time. Unless this changes, hundreds of millions of people will continue to live in extreme poverty.

The state of poverty today

There are poor people in every country, people who live in poor housing and who struggle to afford basic goods and services like heating, transport, and healthy food for themselves and their families.

The definition of poverty differs from country to country, but in high-income countries, the poverty line is around $30 per day . 1

Even in the world’s richest countries, a substantial share of people – between every 10th and every 5th person – lives below this poverty line.

In the map below, and in all international poverty statistics on Our World in Data, the data is adjusted for inflation and cross-country differences in the price level. The expandable section below the map provides a more detailed explanation of how.

Basics of global poverty measurement

Throughout this article – and in global income and expenditure data generally – the statisticians who produce these figures are careful to make these numbers as comparable as possible.

Non-monetary sources of income are taken into account

Many poor people today and in the past rely on subsistence farming and do not have a monetary income. To take this into account and make a fair comparison of their living standards, the statisticians that produce these figures estimate the monetary value of their home production and add it to their income/expenditure.

Differences in purchasing power and inflation are taken into account

The data is expressed in international dollars . This is a hypothetical currency that results from price adjustments across time and place. 2  An international dollar is defined as having the same purchasing power as one US-$ in the US . This means no matter where in the world a person is living on int.-$30, they can buy the goods and services that cost $30 in the US. None of these adjustments are ever going to be perfect, but in a world where price differences are large, it is important to attempt to account for these differences as well as possible, and this is what these adjustments do. 3

Throughout this text, I’m always adjusting incomes for price changes over time and price differences between countries in this way. All dollar values discussed here are presented in int.-$; the UN does the same for the $2.15 poverty line. Sometimes I leave out ‘international’ as it is awkward to repeat it all the time; but every time I mention any $ amount in this text, I’m referring to international-$ and not US-$. 4

Global data is a mix of income and expenditure data

There is no global survey of incomes: researchers need to rely on the available national surveys. Such surveys are designed with cross-country comparability in mind, but because they reflect the circumstances and priorities of individual countries, there are some important differences across countries. In most high-income countries, the surveys capture people’s incomes, while in poorer countries, these surveys tend to capture people’s consumption.

The two concepts are closely related: the income of a household equals their consumption plus any saving (or minus any borrowing). When speaking about these statistics, it would therefore be accurate to speak about ‘the income of people in richer countries and the monetary value of consumption in poorer countries’. But since it’d be a bit much to repeat this every time, researchers simply speak of ‘living standards’ or ‘income’ instead. I do the same in this text.

We can apply this $30-a-day-poverty-line to the global income distribution to see the share in poverty as judged by the definition of poverty in high-income countries. 5

The latest global data tells us that the huge majority – 84% of the world population – live on less than $30 per day. That means 6.7 billion people.

Why is an extremely low poverty line necessary?

Extreme poverty is defined by the UN as living on less than $2.15 a day. Why do we need a poverty line that is so extremely low?

It is not enough to measure global poverty solely by a higher poverty line because a large number of people are living in extreme poverty. Without an extremely low poverty line, we would not be able to see that a large share of the world lives in such deep poverty.

If we’d only rely on the poverty line from high-income countries, we would hide the differences between people with very different living standards. Whether someone was living on almost $30 a day or on thirty times less would not matter – they would all be considered ‘poor’.

It is however a good idea to add additional poverty lines. As the following chart shows, this can draw attention to the large income differences between people and highlights how many live on extremely low incomes. 6

The $2.15 poverty line, set by the UN, shows that globally close to one in ten people live in extreme poverty. In all these statistics, the researchers are not only taking people’s monetary income into account, but also their non-monetary income and home production. One reason why this is important is because many poor people are small-scale farmers who produce their own food. 7

The UN’s global poverty line is valuable because it has been successful in drawing attention to the terrible depths of extreme poverty of the poorest people in the world. 8

In a related essay , I focus on global poverty as defined by a higher poverty line.

The big lesson of the last 200 years: Economic growth is possible, poverty is not inevitable

What needs explanation is not poverty, but prosperity. Deep poverty was the condition that the majority of humanity has always lived in. In the pre-modern days, hunger was widespread , and every second child died no matter where in the world it was born.

Historian Michail Moatsos has recently produced a new global dataset that goes back two centuries. The chart shows his data. According to his research three-quarters of the world lived in extreme poverty in 1820. This means they "could not afford a tiny space to live, some minimum heating capacity, and food that would not induce malnutrition.” 9

The chart looks simple, but it would be a mistake to think that it was simple to produce this data. Underlying it is a wealth of careful historical research that Moatsos made use of. Historians gathered data for people around the world over two centuries to reconstruct how many of them were able to afford a set of very basic goods and services and aggregated this detailed information into this final picture. You find more information on the methodology in the footnote. 10

Economic growth made it possible to leave poverty behind

Economic growth made it possible to leave the widespread extreme poverty of the past behind. It made the difference between a society in which the majority were lacking even the most basic goods and services – food, decent housing and clothes, healthcare, public infrastructure and transport – and a society in which these products are widely available.

Growth means that a society produces an increasing quantity and quality of economic goods and services. The key to economic growth is the development of technology that makes it possible to increase productivity by which these goods and services are produced.

Because the total production in an economy equals the total income in that country – as everyone’s spending is someone else’s income – incomes grow at the same rate as production increases.

The 9 charts show the data for different regions in the world. On the horizontal axis of each chart, you find the average income (GDP per capita) and on the vertical axis you see the share living in extreme poverty. The starting point of each trajectory shows the data for 1820 and it tells us that two centuries ago the majority of people lived in extreme poverty, no matter where in the world they were at home. 11 Since then, all world regions achieved growth – the production of goods and services increased – and the share living in poverty declined.

[See also my related article: 'What is Economic Growth? ]

Most extremely poor people today are living in Africa

How far do we still have to go?

The previous chart showed that Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest region. Almost 40% of the population lives in extreme poverty.

Not all African countries are struggling. In fact, most African countries have achieved good growth after the end of the oppressive colonial regimes that hindered the growth of African economies. But in a number of countries, the situation is bad. These countries remain as poor as they were in the past. Since the economy is stagnant, poverty is too.

In the chart below, you see that mean incomes have actually fallen in some of the world’s poorest countries. 12

To see the consequences of this, let’s first focus on one country that achieved large growth and then contrast it with a country that did not.

A country that achieved large growth is the UK: the orange distribution on the left shows incomes in the UK two centuries ago; the majority lived in extreme poverty. The green distribution shows how the distribution of incomes has changed since then. Two centuries of economic growth lifted the majority of people out of the deep poverty of the past. 13

The next chart shows the income distribution of the UK in 2019 in green – just as in the previous chart – and in red the income distribution of Madagascar, a country that did not achieve growth.

The majority of people in Madagascar still live in extreme poverty. Very similar to the global situation two centuries ago, three-quarters of Madagascar’s population are living in extreme poverty.

Not just economic growth, but also the distribution of that growth matters. If the inequality of income increases, the poorest can be left behind.

But without economic growth, there is no chance at all to leave poverty behind. The data from Madagascar makes clear that a reduction of inequality cannot end extreme poverty in a poor country. If inequality in Madagascar would be entirely eradicated, then everyone would live on the average income. In Madagascar, this is $1.60 a day. For poor countries, the only way to end poverty is an increase in incomes – economic growth.

The majority of the world is making good progress against poverty, but not all: some of the very poorest economies are stagnating

The history of extreme poverty is, at the same time, one of humanity’s greatest achievements and failures.

The majority of the world left extreme poverty behind. To me, this ranks among the most impressive and most important achievements in humanity’s history.

But, as we’ve seen, the fight against extreme poverty is far from over. Almost one in ten people still live in extreme poverty right now.

The worry with extreme poverty today is that some of the world’s poorest countries are not growing. Unless this changes, hundreds of millions of people will continue to live in extreme poverty.

Crucially this was true before the pandemic hit – even before COVID, researchers expected that half a billion people would remain in extreme poverty by 2030. The global recession that followed the pandemic exacerbated this further.

When it comes to the consequences of climate change , this is what I am most worried about. Richer people will be able to adapt in many ways. It is the extremely poor population that will be hardest hit.

The economic stagnation of some of the world's poorest countries is not as widely known as it should be. I think it deserves more attention. If the stagnation of the very poorest economies persists, we will see a growing divide at the lowest end of the global income distribution. While the living standards of the majority of the world are rising, some of the world’s very poorest people remain in extreme poverty.

Whether or not the poorest countries achieve growth is among the most important questions for the coming years. It will decide whether humanity wins its long fight against extreme poverty or not.

Last updated in 2023

This article was first published on November 22, 2021. It was last updated in August 2023.

For the moment, it is important to note that this $30 per day poverty line is defined in international-$ and therefore comparable with the ‘International Poverty Line’ discussed in the following section. More details about how to compare incomes across countries, the income concept here, and the definition of this poverty line follow further below in this text.

This is possible by relying on the work of the International Comparison Project , which monitors the prices of goods and services around the world.

Angus Deaton and Alan Heston (2010) discuss the methods behind such price adjustments and many of the difficulties and limitations involved.

Deaton, A., and Heston, A. 2010. “Understanding PPPs and PPP-Based National Accounts.” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 2 (4): 1–35. A working paper version is available online here .

Keep in mind that in the special case of the US, the US-$ equals the international-$.

Remember that these statistics take the cost of living into account – a person who lives on less than int-$30 is a person who cannot afford the goods and services that cost US-$30 in the US .

If you want to explore this data for any world region or any individual country, you can do so here .

See also the previous box on poverty measurement. This is, of course, also true of the historical research.

Indeed, there is an argument for using an even lower poverty line. To understand what is happening to the very poorest in the world, we need to look even lower than $2.15. This is because one of the biggest failures of development is that over the last decades, the incomes of the very poorest people have not risen. A big part of the reason for why this issue doesn’t get discussed enough is that the International Poverty Line we rely on is too high to see this fact.

Michail Moatsos (2021) – Global extreme poverty: Present and past since 1820. Published in OECD (2021), How Was Life? Volume II: New Perspectives on Well-being and Global Inequality since 1820 , OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/3d96efc5-en .

The sources for the measures shown in this chart and the following chart are:

Jutta Bolt and Jan Luiten van Zanden (2021) – The GDP data in the chart is taken from The long view on economic growth: New estimates of GDP, How Was Life? Volume II: New Perspectives on Well-being and Global Inequality since 1820 , OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/3d96efc5-en .

The latest datapoint for the poverty data refers to 2018, while the latest datapoint for GDP per capita in the chart below refers to 2016. In that chart, I have chosen the middle year (2017) as the reference year.

The historical poverty research was done by economic historian Michail Moatsos and is based on the ‘cost of basic needs’-approach as suggested by Robert Allen (2017) and recommended by the late Tony Atkinson.

The ‘cost of basic needs’-approach was recommended by the ‘World Bank Commission on Global Poverty’, headed by Tony Atkinson, as a complementary method in measuring poverty. The report for the ‘World Bank Commission on Global Poverty’ can be found here .

Tony Atkinson – and after his death, his colleagues – turned this report into a book that was published as Anthony B. Atkinson (2019) – Measuring Poverty around the World. You find more information on Atkinson’s website .

The CBN-approach Moatsos’ work is based on was suggested by Allen in Robert Allen (2017) – Absolute poverty: When necessity displaces desire. In American Economic Review, Vol. 107/12, pp. 3690-3721, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20161080

Moatsos describes the methodology as follows: “In this approach, poverty lines are calculated for every year and country separately, rather than using a single global line. The second step is to gather the necessary data to operationalize this approach, alongside imputation methods in cases where not all the necessary data are available. The third step is to devise a method for aggregating countries’ poverty estimates on a global scale to account for countries that lack some of the relevant data.” In his publication – linked above – you find much more detail on all of the shown poverty data.

The speed at which extreme poverty declined increased over time, as the chart shows. Moatsos writes, “It took 136 years from 1820 for our global poverty rate to fall under 50%, then another 45 years to cut this rate in half again by 2001. In the early 21st century, global poverty reduction accelerated, and in 13 years, our global measure of extreme poverty was halved again by 2014.”

Parts of Western Europe and the US had already achieved some growth in the decades before this chart begins so that the share in poverty had already fallen, but even in 1820 the majority was still living in extreme poverty there

In the centuries and millennia before, no region in the world had achieved sustained economic growth (see, for example, my post on the Malthusian Trap and links therein). The chart here focuses on the very exceptional two last centuries when economic growth reduced widespread poverty.

You can explore related data in detail in this chart for growth measured as GDP per capita and in our Poverty Data Explorer .

The data shown in the small plots of the income distribution in the UK and Madagascar is again taken from PovcalNet – the predecessor to the World Bank's Poverty and Inequality Platform – Gapminder, and Michail Moatsos 2021.

Cite this work

Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as:

BibTeX citation

Reuse this work freely

All visualizations, data, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license . You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. We will always indicate the original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution.

All of our charts can be embedded in any site.

Our World in Data is free and accessible for everyone.

Help us do this work by making a donation.

Using technology to fight poverty

Born in a seas classroom, upsolve is now helping low-income families erase debt at scale.

A nonprofit startup that offers a free, self-service software tool that helps people file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy has relieved more than $300 million in debt for low-income families who have used it. The nonprofit, Upsolve , named one of the best inventions of 2020 by Time magazine, has reached more than two million low-income households in the U.S. through its free educational resources, community, and financial technology.

Now poised for rapid growth, the startup traces its beginnings to a classroom at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) .

Co-founder Rohan Pavuluri, A.B. ’18, a statistics concentrator (who was recently named to the Time100 Next list of individuals who are shaping the future of their fields) began working on Upsolve in Startup R&D (ES 95r) , taught by Paul Bottino , Executive Director of Innovation Education at SEAS .

“Harvard University is one of the best incubators in the world, especially if you are trying to tackle the world’s most pressing problems,” said Pavuluri. “I think a little bit of every facet of the University played a role in Upsolve.”

Pavuluri was inspired to launch Upsolve while conducting research in the Harvard Law School Access for Justice Lab with Jim Greiner , The Honorable S. William Green Professor of Public Law.

Pavuluri was creating self-help packets for people to solve their own legal problems, and started working on a packet related to bankruptcy. Pavuluri learned that, to file for bankruptcy , an individual must pay an average of $1,500 for a bankruptcy lawyer.

“When you need to file for bankruptcy because you have an illness or a job loss and you need to get back on your feet, there’s no way you can afford $1,500 for a lawyer. So there is this civil rights injustice that wasn’t part of our national consciousness in a way that I thought it needed to be,” he said. “And that just made me really, really angry.”

That anger inspired Pavuluri to act. He had enrolled in ES95r , but the original startup idea he had brought to the class wasn’t working out. The course gives students the opportunity to work on any startup idea during class time, with mentorship from seasoned entrepreneurs. Pavuluri began exploring how technology could help address the civil rights issue of bankruptcy at scale.

The guidance of Bottino and the support from an entire community of student founders gave Pavuluri the skills and the boost he needed to get started.

“There’s no way Upsolve would exist if it wasn’t for ES95r ,” he said. “You have this engineering school with all the different parts of engineering, but you walk a few blocks and you’re at the law school, and you can apply those engineering skills to legal problems. That proximity to so many different fields and so much exploration, I don’t think that exists anywhere else in the world like it does at Harvard.”

While he was learning about entrepreneurship in ES95r , Pavuluri was also taking “Innovations in Government,” a Harvard Kennedy School course where he learned to rapidly prototype a basic solution to a complex social problem to determine if it is feasible.

Upsolve passed that litmus test.

As he built momentum, Pavuluri received additional votes of confidence, and critical seed funding, through University startup competitions the i3 Innovation Challenge (sponsored by the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at SEAS) and the President’s Innovation Challenge (sponsored by the Harvard Innovation Labs ). He also received grants from the Law and Kennedy schools—in total, more than $200,000 in seed funding to make his idea a reality.

The startup began in 2017 as a bare-bones, online form that, in its first two years, helped a few dozen people in New York file for bankruptcy. But as Pavuluri used the skills he learned at Harvard and the funding provided by the University to scale up, things began taking off.

Upsolve grew into an entire educational platform, online community, and set of sleek, self-service software tools that help people determine whether filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy is the right move for them. If so, the tools walk them through the process in a streamlined and simplified way.

“Chapter 7 bankruptcy allows you to rebuild your credit and re-enter the economy. So it is this really powerful tool that helps folks get back on their feet,” he said. “Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t know about it, and the people who do know about it are scared. Our goal is to make this tool more accessible for people who are deeply in need.”

Making bankruptcy more accessible could mean changing the culture in the U.S. legal system. For corporations, bankruptcy is typically viewed simply as a legal tool to navigate unfortunate market circumstances, yet when individuals file for bankruptcy, society often considers it a moral failing ; this is a misconception that continues to serve the wealthy and powerful, Pavuluri said.

“The thesis behind Upsolve is that modern-day legal fees in so many areas of poverty law are like poll taxes. Poll taxes used to stop you from accessing your basic civil rights with voting,” he said. “Today, that idea still exists. If you can’t afford legal fees, you can’t afford your rights. And that needs to change.”

Pavuluri expects the need for bankruptcy to expand dramatically as the economy recovers and Americans who have lost jobs due to COVID-19 begin to rebuild their finances. Of those who are currently filing using Upsolve, more than a third are doing so because of a financial shock related to COVID-19.

While Upsolve is well-positioned to help millions more file for bankruptcy, Pavuluri isn’t content to stop there. He plans to continue growing the startup to help low-income families facing a host of financial problems, taking on a legal establishment that he believes is often stacked against those most in need of help.

“It is so fun to be able to work on a serious issue that I care about and that I consider my calling, and at the same time, to be able to build and be creative every day,” he said. “To apply creative solutions to important issues of inequity in our economy and legal system and be able to have this impact at scale has been so fulfilling, enjoyable, and meaningful to me.”

Topics: Alumni , Entrepreneurship

Cutting-edge science delivered direct to your inbox.

Join the Harvard SEAS mailing list.

Related News

Three SEAS ventures take top prizes at President’s Innovation Challenge

Start-ups in emergency medicine, older adult care and quantum sensing all take home $75,000

Applied Physics , Awards , Computer Science , Entrepreneurship , Health / Medicine , Industry , Master of Design Engineering , Materials Science & Mechanical Engineering , MS/MBA , Quantum Engineering

Seven SEAS teams named President’s Innovation Challenge finalists

Start-ups will vie for up to $75,000 in prize money

Computer Science , Design , Electrical Engineering , Entrepreneurship , Events , Master of Design Engineering , Materials Science & Mechanical Engineering , MS/MBA

Alumni profile: Raquel Schreiber, S.B. '15, MS/MBA '21

Using AI to help regenerate the earth

Alumni , Entrepreneurship , Environmental Science & Engineering , MS/MBA

Poverty: Causes and Solutions to Problem

Introduction, the causes of poverty, inclusive economic growth as an answer to poverty, employment opportunities and entrepreneurship.

Poverty is a global economic and social problem that has persisted throughout the centuries. Attempts to establish the causes of poverty and the solutions to the issue have been made since the emergence of early civilizations. Despite the significant drop in the numbers of the extremely poor in the past few decades, particularly in developing countries, poverty remains one of the most serious challenges to governments worldwide. Economic growth can help alleviate many issues that cause poverty. Creating new jobs and improving universal access to education and medical care can considerably enhance the quality of life for low-income households. However, the research proves that economic development benefits the deprived groups only when governments implement targeted socio-economic policies and keep track of their efficiency.

There are multiple theories that try to establish the causes of poverty. Some of those explain it using solely economic models; others consider social factors as well. The first kind focuses on how low per capita income creates intergenerational poverty caused by inadequate access to education and health care (Sabah et al., 2017). However, these theories are somewhat limited, as, for example, in countries lacking quality education and health care, higher income does not necessarily guarantee a better life. Other theories point out the significance of social (ethnic, gender, religious) disparities as a limiting factor, especially in developing countries (Sabah et al., 2017). Several studies have established the relation between poverty and the size of the household. Islam et al. (2016) note that households with more than five members, a young head of the family, and female-headed households are the most vulnerable. Overall, most scholars agree that poverty is defined by limited access to vital resources. It is a complex phenomenon caused by a multitude of economic, political, and social factors, which requires a holistic approach in its analysis.

Numerous scholars have questioned the impact of economic growth on poverty levels over the last few decades. However, multiple studies prove that the economic boom at the end of the 20th century helped resolve long-standing poverty issues in developing countries. Khan et al. (2019) state that “economic growth at macro-level consequent better health services and improved quality of education, whereas at micro-level it consequent increased individual’s income and provided employment opportunities, thereby reducing poverty” (p. 769). Fosu (2017) attributes the significant change in poverty levels in Latin American and Asian countries in the last quarter of the 20th century to high GDP growth. However, GDP growth is not necessarily indicative of lower poverty rates. Fosu (2017) notes that “income is generally a better reflector of poverty than GDP is” (p. 313). According to Škare and Družeta (2016), economic growth in China and India resulted in a significant increase in per capita income, despite soaring income inequalities. While the perception of the relation between economic development and lower poverty levels has evolved significantly throughout the last decades, most researchers agree that growth is essential to fighting poverty.

Nevertheless, income inequality is a major factor that can reduce the positive impact of a healthy economy. Fosu (2017) states that income disparities in Botswana have persisted despite rapid GDP growth, while lesser progress in the Ghanaian economy had a more significant impact on poverty levels. Corruption is another factor that can hinder the positive effect of growth. Niyimbanira (2017) notes that in many African countries, economic development primarily benefited the elites and did not change much for low-income households. Škare and Družeta (2016) conclude that the original “trickle-down” theory of the post-war period, which implies that a healthy economy guarantees lower poverty levels, needs serious reconsideration. The latest research shows that while economic growth is essential in order to alleviate poverty, its impact can vary significantly depending on other social and political factors. Therefore, it should be used to implement social policies and make investments in jobs, education, and health sectors that target the most deprived and vulnerable groups.

Economic development contributes to the creation of new jobs, which can significantly reduce poverty levels. Nguyen (2016) states that “there is a positive relationship between high unemployment and widespread poverty” (p. 115). Therefore, the reduction of unemployment rates should be one of the governments’ main priorities in developing countries. Nguyen (2016) observers that the Caribbean states with a high focus on human capital have been far more successful in handling the poverty issue than other countries in the region. Niyimbanira (2017) underpins the significance of creating job opportunities that can provide a decent stable income for unemployed youth. Along with job creation, increasing the minimum wage is crucial to reduce poverty in developing countries (Niyimbanira, 2017). The poor are often inclined to accept any job offers, even those that do not provide sufficient income (Ramadhani & Putra, 2019). However, it is important to notice that in countries where a significant fraction of the labor force is employed unofficially, raising the minimum wage will not change much (Ramadhani & Putra, 2019). Overall, sustainable job creation is arguably the most important tool in eliminating poverty.

In developed countries, policymakers often emphasize the crucial role of entrepreneurship in fighting poverty. Lee and Rodriguez-Pose (2020) note that “rapid growth forces firms to be more inclusive when hiring” (para. 9). However, as previously noted, lower unemployment does not guarantee a reduction in poverty levels, and the impact of entrepreneurship on the poor has to be studied in more detail. Lee and Rodriguez-Pose (2020) state that only entrepreneurship in tradable sectors contributes to reducing poverty. Thus, governments should prioritize investment in manufacturing, financial services, and research and development as entrepreneurship in these sectors might be of the greatest benefit to low-income families.

Education is another key factor that impacts average income growth. Ramadhani and Putra (2019) state that insufficient education limits one’s job opportunities and reduces potential income. Economic development can be used to improve access to high-quality education for the poor and increase their employment opportunities. Niyimbanira (2017) argues that low skills and the absence of decent education are the driving forces of unemployment and poverty in developing countries. For example, in South Sudan, over 80 percent of the earners in low-income households have no formal education (Shimeles & Verdier-Chouchane, 2016). However, despite the importance of universal primary education, poor families in African countries are often reluctant to send their children to school. According to Shimeles and Verdier-Chouchane (2016), “low returns to primary education reduce incentives for households to send children to school, thereby limiting the poverty mitigating scope of primary education” (p. 168). Targeted income subsidies for primary education could solve this problem (Shimeles & Verdier-Chouchane, 2016). However, to implement these initiatives, stable economic growth is required.

Higher education plays an equally important role in alleviating poverty. In the 2000s, Surin and Si-Saket provinces in northeastern Thailand have shown significant GDP per capita growth; however, only Surin managed to significantly reduce poverty levels (Moore & Donaldson, 2016). The success of the policies implemented in Surin was largely a result of well-educated local youth engagement in NGOs that offered support to local farmers and prevented the implementation of harmful initiatives (Moore & Donaldson, 2016). This case shows how economic growth can contribute to reducing poverty through better education, and how quality education, in turn, can lead to economic growth.

Ensuring universal access to medical care is a measure that can significantly improve the quality of life for the most marginalized groups. The inefficiency of the healthcare industry remains one of the most pressing issues in African countries. Health issues decrease individuals’ chances of getting well- paid jobs and contribute to poverty. Bawah et al. (2019) cite the Community Health and Family Planning Project (CHPS) as an example of a successful policy that addresses poverty issues in Ghana. The study confirms that qualified professionals in rural communities helped lower child mortality rates and decrease health issues among the populace (Bawah et al., 2019). Providing access to quality medical care, in this case, helped reduce the gap between the rich and the poor through decreasing the economic pressure on low-income households.

While poverty is a phenomenon usually associated with developing countries, it remains a pressing issue even in the US. In the developed countries, high costs of medical care can contribute towards higher poverty levels, especially among the minorities (Remler et al., 2017). Implementation of social policies in healthcare in the US is an example of the inclusive economic growth approach that can lead to poverty alleviation. Remler et al. (2017) state that “Medicaid reduced poverty among its recipients by a remarkable 17.1 percentage points” (p. 1834). Overall, the benefits of public health insurance programs have a significant correlation to poverty reduction (Remler et al., 2017). Therefore, in the developed countries, policymakers should seek to implement public programs and premium benefits, as they have proven to be efficient in the fight against poverty.

Poverty alleviation is a complex issue that requires a systematic approach. As the causes of poverty can vary significantly across the globe, empirical research is necessary to find efficient policies in every specific case. While economic growth arguably had a significant impact on poverty levels in less developed regions at the end of the 20th century, the research has proven that an increase in GDP has not benefited the poor in many countries. Numerous examples of inefficient use of political and financial assets in Africa, Latin America, and Asia show that economic development leads to a reduction in poverty only when the governments implement targeted pro-poor policies. Employment and education opportunities, as well as accessible health care for low-income households, should be prioritized. Numerous studies confirm that targeting these areas leads to a significant reduction in poverty levels in the long term, and it helps to close the gap between the poorest and the rich. The most recent research established that inequality has a strong impact on poverty levels. Therefore, it is vital to ensure that low-income households actually benefit from economic growth, and it does not lead to larger income discrepancies instead.

Bawah, A. A., Philips, J. F., Asuming, P. O., Jackson, E. F., Walega, P., Kanmiki, E. W., Sheff, M. C., & Oduro, A. (2019). Does the provision of community health services offset the effects of poverty and low maternal educational attainment on childhood mortality? An analysis of the equity effect of the Navrongo experiment in Northern Ghana . SSM – Population Health, 7.

Fosu, A. K. (2017). Growth, inequality, and poverty reduction in developing countries: Recent global evidence . Research in Economics, 71 (2), 306-336.

Islam, D., Sayeed, J., & Hossain, N. (2016). On determinants of poverty and inequality in Bangladesh . Journal of Poverty, 21 (4), 1-20.

Khan, H. U. R., Nassani, A. A., Aldakil, A. M., Abro, M. M. Q., Islam, T., & Zaman, K. (2019). Pro-poor growth and sustainable development framework: Evidence from two step GMM estimator . Journal of Cleaner Production, 206, 767-784.

Lee, N., & Rodriguez-Pose, A. (2020). Entrepreneurship and the fight against poverty in US cities . Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, preprint.

Moore, J. D., & Donaldson, J. A. (2016). Human-scale economics: Economic growth and poverty reduction in northeastern Thailand. World Development, 85, 1-15. 

Nguyen, H. Q. (2016). Relationship between economic growth, unemployment and poverty: Analysis at provincial level in Vietnam . International Journal of Economics and Finance, 8 (12), 113-119.

Niyimbanira, F. (2017). Analysis of the impact of economic growth on income inequality and poverty in South Africa: The case of Mpumalanga province. International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, 7 (4), 254-261.

Remler, D. K., Korenman, S. D., & Hyson, R. T. (2017). Estimating the effects of health insurance and other social programs on poverty under the Affordable Care Act . Health Affairs, 36 (10), 1828-1837.

Ramadani, F., & Putra, F. S. (2019). Having a job is Not enough to escape poverty: Case of Indonesian working poors. IPTEK Journal of Proceedings Series, 6, 58-64.

Sabah, A, Rusdi, O., & Mohd Udin, M. (2017). Theories of poverty to the integrative theory. A comparative analysis: Accordance to the situation of Iraq . IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 22 (5), 47-50.

Shimeles, A. & Verdier-Chouchane, A. (2016). The key role of education in reducing poverty in South Sudan . African Development Review, 28 (2), 162-176.

Škare, M., & Družeta R. P. (2016). Poverty and economic growth: A review . Technological and Economic Development of Economy, 22 (1), 156-175.

Cite this paper

• Chicago (N-B)
• Chicago (A-D)

StudyCorgi. (2022, April 14). Poverty: Causes and Solutions to Problem. https://studycorgi.com/poverty-causes-and-solutions-to-problem/

"Poverty: Causes and Solutions to Problem." StudyCorgi , 14 Apr. 2022, studycorgi.com/poverty-causes-and-solutions-to-problem/.

StudyCorgi . (2022) 'Poverty: Causes and Solutions to Problem'. 14 April.

1. StudyCorgi . "Poverty: Causes and Solutions to Problem." April 14, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/poverty-causes-and-solutions-to-problem/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "Poverty: Causes and Solutions to Problem." April 14, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/poverty-causes-and-solutions-to-problem/.

StudyCorgi . 2022. "Poverty: Causes and Solutions to Problem." April 14, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/poverty-causes-and-solutions-to-problem/.

This paper, “Poverty: Causes and Solutions to Problem”, was written and voluntary submitted to our free essay database by a straight-A student. Please ensure you properly reference the paper if you're using it to write your assignment.

Before publication, the StudyCorgi editorial team proofread and checked the paper to make sure it meets the highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, fact accuracy, copyright issues, and inclusive language. Last updated: January 11, 2024 .

If you are the author of this paper and no longer wish to have it published on StudyCorgi, request the removal . Please use the “ Donate your paper ” form to submit an essay.

390 Poverty Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

• 📑 Aspects to Cover in a Poverty Essay

Students who learn economics, politics, and social sciences are often required to write a poverty essay as part of their course. While everyone understands the importance of this topic, it can be hard to decide what to write about. Read this post to find out the aspects that you should cover in your essay on poverty.

🏆 Best Poverty Topics & Free Essay Examples

👍 powerful topics on poverty and inequality, 🎓 simple & easy topics related to poverty, 📌 interesting poverty essay examples, ⭐ strong poverty-related topics, 🥇 unique poverty topics for argumentative essay, ❓ research questions about poverty.

Topics related to poverty and inequality might seem too broad. There are so many facts, factors, and aspects you should take into consideration. However, we all know that narrowing down a topic is one of the crucial steps when working on an outline and thesis statement. You should be specific enough to select the right arguments for your argumentative essay or dissertation. Below, you will find some aspects to include in your poverty essay.

Poverty Statistics

First of all, it would be beneficial to include some background information on the issue. Statistics on poverty in your country or state can help you to paint a picture of the problem. Look for official reports on poverty and socioeconomic welfare, which can be found on government websites. While you are writing this section, consider the following:

• What is the overall level of poverty in your country or state?
• Has the prevalence of poverty changed over time? If yes, how and why?
• Are there any groups or communities where poverty is more prevalent than in the general population? What are they?

Causes of Poverty

If you look at poverty essay titles, the causes of poverty are a popular theme among students. While some people may think that poverty occurs because people are lazy and don’t want to work hard, the problem is much more important than that. Research books and scholarly journal articles on the subject with these questions in mind:

• Why do some groups of people experience poverty more often than others?
• What are the historical causes of poverty in your country?
• How is poverty related to other social issues, such as discrimination, immigration, and crime?
• How do businesses promote or reduce poverty in the community?

Consequences of Poverty

Many poverty essay examples also consider the consequences of poverty for individuals and communities. This theme is particularly important if you study social sciences or politics. Here are some questions that may give you ideas for this section:

• How is the psychological well-being of individuals affected by poverty?
• How is poverty connected to crime and substance abuse?
• How does poverty affect individuals’ access to high-quality medical care and education?
• What is the relationship between poverty and world hunger?

Government Policies

Governments of most countries have policies in place to reduce poverty and help those in need. In your essay, you may address the policies used in your state or country or compare several different governments in terms of their approaches to poverty. Here is what you should think about:

• What are some examples of legislation aimed at reducing poverty?
• Do laws on minimum wage help to prevent and decrease poverty? Why or why not?
• How do governments help people who are poor to achieve higher levels of social welfare?
• Should governments provide financial assistance to those in need? Why or why not?

Solutions to Poverty

Solutions to poverty are among the most popular poverty essay topics, and you will surely find many sample papers and articles on this subject. This is because poverty is a global issue that must be solved to facilitate social development. Considering these questions in your poverty essay conclusion or main body will help you in getting an A:

• What programs or policies proved to be effective in reducing poverty locally?
• Is there a global solution to poverty that would be equally effective in all countries?
• How can society facilitate the reduction of poverty?
• What solutions would you recommend to decrease and prevent poverty?

Covering a few of these aspects in your essay will help you demonstrate the in-depth understanding and analysis required to earn a high mark. Before you start writing, have a look around our website for more essay titles, tips, and interesting topics!

• Poverty Research Proposal To justify this, the recent and most current statistics from the Census Bureau shows that the level and rate of poverty in USA is increasing, with minority ethnic groups being the most disadvantaged.
• Wordsworth’s Vision of Childhood in His Poems “We Are Seven” and “Alice Fell or Poverty” Specifically, the joint publication he released in 1798 known as “Lyrical Ballads” are considered the most important publications in the rise of the Romantic literature in the UK and Europe.
• Poverty: A Sociological Imagination Perspective I was raised in a nuclear family, where my mum was a housewife, and my father worked in a local hog farm as the overall manager.
• “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” by Peter Singer The article “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” by author Peter Singer attempts to provide a workable solution to the world poverty problem.
• Poverty in the World In this paper, we will be looking at the situation of poverty in the world, its causes and the efforts of the international organizations to manage the same.
• The Philippines’ Unemployment, Inequality, Poverty However, despite the strong emphasis of the government on income equality and poverty reduction along with the growth of GDP, both poverty and economic and social inequality remain persistent in the Philippines.
• The End of Poverty Philippe Diaz’s documentary, The End of Poverty, is a piece that attempts to dissect the causes of the huge economic inequalities that exist between countries in the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.
• Poverty in India and China India’s slow rate of poverty reduction compared to China is due to the differences in their approach to the economy. Improving the living conditions and general well being of the people is not only the […]
• Poverty in Africa These pictures have been published online to show the world the gravity of the poverty situation in the African continent. The pictures represent the suffering of majority of the African people as a result of […]
• Poverty Areas and Effects on Juvenile Delinquency The desire to live a better life contributes to the youths engaging in crimes, thus the increase in cases of juvenile delinquencies amid low-income families. The studies indicate that the fear of poverty is the […]
• Poverty Effects on Child Development and Schooling To help children from low-income families cope with poverty, interventions touching in the child’s development and educational outcomes are essential. Those programs campaign against the effects of poverty among children by providing basic nutritional, academic, […]
• Max Weber’s Thoughts on Poverty Weber has contributed to the exploration of the origins of poverty and the impact of religions on the attitude to it.
• Analysis of Theodore Dalrymple’s “What Is Poverty?” With ethical arguments from Burnor, it can be argued that Dalrymple’s statements are shallow and based on his values and not the experience of those he is judging.
• The Singer Solution to World Poverty: Arguments Against The article compares the lives of people in the developed world represented by America and that of developing world represented by Brazil; It is about a school teacher who sells a young boy for adoption […]
• What Causes Poverty in the World One of the major factors that have contributed to poverty in given areas of the world is overpopulation. Environmental degradation in many parts of the world has led to the increase of poverty in the […]
• Poverty and the Environment The human population affects the environment negatively due to poverty resulting to environmental degradation and a cycle of poverty. Poverty and the environment are interlinked as poverty leads to degradation of the environment.
• Community Work: Helping People in Poverty The first project would be water project since you find that in most villages water is a problem, hence $100 would go to establishing this project and it’s out of these water then the women […]
• Relationship Between Crime Rates and Poverty This shows that the strength of the relationship between the crime index and people living below the line of poverty is.427.
• Children Living in Poverty and Education The presence of real subjects like children is a benefit for the future of the nation and a free education option for poor families to learn something new and even use it if their children […]
• Is Poverty a Choice or a Generational Curse? The assumption that poverty is a choice persists in public attitudes and allows policy-makers to absolve themselves of any responsibility for ensuring the well-being of the lower socioeconomic stratum of society.
• Poverty and Global Food Crisis: Food and Agriculture Model Her innovative approach to the issue was to measure food shortages in calories as opposed to the traditional method of measuring in pounds and stones.
• Cause and Effect of Poverty For example, the disparities in income and wealth are considered as a sign of poverty since the state is related to issues of scarcity and allocation of resources and influence.
• The Problem of Poverty in Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” To see the situation from the perspective of its social significance, it is necessary to refer to Mills’ concept of sociological imagination and to the division of problems and issues into personal and social ones.
• Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Development The research focuses on the causes of poverty and the benefits of poverty alleviation in achieving sustainable development. One of the causes of poverty is discrimination and social inequality.
• Poverty Simulation Reflection and Its Influence on Life Something that stood out to me during the process is probably the tremendous emotional and psychological impact of poverty on a person’s wellbeing.
• The Connection Between Poverty and Mental Health Problems The daily struggle to earn a daily bread takes a toll on an individual mental health and contributes to mental health problem.
• Third World Countries and the Barriers Stopping Them to Escape Poverty The phrase Third World was initially used in the Cold War period to represent those countries that were neither on the West NATO nations referred to as the first world countries, nor on the East-Communist […]
• Consumerism: Affecting Families Living in Poverty in the United States Hence, leading to the arising of consumerism protection acts and policies designed to protect consumers from dishonest sellers and producers, which indicates the high degree of consumer’s ignorance, and hence failure to make decisions of […]
• Global Poverty: Famine, Affluence, and Morality In the article Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Michael Slote contends that rich people have a moral obligation to contribute more to charities.
• Poverty in Bambara’s The Lesson and Danticat’s A Wall of Fire Rising It is important to note the fact that culture-based poverty due to discrimination of the past or political ineffectiveness of the nation can have a profound ramification in the lives of its victims.
• Environmental Degradation and Poverty It is however important to understand the causes of the environmental degradation and the ways to reduce them, which will promote the improvement of the environmental quality.
• Poverty in Urban Areas The main reason for escalation of the problem of poverty is urban areas is because the intricate problems of urban poverty are considered too small to attract big policies.
• Health, Poverty, and Social Equity: The Global Response to the Ebola Outbreak Canada and Australia, as well as several countries in the Middle East and Africa, were the most active proponents of this ban, halting the movements for both people and goods from states affected by the […]
• Poverty and Diseases A usual line of reasoning would be that low income is the main cause of health-related problems among vulnerable individuals. Such results that the relationship between mental health and poverty is, in fact, straightforward.
• “The End of Poverty” by Phillipe Diaz In the film End of Poverty, the filmmaker tries to unravel the mystery behind poverty in the world. The film is arranged in such a way that the author has persuasively argued his case that […]
• Social Issues of Families in Poverty With the tightened budget, parents of the families living in poverty struggle to make ends meet, and in the course of their struggles, they experience many stresses and depressions.
• We Can Stop Poverty in Ghana Today One of the main disadvantages of the document is that the problem of poverty is not considered separately, but only as a part of other economic and social problems.
• Poverty in Rural and Urban Areas My main focus is on articles explaining the sources of poverty in rural and urban areas and the key difference between the two.
• Reflective Analysis of Poverty It can be further classified into absolute poverty where the affected do not have the capability to make ends meet, and relative poverty which refer to the circumstances under which the afflicted do not have […]
• Poverty Through a Sociological Lens Poverty-stricken areas, such as slums, rural villages, and places hit by disasters, lack the required economic activities to improve the employment and wealth status of the people.
• Global Poverty: The Ethical Dilemma Unfortunately, a significant obstacle to such global reforms is that many economic systems are based on the concept of inequality and exploitation.
• Concept of Poverty The main difference between this definition and other definitions of poverty highlighted in this paper is the broad understanding of the concept.
• Social Issues; Crime and Poverty in Camden This has threatened the social security and peaceful coexistence of the people in the community. The larger the differences between the poor and the rich, the high are the chances of crime.
• The Myth of the Culture of Poverty Unfortunately, rather all of the stereotypes regarding poor people are widespread in many societies and this has served to further increase the problem of generational poverty. Poor people are regarded to be in the state […]
• Dependency Theory and “The End of Poverty?” It is also reflected in the film “The End of Poverty?” narrating the circumstances of poor countries and their precondition. It started at the end of the fifteenth century and marked the beginning of the […]
• Poverty, Government and Unequal Distribution of Wealth in Philippines The author of the book Poverty And The Critical Security Agenda, Eadie, added: Quantitative analyses of poverty have become more sophisticated over the years to be sure, yet remain problematic and in certain ways rooted […]
• Tourism Contribution to Poverty Reduction Managers usually make targeting errors such as poor delivery of tourism benefits to the poor and accruing tourism benefit to the rich in the society.
• Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? & How to Judge Globalism The article Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality by Robert Hunter Wade explores the phenomenon of globalization and its influence on the poverty and inequality ratios all over the world.
• Analysis of a Social Problem: Poverty Furthermore, the World Bank predicts that both the number of people and the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty will increase in 2020 and 2021 due to the coronavirus outbreak.
• Poverty in Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” The fact that the structure of society is discussed is especially interesting, and it is suggested that opinions of people that live in poverty are not acknowledged most of the time.
• Poverty: $2.00 a Day in America When conversations about the poor occur in the city of Washington, they usually discuss the struggles of the working poor, forgetting about the issues that the non-working poor face day by day.
• Poverty as Capability Deprivation In this paper, the importance of social justice manifests through the understanding of social deprivation, as opposed to the understanding of income levels in the achievement of social justice.
• Poverty in the Bronx: Negative Effects of Poverty South Bronx is strictly the southwestern part of the borough of Bronx and Bronx is the only borough in New York city in the mainland.
• Social Work at Acacia Network: Poverty and Inequality Around the 1980s, the number of older adults was significantly increasing in society; the local government of New York established a home for the aged and was named Acacia Network. The supporting staff may bond […]
• Economic Growth vs. Development: Dreze and Sen’s Analysis The majority of the poor people in the slums and villages use small capital to run their businesses. Good institutions enforce the property rights of the majority in the society, create constraints for the elites, […]
• How Poverty Contributes to Poor Heath The results show that poverty is the main cause of poor health. The study was purposed to assess the effect of poverty in determining the health status of households.
• Global Poverty Project: A Beacon of Hope in the Fight Against Extreme Poverty The organization works with partners worldwide to increase awareness and understanding of global poverty and inspire people to take action to end it.
• The Causes of an Increase in Poverty in Atlanta, Georgia The key causes of the high poverty rise in the city include housing policies and instabilities, the lack of transit services and public transportation infrastructure in suburban areas, and childhood poverty.
• Thistle Farms: Help for Women Who Are Affected by Poverty As I said in the beginning, millions of women need help and assistance from the community to overcome poverty and heal emotional wounds caused by abuse. You can purchase a variety of its home and […]
• Median Household Incomes and Poverty Levels The patterns of poverty in the Denver urban area show that rates are higher in the inner suburb and the core city and lower in the outer suburb.
• Poverty: The American Challenge One of the main problems in the world is the problem of poverty, which means the inability to provide the simplest and most affordable living conditions for most people in a given country.
• The Poverty Issue From a Sociological Perspective The core of the perspective is the idea that poverty is a system in which multiple elements are intertwined and create outcomes linked to financial deficits.
• Saving the Planet by Solving Poverty The data is there to make the necessary links, which are needed when it comes to the economic variations and inadequate environmental impacts of climate change can be distinguished on a worldwide scale.
• Anti-Poverty Programs From the Federal Government The programs provide financial assistance to low-income individuals and families to cover basic needs like housing and food. The anti-poverty programs that have been most effective in reducing poverty rates in the United States are […]
• Rural Development, Economic Inequality and Poverty The percentage of the rural population is lower for developed countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Thus, the objective of the proposal is to determine how the inhabitants of the country in […]
• Global Poverty: Ways of Combating For example, one of such initiatives is social assistance and social protection programs, which ensure the safety and creation of various labor programs that will help increase the number of the working population.
• Poverty and Homelessness as a Global Social Problem What makes the task of defining poverty particularly difficult is the discrepancy in the distribution of social capital and, therefore, the resulting differences in the understanding of what constitutes poverty, particularly, where the line should […]
• Poverty: Aspects of Needs Assessment The target neighborhood and population for the following analysis are women of reproductive age, defined as 15 to 49 years, in Elmhurst and Corona, Queens. 2, and the percentage of births to women aged over […]
• What Is Poverty in the United States? Estimates of the amount of income required to meet necessities serve as the foundation for both the official and supplemental poverty measurements.
• The Caribbean Culture: Energy Security and Poverty Issues Globally, Latin American and the Caribbean also has the most expensive energy products and services because of fuel deprivation in the Caribbean and the Pacific regions.
• Poverty: The Main Causes and Factors Because of the constant process of societal development, the concept of poverty changes rapidly, adapting to the new standards of modern human life.
• How to Overcome Poverty and Discrimination As such, to give a chance to the “defeated” children and save their lives, as Alexie puts it, society itself must change the rules so that everyone can have access to this ticket to success. […]
• Poverty and Homelessness in American Society It is connected with social segregation, stigmatization, and the inability of the person to improve their conditions of life. The problem of affordable housing and poverty among older adults is another problem that leads to […]
• Private Sector’s Role in Poverty Alleviation in Asia The ambition of Asia to become the fastest-growing economic region worldwide has led to a rapid rise of enterprises in the private sector.
• Connection of Poverty and Education The economy of the United States has been improving due to the efforts that have been made to ensure that poverty will not prevent individuals and families from having access to decent education.
• The Opportunity for All Program: Poverty Reduction The limiting factors of the program may be the actions of the population itself, which will not participate in the employment program because of the realized benefits.
• Early Childhood Financial Support and Poverty The mentioned problem is a direct example of such a correlation: the general poverty level and the well-being of adults are connected with the early children’s material support.
• Discussion: Poverty and Healthcare One of the research questions necessary to evaluate this issue is “How do ethical theories apply to the issue?” Another critical research question worth exploring is “Which cultural values and norms influence the problem?” These […]
• Explosive Growth of Poverty in America The three richest Americans now own 250 billion USD, approximately the same amount of combined wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the country. Wealth inequality is a disturbing issue that needs to be at […]
• The Poverty and Education Quality Relationship Although the number of people living under the poverty threshold has decreased in the last 30 years, more than 800,000,000 people still have to live with insufficient money and a lack of food, water, and […]
• The Problems of Poverty and Hunger Subsequently, the cause in this case serves as a path to a solution – more social programs are needed, and wealthy citizens should be encouraged to become beneficiaries for the hungry.
• “Life on a Shoestring – American Kids Living in Poverty” by Claycomb Life on a Shoestring – American Kids Living in Poverty highlights the widening disparity between the poor and the wealthy in America and how the economic systems are set up to benefit the rich and […]
• Decreasing Poverty With College Enrollment Program In order to achieve that, it is necessary, first and foremost, to increase the high school students’ awareness of the financial aid programs, possibilities of dual enrollment, and the overall reality of higher education.
• Reducing Poverty in the North Miami Beach Community The proposed intervention program will focus on the students in the last semester of the 9th and 10th grades and the first semester of the 11th and 12th grades attending the client schools.
• Food Banks Board Members and Cycle of Poverty What this suggests is that a large portion of the leadership within these collectives aim to provide assistance and food but not to challenge the current system that fosters the related issues of poverty, unemployment, […]
• Poverty as a Social Problem in Burundi The rationale for studying poverty as a social problem in Burundi is that it will help to combat poverty through the advocacy plan at the end of this paper.
• Poverty: Subsidizing Programs Subsidizing programs are considered welfare and net initiatives that the government takes to aid low-income families and individuals affected by poverty.
• The Problem of Poverty in Chad Thus, the study of the causes of poverty in the Republic of Chad will help to form a complete understanding of the problem under study and find the most effective ways to solve it.
• “Poverty, Toxic Stress, and Education…” Study by Kelly & Li Kelly and Li are concerned with the lack of research about poverty and toxic stress affecting the neurodevelopment of preterm children.
• Poverty in “A Modest Proposal” by Swift The high number of children born to poor families presents significant problems for a country.”A Modest Proposal” is a satirical essay by Jonathan Swift that proposes a solution to the challenge facing the kingdom.
• Life Below the Poverty Line in the US The major problem with poverty in the US is that the number of people living below the poverty threshold is gradually increasing despite the economic growth of the country. SNAP is not considered to be […]
• The Relationship Between Single-Parent Households and Poverty The given literature review will primarily focus on the theoretical and empirical aspects of the relationship between single-parent households and poverty, as well as the implications of the latter on mental health issues, such as […]
• Aspects of Social Work and Poverty In terms of work principle, both the poor working and the welfare poor have it to varying degrees, but it does not help them much because the only employment available is low paying and leads […]
• Poverty and Its Effect on Adult Health Poverty in the UK is currently above the world average, as more than 18% of the population lives in poverty. In 2020, 7% of the UK population lived in extreme poverty and 11% lived in […]
• Child Poverty in the United States The causes of child poverty in the United States cannot be separated from the grounds of adult poverty. Thus, it is essential to take care of the well-being of children living in poverty.
• Poverty in New York City, and Its Reasons The poverty rate for seniors in New York is twice the poverty rate in the United States. New York City’s blacks and Hispanics have a much higher poverty rate than whites and Asians in the […]
• “The Hidden Reason for Poverty…” by Haugen It is also noteworthy that some groups of people are specifically vulnerable and join the arrays of those living in poverty.
• Juvenile Violent Crime and Children Below Poverty The effect of this trend is that the number of children below poverty will continue to be subjected to the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
• Poverty and Homelessness as Social Problem The qualifications will include a recommendation from the community to ensure that the person is open to help and willing to be involved in the neighborhood of Non-Return.
• Discussion of the Problem of the Poverty To help prevent homelessness for the woman in question and her children, I think it would be essential to provide mental support for her not to turn to alcohol and drugs as a coping mechanism.
• Poverty Effects and How They Are Handled Quality jobs will provide income to the younger people and women in the community. The focus on developing and facilitating small and medium-sized enterprises is a great strategy but more needs to be done in […]
• Feminization of Poverty and Governments’ Role in Solving the Problem However, women form the greatest percentage of the poor, and the problem continues to spread. Furthermore, the public supports available are inaccessible and inadequate to cater for women’s needs.
• Free-Trade Policies and Poverty Level in Bangladesh The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which the end of the quota system and introduction of a free-trade system for the garment industry in Bangladesh has impacted on poverty in […]
• Poverty and Risks Associated With Poverty Adolescents that are at risk of being malnourished can be consulted about the existing programs that provide free food and meals to families in poverty.
• Poverty and Inequality Reduction Strategies Thus, comprehending the causes of poverty and inequalities, understanding the role of globalization, and learning various theoretical arguments can lead to the establishment of appropriate policy recommendations.
• International Aid – Poverty Inc This film, the research on the impact of aid on the states receiving it, and the economic outcomes of such actions suggest that aid is a part of the problem and not a solution to […]
• Poverty Effects on American Children and Adolescents The extent to which poor financial status influences the wellbeing of the young children and adolescents is alarming and needs immediate response from the community.
• Progress and Poverty Book by Henry George George wrote the book following his recognition that poverty is the central puzzle of the 20th century. Thus, George’s allegation is inconsistent with nature because the number of living organisms can increase to the extent […]
• Vicious Circle of Poverty in Brazil The vicious circle of poverty is “a circular constellation of forces that tend to act and react on each other in such a way that the country in poverty maintains its poor state”.
• Global Education as the Key Tool for Addressing the Third World Poverty Issue Global education leads to improvements in the state economy and finances. Global education helps resolve the unemployment problem.
• Poverty, Partner Abuse, and Women’s Mental Health In general, the study aimed at investigating the interaction between poverty and the severity of abuse in women. The research question being studied in this article is how income intersects with partner violence and impacts […]
• America’s Shame: How Can Education Eradicate Poverty The primary focus of the article was global poverty, the flaws in the educational system, as well as the U.S.government’s role in resolving the problem.
• Global Poverty and Ways to Overcome It These are some of the strategies, the subsequent application of which would significantly reduce the level of poverty around the world.
• Poverty and Sex Trafficking: Qualitative Systematic Review The proposed research question is to learn how the phenomenon of poverty is connected to sex trafficking. To investigate the relationship between the phenomenon of poverty and sex trafficking.
• Political Economy: Relationship Between Poverty, Inequality, and Nationalism The prevalence of nationalism leads to changes in the education system, as the government tries to justify the superiority of the country by altering the curriculum.
• End of Extreme Poverty Importantly, the ability to remain the owners of a substantial amount of accumulated wealth is the primary motivation for such individuals.
• Poverty and Inequality in the US Despite the progress of civilization and the establishment of democratic values, in the modern United States, such problems as poverty and inequality persist, which is a significant social gap.
• The Problem of Poverty in the United States The problem of increasing poverty is one of the major political issues in the United States, which became especially agile after the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the difficult economic situation all over […]
• Poverty and Unemployment Due to Increased Taxation The government on its side defended the move while trying to justify the new measures’ benefits, a move that would still not benefit the country.
• Poverty as a Global Social Problem For example, the research shows that Kibera is the largest slum in the country, and this is where many people move to settle after losing hope of getting employed in towns.
• Researching the Problem of Poverty However, the rich people and the rich countries reduce poverty to some extent by providing jobs and markets to the poor, but the help is too little compared to the benefits they get thus accelerating […]
• Poverty, Social Class, and Intersectionality I prefer the structural approach to the issue as I believe the created structures are responsible for the existence of diverse types of oppression.
• Wealth and Poverty: The Christian Teaching on Wealth and Poverty To illustrate the gap between the world’s richest and the world’s poorest, a recent UN publication reported that the wealth of the three richest persons in the world is greater than the combined wealth of […]
• Guns Do Not Kill, Poverty Does It is widely accepted that stricter gun control policies are instrumental in alleviating the problem, as they are supposed to reduce the rate of firearm-related deaths, limiting gun access to individuals at-risk of participating in […]
• Poverty’s Effects on Delinquency The economic status of people determines their social class and the manner in which they get their basic needs. Seeing these things and the kind of life rich people lead motivates the poor to commit […]
• The Criminalization of Poverty in Canada In this regard, with a special focus on Canada, the objective of this essay is to investigate how public policy has transformed alongside the public perception of social welfare reform.
• The Issue of Vicious Circle of Poverty in Brazil The persistence of poverty, regardless of the many shocks that every state receives in the normal course of its survival, raises the feeling that underdevelopment is a condition of equilibrium and that there are pressures […]
• Community Health Needs: Poverty Generally, the higher the level of poverty, the worse the diet, and hence the higher the chances of developing diabetes. Consequently, a considerable disparity in the prevalence of diabetes occurs between communities with high levels […]
• “Poverty, Race, and the Contexts of Achievement” by Maryah Stella Fram et al. The article “Poverty, race, and the contexts of achievement: examining the educational experience of children in the U.S. Multilevel models were then applied in the analyses of how children varied in their reading scores depending […]
• Couple Aims to Fight Poverty, One Village at a Time People are not afraid to risk their own financial savings, their investments, and even life’s safety to help the chosen community and improve the conditions this community has to live under.
• Microeconomic Perspective on Poverty Evolution in Pakistan The periodic spike in poverty levels, notwithstanding economic growth, implies incongruous policy functionality in relation to drivers of poverty and the subsequent failure to improve the indicators.
• The Impact of Poverty on Children Under the Age of 11 The strengths of the Marxist views on poverty are in the structural approach to the problem. Overall, the Marxist theory offers a radical solution to the problem of child poverty.
• Poverty Policy Recommendations Different leaders have considered several policies and initiatives in the past to tackle the problem of poverty and empower more people to lead better lives.
• Poverty Reduction and Natural Assets Therefore, the most efficient way to increase the efficiency of agriculture and reduce its environmental impacts is ensuring the overall economic growth in the relevant region.
• Corporate Social Responsibility & Poverty Alleviation Researchers state that “preventing and managing the negative impacts of the core business on the poor” are essential indicators of the social responsibility of the company.
• Children in Poverty in Kampong Ayer, Brunei Part of the reason is likely malnutrition that results from the eating or consumption patterns of the families and also dependency on the children to help out with the family or house chores.
• Health, Poverty, and Social Equity: Indigenous Peoples of Canada Another problem that much of northern Canada’s Indigenous Peoples face is the availability of healthcare services and people’s inability to access medical help.
• The Problem of Childhood Poverty Unequal income distribution, adult poverty, government policies that exclude children and premature pregnancy are some of the items from the long list of childhood poverty causes. Before discussing the causes and effects of childhood poverty, […]
• Individualistic Concepts and Structural Views on Poverty in American Society The concepts presented in the book Poverty and power help to better understand the content of the article and the reasons for such a different attitude of people to the same problem.
• Poor Kids: The Impact of Poverty on Youth Nevertheless, the environment of constant limitations shapes the minds of children, their dreams and the paths they pursue in life, and, most importantly, what they make of themselves.
• Poverty: Causes and Effects on the Population and Country Thesis: There are a great number of factors and issues that lead a certain part of the population to live in poverty and the input that such great numbers of people could provide, would be […]
• The Internet and Poverty in Society The information that can be found on the web is a very useful resource but at the same time it is important to consider several things with the treatment and examination of the presented information.
• Poverty in Africa: Impact of the Economy Growth Rate Thus, a conclusion can be made that economic growth in Africa will result in the social stability of the local population.
• Poverty and Disrespect in “Coming of Age in Mississippi” by Anne Moody Life was not fair to a little Anne the chapters about her childhood are alike to a chain of unfortunate events that happened to her and her relatives.
• Vietnam’s Economic Growth and Poverty & Inequality A significant part of the population was active in employment, and this means that the numerous income-generating activities improved the economy of this country.
• Poverty and Disasters in the United States Focusing on the precaution measures and the drilling techniques that will help survive in case of a natural disaster is one of the most common tools for securing the population.
• Intro to Sociology: Poverty It is challenging to pinpoint the actual and not mythological reasons for the presence of poverty in America. The former can be summed up as a “culture of poverty”, which suggests that the poor see […]
• The Notion of “Poverty” Is a Key Word of a Modern Society As far as the countries of the Third World are deprived of these possibilities, their development is hampered and the problem of poverty has become a chronic disease of the society.
• The Problem of Poverty in Africa The major aim of the study is to identify the causes of poverty and propose best strategies that can help Africans come out of poverty.
• Poverty Sustainability in Sub-Saharan Countries: The Role of NGOs The position of research and statistics in undertaking social-counting work is not queried. It is after the research method is used in other tribulations of the charity that gaps emerge between management and research.
• The Effects of Poverty Within Criminal Justice The approach used in this study is deductive since the reasoning in the study proceeds from the general principle regarding the fact that poverty has a role to play in the administering of fairness in […]
• The Poverty Rates in the USA Poverty in the U. Officially the rate of poverty was at14.3%.
• Poverty in America: A Paradox Many people especially the young people living in other countries and more so in developed countries wish to immigrate to America instead of working hard to achieve the dream of better opportunities.
• Values and Ethics: Poverty in Canada The case study1 has indicated for instance, that the number of people living in poverty in 2003 is at 4. A group of individuals would therefore be granted the mandate to lead the others in […]
• War and Poverty Connection in Developing Countries The scholars claim that conflict and war in most nations have been found to exacerbate the rate of poverty in the affected nations.
• Poverty in United States. Facts and Causes Schwartz carried out a research which showed that in the United States, about 13-17|% of the individuals live below the federal poverty line at any one single time and poverty is one of the main […]
• Cultures and Prejudice: Poverty Factors For instance, if the two cultures had in the past interacted in a negative way, the poor culture directs all the blame to the well up culture.
• Poverty and Criminal Behavoiur Relation The level of accuracy that the data collected holds cannot be 100%; there is a level of error that affects the reliability of the data collected.
• Urban Relationship Between Poverty and Crime The areas with high poverty level in the US urban areas have the highest cases of crime but this is inadequate to justify that poverty is the cause of crime.
• The End of Poverty Possibility He presents the difficulty as in inability of each poor country to get to the base rung of the ranking of economic progress if the rank is achieved; a country can drag itself up towards […]
• Poverty, Suburban Public School Violence and Solution
• Social and Economic Policy Program: Globalization, Growth, and Poverty
• Is Poverty From Developing Countries Imagined?
• How Gender and Race Structure Poverty and Inequality Connected?
• Poverty by Anarchism and Marxism Approaches
• Colonial Economy of America: Poverty, Slavery and Rich Plantations
• Poverty as a Great Social Problem and Its Causes
• Environmental Deterioration and Poverty in Kenya
• Management Issues: The Poverty Business
• Marginalization and Poverty of Rural Women
• Pockets of Poverty Mar the Great Promise of Canada
• Poverty. “How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis
• The Underclass Poverty and Associated Social Problems
• Child Poverty in Toronto, Ontario
• Children’s Brain Function Affected by Poverty
• Poverty Issue in America Review
• Microeconomics. Poverty in America
• Poverty and Inequality in Modern World
• Poverty and Its Effects on Females
• Poverty and Its Effects on Women
• Poverty of America: Economic Assumptions
• Poverty as a General Problem
• Feminization of Poverty – A Grave Social Concern
• Global Poverty Dimensions and Alleviating Approaches
• Poverty Level in any Country
• Theories of Fertility. Economics Aspect and Poverty.
• The Cultural Construction of Poverty
• Poverty in the US: Causes and Measures
• Poverty Rates Issue in Alberta Analysis
• “Old Age Poverty” Study by Kwan & Walsh
• Phenomena of Poverty Review
• Development Economics: Poverty Traps in Africa
• Healthcare Development. Poverty in the 1800s
• Social Problem of Poverty in the United States
• Poverty and Hip-Hop: Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy”
• Globalization Issues and Impact on Poverty and Free Trade
• Anthropology: Culture of Poverty
• Poverty, Stratification and Gender Discrimination
• Teen Pregnancy Can Lead to Suicide and Poverty
• Poverty Around the World
• Poverty in Los Angeles
• “Rethinking the Sociological Measurement of Poverty” by Brady
• Poverty in the US: Essentials of Sociology
• Econometrics: Poverty, Unemployment, Household Income
• Religious Quotes on Poverty and Their Interpretations
• Poverty and Inequality in “Rich and Poor” by Peter Singer
• The Relation Between Poverty and Justice
• Canada and the Imposition of Poverty
• Poverty and Politics in “The Bottom Billion” by Collier
• The Impact of Poverty in African American Communities
• “Poverty and Joy: The Franciscan Tradition” by Short
• International Financial Institutions’ Poverty Reduction Strategy
• Social Study: Mamelodi Residents Living in Poverty
• Video Volunteers’ Interventions Against Poverty
• Poverty in American Single-Parent Families
• Single-Mother Poverty and Policies in the United States
• Poverty and Its Aspects in Historical Documents
• Poverty and Its Relative Definitions
• Poverty in America: An Ethical Dilemma
• Child Poverty and Academic Achievement Association
• Poverty as a Factor of Terrorist Recruitment
• Poverty Solution as a Political Issue in Australia
• Poverty: An Echo of Capitalism
• Poverty, Inequality and Social Policy Understanding
• Breastfeeding Impact on Canadian Poverty Gaps
• Urban and Suburban Poverty in the United States
• Inequality and Poverty Relationship
• Poverty and Child Health in the US and the UK
• Poverty Impact on Life Perception
• Energy Poverty Elimination in Developing Countries
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
• Vietnamese Poverty and Productivity Increase
• Global Health Governance and Poverty
• Poverty Rates Among Whites and Blacks Americans
• Culture of Poverty in the “Park Avenue” Documentary
• Poverty in the US
• Poor Economics and Global Poverty
• Poverty as a Cause of the Sudanese Civil War
• “Halving Global Poverty” by Besley and Burges
• Do Poverty Traps Exist? Assessing the Evidence
• Poverty Reasons in Ancient Times and Nowadays
• American War on Poverty Throughout US History
• Poverty and Challenges in Finding Solutions
• Children and Poverty in “Born into Brothels” Documentary
• Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States
• Poverty in “A Theology of Liberation” by Gutierrez
• Poverty Reduction Among American Single Mothers
• The Relationship Between Poverty and Education
• Divorce Outcomes: Poverty and Instability
• African Poverty at the Millennium: Causes and Challenges
• Poverty Effect on Children
• Poverty and Education: School Funding Reinforces Inequality
• Global Poverty and the Endeavors of Addressing It
• Global Poverty Reduction: Economic Policy Recommendation
• Global Conflict and Poverty Crisis
• Poverty in the Novel “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk
• The Rise of Poverty in the US
• Profit From Organizing Tours to Poverty Areas
• Detroit Poverty and “Focus Hope” Organization
• Poverty Controversy in the USA
• Poverty as the Deprivation of Capabilities
• Suburbanisation of Poverty in the USA
• The Solution to World Poverty by Peter Singer
• The Poverty Across the US Culture
• How Racial Segregation Contributes to Minority’s Poverty?
• Catholic Dealing With Poverty and Homelessness
• Human Capital and Poverty in Scottsdale
• Global Poverty Studies and Their Importance
• The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform
• Challenges of Social Integration: Poverty
• Globalization and the Issue of Poverty: Making the World a Better Place
• The Economic Effect of Issuing Food Stamps to Those in Poverty
• Business and Pollution Inequality in Poor States
• “Facing Poverty With a Rich Girl’s Habits” by Suki Kim
• What Should You Do? Poverty Issue
• Causes of Poverty Traps in an Economy, Its Results and Ways of Avoiding Them
• Millennium Development Goals – Energy and Poverty Solutions
• Sociological Indicators of Energy Poverty
• Energy and Poverty Solutions – Non-Traditional Cookstoves
• Energy and Poverty Solutions – World Bank
• How do Migration and Urbanization Bring About Urban Poverty in Developing Countries?
• Poverty and Domestic Violence
• The Rise of Extremist Groups, Disparity and Poverty
• Measuring Poverty and Social Exclusion in Australia
• Does Poverty Lead to Terrorism?
• “Urban and Rural Estimates of Poverty: Recent Advances in Spatial Microsimulation in Australia” by Tanton, R, Harding, A, and McNamara, J
• Importance of Foreign Aid in Poverty Reducing
• Hispanic Childhood Poverty in the United States
• How Poverty Affects Children Development?
• Why Is Poverty Important in Contemporary Security Studies?
• Millennium Development Goals in Kenya, Ivory Coast, Haiti, and Chad
• Development Is No Longer the Solution to Poverty
• Issues Underlying Global Poverty and Provision of Aid
• Films Comparison: “The Fields” by Roland Joffe and “Hotel Rwanda” by Terry George
• Poverty Prevalence in the United States
• Terrorism, Poverty and Financial Instability
• Global Poverty and Education
• Critical Analyses of the Climate of Fear Report From Southern Poverty Law Center
• How World Vision International Contributes to Poverty Reduction
• Global Poverty, Social Poverty and Education
• Global Poverty, Social Policy, and Education
• Poverty Reduction in Africa, Central America and Asia
• Does Parental Involvement and Poverty Affect Children’s Education and Their Overall Performance?
• African Poverty: To Aid, or Not to Aid
• Poverty Fighting in Saudi Arabia and in USA
• Technological Development in Trade and Its Impacts on Poverty
• Poverty and Development Into the 21st Century
• Social Dynamics: The Southern Poverty Law Centre
• Property, Urban Poverty and Spatial Marginalization
• Rural Poverty in Indonesia
• Is Poverty of Poor Countries in Anyway Due to Wealth of the Rich?
• Poverty and Gender Violence in Congo
• Correlation Between Poverty and Obesity
• Fight Poverty, Fight Illiteracy in Mississippi Initiative
• Civil War and Poverty: “The Bottom Billion” by Paul Collier
• Analytical Research: Poverty in Thailand: Peculiarities and Perspectives
• Poverty Indicators in Developing Countries
• Poverty, Homelessness and Discrimination in Australia: The Case of the Aboriginal
• Social Business Scope in Alleviating Poverty
• Africa’s Poverty: The Influence of Western States
• Susceptibility of Women and Aboriginal People to Poverty in Canada
• MDG Poverty Goals May Be Achieved, but Child Mortality Is Not Improving
• Microcredit: A Tool for Poverty Alleviation
• Impacts of Global Poverty Resistance
• Reducing Poverty: Unilever and Oxfam
• Poverty in the United States
• The Mothers Who Are Not Single: Striving to Avoid Poverty in Single-Parent Families
• Effect of Poverty on Children Cognitive and Learning Ability
• Sweatshops and Third World Poverty
• War on Poverty: Poverty Problem in US
• Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right and the UN Declaration of Human Rights
• War on Poverty in US
• The Causes of Poverty Concentration in the Modern World
• Poverty in Saudi Arabia
• Poverty as a Peculiarity of the Economical Development
• Capitalism and Poverty
• The Problems of Poverty in the Modern World
• Poverty Among Women and Aboriginals
• On (Not) Getting by in America: Economic Order and Poverty in the U.S.
• The Singer Solution to World Poverty
• Poverty and Inequality in Jacksonian America
• Poverty in America Rural and Urban Difference (Education)
• What Is the Relationship Between Race, Poverty and Prison?
• Poverty and Its Effects on Childhood Education
• Poverty in Russia During the Late Nineteenth Century
• Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty: Advantages of Microcredit
• Social Welfare Policy That Facilitates Reduction of Poverty and Inequality in the US
• Immigrant Status and Poverty: How Are They Linked?
• Effects of Poverty on Immigrant Children
• Poverty in Brazil
• The Problem of Immigrants Poverty in the US
• Why Poverty Rates are Higher Among Single Black Mothers
• Poverty and Its Impact on Global Health: Research Methodologies
• Poverty Concerns in Today’s Society
• Literature Study on the Modern Poverty Concerns
• Poverty and Wealth in “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara
• Peter Singer on Resolving the World Poverty
• Aspects of Global Poverty
• Concepts of Prenatal Drug Exposure vs. Poverty on Infants
• UN Summit in New York: Ending Global Poverty
• Why Has Poverty Increased in Zimbabwe?
• Should Private Donations Help Eliminate Child Poverty?
• Why Was Poverty Re-Discovered in Britain in the Late 1950s and Early 1960?
• Why Does Child Labour Persist With Declining Poverty?
• Why Are Child Poverty Rates Higher in Britain Than in Germany?
• What Are the Principles and Practices for Measuring Child Poverty in Rich Countries?
• Why Did Poverty Drop for the Elderly?
• What Is the Relationship Between Income Distribution and Poverty Reduction in the UK?
• What Are the Pros and Cons of Poverty in Latin America?
• Should Poverty Researchers Worry About Inequality?
• What Helps Households With Children in Leaving Poverty?
• What Is the Connection Between Poverty and Crime?
• Why Have Some Indian States Done Better Than Others at Reducing Rural Poverty?
• What Is the Relationship Between Lack of Education and Poverty?
• Why Are Child Poverty Rates So Persistently High in Spain?
• Trade Liberalisation and Poverty: What Are the Links?
• What Are Academic Programs Available for Youth in Poverty?
• What Are the Main Factors Contributing to the Rise in Poverty in Canada?
• Single-Mother Poverty: How Much Do Educational Differences in Single Motherhood Matter?
• What Are the Causes and Effects of Poverty in the United?
• Why Are Some Countries Poor?
• What Is the Link Between Globalization and Poverty?
• What Are the Factors That Influence Poverty Sociology?
• What Causes Poverty Within the United States Economy?
• What Is the Relationship Between Poverty and Obesity?
• Why Were Poverty Rates So High in the 1980s?
• With Exhaustible Resources, Can a Developing Country Escape From the Poverty Trap?
• Why Does Poverty Persist in Rural Ethiopia?
• Who Became Poor, Who Escaped Poverty, and Why?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, March 2). 390 Poverty Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/poverty-essay-examples/

"390 Poverty Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." IvyPanda , 2 Mar. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/poverty-essay-examples/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '390 Poverty Essay Topic Ideas & Examples'. 2 March.

IvyPanda . 2024. "390 Poverty Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/poverty-essay-examples/.

1. IvyPanda . "390 Poverty Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/poverty-essay-examples/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "390 Poverty Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/poverty-essay-examples/.

• Social Norms Essay Ideas
• Drug Abuse Research Topics
• Juvenile Delinquency Essay Titles
• Segregation Research Topics
• Alcohol Abuse Paper Topics
• Challenges Essay Topics
• Community Service Questions
• Discrimination Essay Titles

Home / Essay Samples / Social Issues / Food Shortage / Combatting Poverty: Strategies for Effective Solutions

Combatting Poverty: Strategies for Effective Solutions

• Category: Social Issues
• Topic: Food Shortage , Homelessness

Pages: 4 (1636 words)

• Downloads: -->

--> ⚠️ Remember: This essay was written and uploaded by an--> click here.

Found a great essay sample but want a unique one?

are ready to help you with your essay

You won’t be charged yet!

Internet Privacy Essays

Gender Discrimination Essays

Corporal Punishment Essays

Gender Wage Gap Essays

Affirmative Action Essays

Related Essays

We are glad that you like it, but you cannot copy from our website. Just insert your email and this sample will be sent to you.

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service  and  Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Your essay sample has been sent.

In fact, there is a way to get an original essay! Turn to our writers and order a plagiarism-free paper.

samplius.com uses cookies to offer you the best service possible.By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .--> -->