Global Poverty Essay Example for Free

Global Poverty Essay The definition of poverty is a matter of debate. In 1795, English magistrates decided that a minimum income should be the cost of a gallon loaf of bread, multiplied by three, plus an allowance for each dependent. Today, the Census Bureau defines the threshold of global poverty as the minimum amount of money families need to purchase a nutritionally adequate diet, assuming they use one-third of their income for food. The term underclass has been applied by some social scientists to a population of people, concentrated in an inner city, who are persistently poor, unemployed, and dependent on welfare, with an emphasis on persistently. Initially, sociologist William Julius Wilson championed the concept to describe the plight of the truly disadvantaged. But he and a number of other sociologists have since expressed concern that the term underclass is being misused by some journalists and political conservatives to argue that the poor have created their own plight and are to blame for their poverty (Hinkle, 1994). Wilson contends that the underclass exists mainly because of a sharp climb in inner-city joblessness by virtue of the elimination of hundreds of thousands of lower-skill jobs, the growing polarization of the labor market into low-wage and high-wage sectors, the relocation of manufacturing industries out of the central city, and periodic recessions. The problem has been compounded by the concentration of the disadvantaged in inner-city ghettos and the isolation of these areas from more affluent communities (Hinkle, 1994). Before World War I, most African Americans lived in the rural South. But industrial jobs during World Wars I and II drew hundreds of thousands of blacks to cities in the North (Davis, 2004). Almost all of these people were poor, unskilled workers. Structural factors, i. e. the disappearance over the past quarter-century of hundreds of thousands of low-skill jobs, mainly involving physical labor, have meant that inner-city blacks have become a severely disadvantaged class (Hinkle, 1994). They settled in slum areas near the factories where they worked in the inner city. As slums grew, ghetto conditions worsened. These patterns are most evident in large American cities where smokestack industries once attracted young men with few or no skills to jobs that nonetheless paid well enough to support wives and children. Prejudice and discrimination have made it difficult for African Americans and other minorities to improve these conditions. Legislation has been used to try to eliminate ghetto conditions in the United States. But segregation remains a serious problem. Now poor urban blacks find themselves relegated to all-black neighborhoods where they are socially isolated from mainstream life (Davis, 2004). According to the conflict theory, though, the underclass indeed constitutes a minority of the poor. The underclass is a cote of inner-city poor, those individuals and families who are trapped in an unending cycle of joblessness and dependence on welfare or criminal earnings. Their communities are plagued by drug abuse, lawlessness, crime, violence, and poor schools. Many underclass women were teenage mothers and high school dropouts who subsequently found themselves sidetracked without the resources or skills to escape a life of poverty (Hinkle, 1994). Some sociologists portray global poverty as a structural feature of capitalist societies. The cyclical movements between economic expansion and contraction, boom and bust, contribute to sharp fluctuations in employment (Iceland, 2003). A century ago, Karl Marx contended that an industrial reserve army is essential for capitalist economies. The industrial reserve army consists of individuals at the bottom of the class structure who are laid off in the interests of corporate profits during times of economic stagnation, then rehired when needed for producing profits during times of economic prosperity. It is disproportionately composed of minorities, who traditionally have been the last hired and the first hired. Contemporary structural functionalists say that a new industrial order characterized by a significant shift from manufacturing to service-sector employment has produced massive vulnerability among all blue-collar workers (Hinkle, 1994). Poverty derives from a lack of income-producing employment. And high inner-city rates of family disintegration, welfare dependency, drug abuse, and crime are additional outcomes of faulty economic organization. Clustered in large ghettos and squatters Mexico, Africa, and some parts of Asia, the poor develop feelings of marginality, helplessness, dependence, and inferiority. These circumstances allegedly breed weak ego structures, lack of impulse control, a present-time orientation characterized by little ability to deter gratification, and a sense of resignation and fatalism. The resulting lifeways are both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor to their disadvantaged positions (Iceland, 2003). They become self-perpetuating patterns as the ethos associated with the culture of poverty is transmitted to successive generations. United Nations bureaus revealed that nearly half of the state’s children have mothers who have failed to fulfill elementary school. Statistics illustrate there exists a positive relationship between parents’ educational attainment and their offspring’s odds in their latter life. Children of parents who have no adequate formal education are prone to endure scarcity as they age. Poverty-stricken people around the world suffer from the lack of many things they need. For example, they are less likely to receive adequate medical care or to eat the foods they need to stay healthy. The poor have more diseases, become more seriously ill, and die at a younger age than other people do. Poor people often live in substandard housing in socially isolated areas where most of their neighbors are poor. Many low-income families live in crowded, run-down buildings with inadequate heat and plumbing. The jobs most readily available to the poor provide low wages and little opportunity for advancement. Many of these jobs also involve dangerous or unhealthful working conditions. Financial, medical, and emotional problems often strain family ties among the poverty-stricken (Iceland, 2003). In Laos, saddled with debt, lacking infrastructure, and short of trained personnel, the government simply cannot afford to provide basic schooling for all of their children. However, this is not a problem of lack of resources, but rather a problem of resource allocation. In Ghana, misdistribution and capitalistic exploitation make the medicines inaccessible to the poor clients in the district. If in the past, the causes of illnesses may have been shared between man and nature, from this time forth, diseases are brought about by the caustic arms of industrialization, which might have not destroyed or alternatively benefited the sub-Saharan Africa. In Thailand, young people, some hardly elapsed pre-school age, vending on streets virtually every single day is a heartbreaking scene to the passersby. While at first glance it may seem to be effortless, risk-free toil that equips a deprived family a most wanted boost, it essentially stems from a chain of causes, and begets a mesh of costs for the child, his family and the society in which they are trying to survive. Eventually, many unschooled children would eventually realize finding themselves sidetracked without the resources or skills to escape a life of poverty. Within the United States, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society produced a flurry of social programs rivaling those of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Some are gone, while others were severely cut or revamped by the Reagan and Bush administrations. The government provides two main types of aid: social insurance and public assistance. Social insurance mainly covers people-or their families-who have worked and paid special taxes in the past, whether or not they are poor. Public assistance provides aid to the needy regardless of their work record (Iceland, 2003). Education is a key element in reversing poverty. For some people in Asia and Africa, education is a means to improve oneself. Education is greatly related to social status because a high degree of education involves money and motivation. Some people insist that the forces that are making the world into a single economy have separated people from longstanding identities and have, at the same time, weakened nation-state. Particularly, McDonaldization of global society has allowed to target highly specific groups wherever they are and so the ethnic bond tails them too (Ritzer, 1996). People in developing countries are starving, purely so that our developed society can be provided with excess food. Chemicals, necessary for the uniformity of its products, are destroying the environment and putting lives at risk due to increased nitrate levels. This way, McDonaldization of society wouldn’t make the world a better place, as it will simply turn into a bigger breeding ground for exploitation, pollution, and economic imbalance around the world furthering global poverty.

Alistair MacLeods No Great Mischief Essay example -- Alistair MacLeod

Alistair MacLeod's "No Great Mischief"   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In No Great Mischief, Alistair MacLeod proves to the reader that it is impossible to talk about the Scottish-Canadian heritage without mentioning tradition, family and loyalty. MacLeod wrote this book about loyalty to family tradition. It is common to talk about these three things when one describes his family or his past in general, but in this book, MacLeod has included every single intricate detail about each one of the three aspects.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Family plays the biggest role in this novel. Anything that the characters say or do usually has to do with family. The first time Alexander MacDonald, the narrator of the story, mentions family it is not his own. It is one of the immigrant families picking berries along the road that he is driving on (MacLeod 1). This point takes him directly into a slight mention of his own family: the grandmother (3). Since there is no main character in the book, it is thought to be the narrator. However, I wish to disagree with this fact and say that the real main character in this book is Alexander’s brother, Calum, who lives in Toronto. The first time Calum is introduced, one of the first things to come out of his mouth is of family: â€Å"I have been thinking the last few days of Calum Ruadh,† (11). We find out that Alexander has a close relationship with his brother and he drives to Toronto to visit him every weekend. This has become almost a tradition because he does not visit him to actually have a constructive conversation or to resolve a problem, although Calum has many of them, the most serious of which is drinking, but instead he visits him only for the sake of visiting him. It is also a tradition in that they do the same thing every time: they drink, not so much Alexander as Calum. We later find out that Alexander has a similar tradition set up with other family members. The most distinct of which is his relationship with his grandmother: Grandma. When he visits Grandma, it is always the same routine: they sing long Gaelic songs, like the ones that their ancestors would. Alexander, for most of the first half of the book, does not talk about his present day family as much as his ancestors. He provides the reader with the information about how he wound up in Canada and what his ancestors had to go through to get here. Throughout this part of the book, Alexander makes it seem as... ...xample, the way that grandfather dies is probably one of the best ways to go: he was relaxed, not in pain, and he was doing what he loved most: reading his history textbooks. In the latter part of the book, whenever there is any mention of grandfather anywhere he is always either reading a book or sleeping (228, 264). Everyone in the family is always content, no matter what kind of trouble they go through or how much they have enjoyed; they have always had enough to satisfy them.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Towards the end of the novel, the reader is more and more convinced that the MacDonalds have serious problems. Regardless of how attached you are to your past it is way too much to still live on the same piece of land that someone from your family, your ancestor, has lived on in 1497. The MacDonalds live there not because they cannot afford something better but because they truly cherish the land that their ancestors cultivated and took care of. At the very end of the book, when Calum wishes for Alexander to take him back out to the East Coast to die there, it seems to be almost apologetic and gives the reader the impression that the brothers have to keep reminding themselves of their heritage.

Economic analysis of deposit insurance Essay

Federal deposit Insurance Corporation was an institution set by government back in 1930s to protect depositors fund held by bank. In the great depression of 1930 most depositors lost their fund following the collapse of many banks. After the stock market crash in 1929, financial market was adversely affected and by March 1933 more than 9,000 banks had already failed and this facilitated establishment of FDIC. Henceforth it has been evolving and finding alternative ways of insuring depositors fund against potential bank insolvency. FDIC guarantees a specific amount of deposit and checking for member banks. Since it establishment FDIC paid depositors in 1988 following the banking crisis fueled by high interest rate, inflation, recession and deregulation in the banking sector. More than 200 banks were in a liquidity problem and FDIC had to intervene to settle claims by depositors. Role of deposit insurance in the economy The main purpose of deposit insurance is to create financial stability in the economy. Majority of people did not bother to check whether their deposit was insured under deposit insurance but following the current financial crisis which started in mid 2007 which saw many banks and other company becoming insolvent most people are  Ã‚  increasingly becoming aware of the role and importance of deposit insurance in the economy. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 temporarily increased the basic limit of deposit insurance from $100,000 to $250,000 (Robert, 2009). Advocates of free market view deposit insurance as part of government intervention in the market and criticize it on the basis that a competitive market is self regulating and will act to correct any deviation that occurs in the market. however the great depression of 1930s and the current financial crisis   has proved that the market is not always self regulating and therefore there is a need for government intervention as proposed by Keynes in order to correct deviation in the market. although the classical economist argued that   in a competitive market system price, wages and interest rate would automatically adjust to restore the economy to full employment levels there existed certain factors such as investment demand, money demand, union and monopoly power that inhibited the automatic mechanism assumed by classical writers. Keynes advocate for discretion fiscal policies given the failure of automatic forces as a counter cyclical device to oppose advance trends in business cycles. In period of massive unemployment and depression, expansionary fiscal policy was required by government to solve the problem in less time than automatic forces ever could (Stephen, 2008). Deposit insurance creates confidence among the public and avoid panic withdrawals as those occasioned in UK when information reached the public that northern bank was experiencing liquidity problem and many account holder were queuing to withdraw there money from the bank. During the current financial crisis where many bank were declared insolvent FDIC compensated many deposit holders who  would otherwise lost their deposit. This not only helps to maintain financial stability but also improve economic growth (Robert & George, 2006). Where people receive compensation they will be able to increase the level of spending on goods and services. This increase in aggregate demand forces supplies to increase output in order to satisfy the growing demand. Supplies will in turn require additional input in term of labor, material and capital which reduces unemployment and increase economic growth.   The graph below indicates the role that deposit insurance can play during economic crisis for instance the current financial crisis.

US Elections and The Great Depression - 1241 Words

Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt defeats Republican Herbert Hoover. This was a turning point for democrats because the republicans had controlled the presidency for most of the time since 1860. The main problem that the election of 1932 dealt with was the Great Depression. Hoover had been unsuccessful in dealing with the great depression. FDR had plans for a new deal, which would dramatically change the economy of America. Hoover and FDR were very different in personality, Hoover was isolated and did not show much emotion, FDR was confident and meant what he said. FDR won the electoral vote 472 to 59 in a landslide victory. This new leader of America marked hope in the eyes of American citizens for the first time in years. Democrat†¦show more content†¦Receiving a good education in the 1930’s was difficult. Schools were still segregated at this time. A lot more men actually started going to school because they could not find a job. Teacher salaries were dismal so it was hard to find good teachers. College attendance decreased because most people could not afford to pay to go to school. Due to the economic problems it carried over to the educational problems. The consequences of little to no education meant a more illiterate society. The depression influenced girls to expand their education opportunities, at the college level. The new things that women focused on were sports and different career fields, before this time most women just became nurses or stayed at home to care for the house and family. One major reason that women became more involved in the job field was because due the depression most men did not have a job, so women would have to support themselves financially. This ear in history was vital for women becoming more independent because it gave them a chance to take care of themselves for once. With an uneasy economy, many great cultural achievements have been made including the popularity of the radio. Americans loved to laugh at the antics of such comedians as Jack Benny, Fred Allen, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Amos and Andy, and Fibber McGee and Molly. People also took interest inShow MoreRelatedEssay on President Hoovers Lack of Action in the 1920s1389 Words   |  6 Pagesof the Great Depression. The late 1920’s economy was full of superficial prosperity and credit, and an unleveled playing field to most Americans. This causes the fortified nation to unravel at the seams. Speculators were buying on margin and selling at an artificial price. These speculators set up the stock market to plummet. Hoover dwelled his success on his rugged individualism that did not believe in direct federal aid to the people. 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