Poverty

Poverty is the condition of not having access to material resources, income, or wealth.

Learning Objective

Assess how poverty relates to social mobility

Key Points

The United States officially defines poverty using the poverty line. The poverty line is set at an income level that is three times the approximate cost of a subsistence level food budget.
Poverty can also refer to the lack of opportunity to improve one's standard of living (or poor life chances).
The term "near poverty" refers to earnings that are above the poverty line, but by no more than 25%.
Social mobility describes a person's flexibility to change their economic status.
If there is a high level of social mobility, it is relatively easy for people to escape poverty; if social mobility is low, it is very challenging for people to escape poverty.

Terms

The Poverty Line
The threshold of poverty, below which one's income does not cover necessities.
Near Poverty
The classification "near poverty" describes a demographic group in the United States that earns 25% above the poverty line.

Examples

People who are homeless, hungry, or ill without access to treatment are examples of people who do not have access to the material resources they need to survive. They live in poverty, as the term is used colloquially, and likely fall under formal income thresholds that designate individuals as officially poor.
Liberia has a substantially lower GNI PPP than the United States, meaning that the nation's wealth is much lower. Consequently, someone with an average income in Liberia has a substantially lower standard of living and much less access to resources than someone with an average income in the U.S.
By local standards of relative poverty, the wealthiest person in a town in Liberia is well-off, but measured on a global scale that person is likely to be considered relatively poor.

Full Text

Poverty describes the state of not having access to material resources, wealth, or income. The United States officially defines poverty using the poverty line. The poverty line is set at an income level that is three times the approximate cost of a subsistence level food budget. This definition has been in use in the United States to track demographic changes and allocate welfare aid since the 1960s.

"Near poverty" is the term for an income level that is just above the poverty line; it refers to incomes that are no more than 25% above the poverty line.

"Relative poverty" refers to economic disadvantage compared to wealthier members of society, whereas "absolute poverty" refers to a family (or an individual) with an income so low that they cannot afford basic necessities of survival, such as food and shelter.

Poverty may correspond not only to lack of resources, but to the lack of opportunity to improve one's standard of living and acquire resources. "Life chances" is a term used to describe someone's access to marketplace resources—essentially, how likely it is in their environment that they might be able to find employment or have a social safety net. Someone who is living in poverty but has high life chances may be able to improve their economic standing, but someone with low life chances will likely have a consistently low standard of living. The term for a person's ability to change their economic status in a society is known as "social mobility. "

If there is a high level of social mobility, it is relatively easy for people to leave poverty. Easy access to higher education and prevalence of well-paying jobs contribute to social mobility. While some factors that contribute to poverty are the result of individual choices, such as dropping out of school or committing a crime, other factors affect poverty that are beyond individual control. In the United States, minorities and women are more likely to be living in poverty.

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