The Economic Lives of the Poor, written by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo is an essay about the lives of the extremely poor. The Economic Lives of the Poor exhibits the patterns of how the poor live around the world and the troubles they confront on a daily basis. The article talks about various aspects of life of the poor, including, money, savings, assets, education, and infrastructure. The extremely poor are defined as the people of the world who make less than $1/day. To analyze this, Banerjee and Duflo conducted surveys in 13 different countries (Cote d’Ivoire, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania, and Timor Leste). The article talks about how the poor people …show more content…
Many people have multiple occupations, one usually being operating a farm and the other operating a nonagricultural business. 60% of poor households reported that at least one member of their family lived elsewhere for work, the median length of such migrations being one month. A pattern found was that workers tend not to get too specialized in their work. When family members leave to find work, they do not have enough time to specialize and the agricultural as well as nonagricultural businesses at home require little skill to run. Generally, the poor do not want to depend on one job too much, they want to “spread their risk.” Another reason why the poor get more than one job is to fill wasted time. Farming cannot be done year round or in all types of weather, therefore another job is needed. A final reason for multiple jobs is that the poor could not raise enough capital from their nonagricultural businesses for that to be their only source of …show more content…
A set of surveys showed that few households got loans from formal lending sources and often turned to relatives, money lenders, or shopkeepers for money instead. A big challenge for the poor is finding somewhere to safely store their money and as a result, few poor households have savings accounts. Another problem among the poor is the lack of formal insurance with less than 6% of the extremely poor covered by any health insurance. The essay then finally turns to the infrastructure and the economic environment of the poor. The availability of many physical infrastructures such as electricity, tap water, and basic sanitation varies across countries, but generally have a very low availability. Many of the healthcare providers found in poor areas are extremely under qualified and do more harm than good by misdiagnosing and over-medicating their patients. This lack of good healthcare leads to very high mortality rates, reaching 16.7% in Pakistan. The most enlightening findings of this study allow us to contradict the standard prejudices about how the poor spend their money, their entrepreneurship skills and how the private sector in education and health actually provide less qualified professionals than the public
Although poverty has minimized, it is still significant poverty which is characterized by a numerous amount of things. There are two types of poverty case and insular. “Case poverty is the farm family with the junk-filled yard and the dirty children playing in the bare dirt” (Galbraith 236)Case poverty is not irretraceable and usually caused if someone in the household experiences “ mental deficiency, bad health, inability to adapt to the discipline of industrial life, uncontrollable procreation, alcohol, some educational handicap unrelated to community shortcomings” (Galbraith 236).Case poverty is often blamed on the people for their shortcomings but on some levels can be to pinpoint one person's shortcomings that caused this poverty. Most modern poverty is insular and is caused by things people in this community cannot control. “The most important characteristic of insular poverty is forces, common to all members of the community, that restrain or prevent participation in economic life and increase rates of return.
In the Working Poor, David Shipler shows the different levels of poverty in the United States. Although many people work every day, they still do not have enough money to live their lives comfortably or contently. In chapter 1, Money and Its Opposite, we discuss the different people that worked hard their entire lives only to remain in or below the poverty line. For instance, in the book Shipler speaks of the disadvantages that the working poor are susceptible to. Often being taken advantage of by employers that do not give access that they are entitled to, the working poor are more likely to be audited than the wealthy, and become victims of cons that point toward money for a small payment, first.
In the Ted talk called Social Experiments to Fight Poverty, with the speaker Esther Duflo who talks about how spending money on poverty can either hurt or help contribute to eradicating poverty. Esther Duflo also talks about poverty in a couple different ways through the following reasons; immunization, education, and doing something to stop poverty can really change the world. Firstly, Esther Duflo believes that immunization can help with poverty. It can help because immunization is the cheapest way to save a child's life and can help prevent Malaria, deworm children, and give poor people lentils to live on. With immunization, it can save a life for 300 dollars per life. Next, Esther Duflo explains that education can help defeat poverty globally as well.
There are multiple causes of why a family or individual can fall into poverty, which includes but is not limited to, disability, unemployment, age, and recessions, as we have seen through the 2008 recession and the Great Depression. Throughout this paper, I will address poverty as a social problem and its causes. I will also focus on how children and family households headed by single mothers are affected by poverty, and how Temporary Assistance for Needy Families came about to help children and families in poverty. Before we can explain the causes of poverty, one must first define what poverty is. If you were to ask someone for their definition of poverty, you would get several different definitions.
Underlying mean of the health problems in our country, are poverty and poor education. Differences in socioeconomic status are seen for most conditions, diseases and sick factors in this country. The social distribution of health and social causes, which most effect health, must be understood and addressed. Total public and private health expenditure in Pakistan represents 2-3 %of the gross domestic product. (GDP). In 1990, less then 1% of GDP was allocated to public health care with private expenditure accounting for the rest. This is well below international standards because of the low levels of expending; it becomes critical to evaluate the impact of government policies of people’s health. In addition to direct provision of various governments influence health delivery in indirect ways through their policies towards medical education and regulations.
The most prevalent means of measuring poverty have been, and continue to be, bench marks related to money. Poverty lines are used to measure absolute and relative poverty in terms of incomes and affordability. Such measurements are relatively easy to make and quantify. However, lack of money is more a symptom of poverty rather than its cause. In most cases the poor are not without some income. What they lack is the ability to accumulate assets, which is a key ingredient to the creation of wealth and breaking the cycle of poverty (6).
In conclusion, the ultimate significance to this type of work is to improve the quality of healthcare in these extremely impoverished nations. This argument is represented in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, Monte Leach’s “Ensuring Health Care as a Global Human Right”, and Darshark Sanghavi’s “Is it Cost Effective to Treat the World’s Poor.” The idea that universal healthcare is a human right is argued against in Michael F. Cannon’s “A “Right” to health care?” Cannon claims that it would not work, and fills the holes that the other authors leave in their arguments. All of these articles share the same ultimate goal, and that is to provide every individual with adequate health care, and to not let so many people die from things that could easily have been prevented or treated.
Poverty is usually referrer as the condition of having little or no money, but in some circumstances it can also be described as lack the means of support. According to Global Issues in the Causes of Poverty, over three billions of people live on the wages less than 2.5 dollars per day and 1 billion children, which is equivalent to one in every two children in the world, live under the condition of lacking shelter, safe water, or health services. There is also a huge misconception about the abundant food around the world. However according to the United Nations, there are still about 20,000 people die everyday by hungry or poverty related causes. Even though extreme poverty is not very common in the United States, it is a huge problem for many
Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience.William T. Vollmann goes to different parts around the world to interview different people and to ask about poverty. With the help of interpreters he holds the interview with randomly selected individuals.
In many parts of the world that are considered lower or middle-class countries, health disparities are cause of major concern that leads to unnecessary disease and possible death. Many variables affect how and why many citizens of lower and middle-class countries struggle to obtain adequate healthcare. One region of the world classified as a lower socio economic territory is Ethiopia. Many factors contribute to the lack of health care in Ethiopia such as access to care, high cost of care, and being uneducated, to name a few. One idea that hinders many citizens in Ethiopia to attain healthcare is the access to the healthcare system. This research project will entail the issue of access to the health care system; ways it is affecting the lives of those living in Ethiopia, and measures that can be taken to possibly increase the availability and attainment of healthcare.
19,261 [0.49$/day] and international poverty line NRs. 74842.52 [1.9 $/day] are used to evaluate the level of poverty in the study area. Total household income is converted to average per capita income by multiplying the population share of a household adult equivalent unit (a.e.u.). As national standard, 7.5 % of the sampled population lives in extreme poverty (α = 0; Table 8). This is surprisingly lower than the national figure of 25.16 % (CBS, 2011). And it is also quite lower with the study done by Chhetri et al., (2015) giving the result of 25.1 % sampled population lives in extreme poverty. This is because our study site Jamune VDC is developed than Simjung and Ghyachok VDC of Ghorkha district. The depth of extreme poverty (α = 1) is 2.17 %, while the severity (α = 2) is 0.76 %. Excluding CF income from the total household income, the prevalence of extreme poverty rises to 28.75 %, a relative increase of 283.33 %. That means 21.25% of sampled household are the direct beneficiary with CF to stay above the poverty line. This type of changes was seen in the similar study by Chhetri et al., (2015), with the exclusion of environmental income the prevalence of extreme poverty rises from 39.9% to 59%. With increase in poverty gap (α = 1) and poverty severity (α = 2) indices would increase even more, by 441.47% and 902.63 %, respectively. Further, 13.33 % medium households and 6.67 % poor households lives in extreme poverty (α = 0), quite different
Nearly 50,000 people, including 30,000 children, die each day due to poverty-related problems and preventable disease in underdeveloped Countries. That doesn’t include the other millions of people who are infected with AIDS and other incurable diseases. Especially those living in Sub-Saharan Africa (70%), or “the Third-World,” and while we fight to finish our homework, children in Africa fight to survive without food, or clean water. During the next few paragraphs I will give proof that poverty and disease are the two greatest challenges facing under developed countries.
Poverty is an ever-growing problem throughout our modern world, with millions living in its extremes. There are many consequences of poverty and the way they affect children and family life is absolutely detrimental. Poverty can be simply defined as “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions” (Encyclopedia Britannica 2014). There are two distinct variations of poverty – absolute poverty and relative poverty, which will be further discussed throughout this essay. The total number of people worldwide who live on less than $2.50 (the bare minimum of the poverty line) is 3 billion (Global Issues, The Human Development Report, 2012). According to many, there are a varied number of consequences for those who live in poverty, especially children and families. The effects of poverty have proven to have detrimental effects on child development and the nature of family life. Saunders (2005) reiterates these factors of poverty in his book “The Consequences of Poverty”. This essay will state the many aspects of poverty and the detrimental effects its holds within child development, family life and the health of indiviudals.
“Poverty at Large: A Dark Spot in Humanity.” Causes of Poverty, 25 March 2014. Web. 26
... about Pakistan, where I live there very less hospitals at the moment which provide proper care to patients and if the hospital beds would be full of such patients then other people whose diseases can be cured would not be treated properly.