Bernie Sanders, a hopeful Presidential contender, has a simple message for Americans; the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. As it turns out, he’s right.
- The richest one percent of people in the world now own nearly half of the world’s wealth.
- Something approaching a billion people are hungry worldwide.
- One in six people have inadequate access to water, and a quarter of the entire human race still lives without electricity.
Gross social imbalance seems to crop up over and over again throughout human history.
Why?
THE DEFINITION OF POVERTY
Social workers who work with the poor everyday tell us that the definition of poverty is not a simple monetary statistic. They look a little deeper into poverty and tell us that poverty comes in three forms.
ABSOLUTE POVERTY
They define the most severe poverty conditions as the lack of sufficient resources to meet physical needs for health.
Most Americans believe that absolute poverty exists in places like Africa and India but is rare here in America. In fact, 48.1 million Americans live in food insecure households. 5.4 million American seniors go to bed hungry every night.
RELATIVE POVERTY
Social workers say that the definition of poverty may be refined to this - the absence of the material needs to participate fully in daily life. They call this relative poverty.
It is the condition we respond to with the thought, “there but for the grace of God go I.” Poverty carries a social stigma in America because we believe that wealth is earned through hard work and exceptional talent. Poverty is caused by bad conduct.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION
Even more nuanced, however, is the view of poverty they call social exclusion. This term includes the many different factors that contribute to, and result from, poverty: unemployment, substandard housing, education, addiction, crime, health, and family breakdown.
To put it simply, they are saying that poverty causes poverty. It is a social syndrome more than a measure of merit. Poverty is ultimately about global, structural, and institutional relationships that create and perpetuate poverty. Government corruption, punitive interest and debt repayment, and exclusionary labor practices, for example, all contribute to the poverty trap.
Those trapped in poverty also suffer from a lack of helpful personal relationships. When they suffer setbacks such as divorce, job loss, debt, and eviction, they have no one to turn to. There is no “friend of a friend” to offer them another job that is often the first step out of the cycle of poverty.
THE ONLY HOPE
Our colleagues who work among the poor everyday often quote the wisdom of Maimonides as society's only hope:
