The Causes Of Poverty

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The Causes Of Poverty

“It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty” (Juvenal). As we analyze this quote it reveals to us a truth about life:
“Capital is necessary for man’s earthly well-being, because nature, the world as created, is good only in a general sense. But if something is good in a general sense, that is no guarantee that it will be operative for a particular person’s specific benefit at a particular place, time, circumstance. Men must work directly and men must create capital in order to put the forces of nature to work for them according to their specific needs” (Nymeyer 1).
In modern times it is money that makes the world go around, as many of us have been hearing from our parents since we were children. There is no doubt that poverty is unfavorable, so we must ask ourselves why it exists. If not just for our own knowledge, we also need to know where poverty begins in order to plan an attack on this social epidemic.
There has been an anxious attitude revolving around the very basic study of poverty for the last thirty-five years. Instigated by the National Conference of Charities and Correction and by many university professors, the charity organization societies head the search for the cause of poverty (Brandt 1). The methods used, often seen as mere opinions, are claimed to be scientific.
Charles Booth first launched the method most commonly used to research poverty in his study of pauperism. In his study a large number of individual cases of poverty were examined. A cause was prescribed to each individual case. The causes were then added up and each cause was assigned a percentage that it contributed to the whole group. However this method was not seen as conclusive. Many circumstances were seen as causative, therefore creating the need for “principal” and “subsidiary” causes. For many years this was seen as the most scientific approach for studies concerning pove...