#behavioural economics wise though i think there could definitely be something to be said of popularity

[shanangversion02-blog]

SOCIAL SYSTEM: Poverty

                                  W-H-A-T  I S  P-O-V-E-R-T-Y

                                        ?????????????????

P-O-V-E-R-T-Y IS:

Is the scarcity or the lack of a certain (variant) amount of material possessions or money. Poverty is a multifaceted concept, which may include social, economic, and political elements. Absolute poverty, extreme poverty, or destitution refers to the complete lack of the means necessary to meet basic personal needs such as food, clothing and shelter. 

Poverty, the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions. Poverty is said to exist when people lack the means to satisfy their basic needs. In thi s context, the identification of poor people first requires a determination of what constitutes basic needs. These may be defined as narrowly as “those necessary for survival” or as broadly as “those reflecting the prevailing standard of living in the community.” The first criterion would cover only those people near the borderline of starvation or death from exposure; the second would extend to people whose nutrition, housing, and clothing, though adequate to preserve life, do not measure up to those of the population as a whole. The problem of definition is further compounded by the noneconomic connotations that the word poverty has acquired. Poverty has been associated, for example, with poor health, low levels of education or skills, an inability or an unwillingness to work, high rates of disruptive or disorderly behaviour, and improvidence. While these attributes have often been found to exist with poverty, their inclusion in a definition of poverty would tend to obscure the relation between them and the inability to provide for one’s basic needs. Whatever definition one uses, authorities and laypersons alike commonly assume that the effects of poverty are harmful to both individuals and society. 

CAUSES OF Poverty

1.) Lack of education.       - Education offers you the opportunity to get a job, set up a business, manufacture, plan and make appropriate budgets for meaningful spending and development, design things that you can market (although some uneducated people creatively make crafts for sale etc.), and enable you to diversify the use of your talents. Education also trains the mind to desire development, progress, and the wise acquisition of money and property that go with advancement. 2) Poor environment.      - You are unconsciously frozen in your poor prison. Nothing motivates or challenges you to make progress in such a place. Several nice, good, and innovative things don't even fit into the degraded surroundings. 3) Lack of supervision, and poor parenting.       - People tend to go astray, and are not inspired, mentored, guided, and trained, right from childhood to discover and optimize the use of their gifts and talents in order to succeed. 4) Fractured and dysfunctional families.      - Both young and old are all thrown into a mess of misdirection, loss of important values, lack of provision, unnecessary hardships, pain, tendencies to stray into evil and all kinds of vices, and a mind that cannot focus on true financial prosperity and progress. 5) Bad character and bad morals.     - Bad character that breeds poverty is especially rooted in laziness, misuse of money and resources, squandering instead of saving and investing, misuse and loss of opportunities, greed by a proud and dominating few, selfishness, and a spirit of sabotage that undermines anyone trying to develop and make wealth. Evil tendencies, habitual practice of bad habits, bribery, gambling rather than diligently working, robbery and other forms of crime, will always hinder progress and promote poverty. 6) Ignorance       - Woefully ignorant of the presence or the extent of wealth that you are sitting on, or the wealth around you; and lacking the basic knowledge or any insight to recognize, appreciate, or tap into the rich resources. This is one major factor that leads to exploitation by someone else who comes along and is able to spot or discover your wealth, and plunders it without your knowledge. The one could further blind you by using a minute fraction of your own wealth to “bless” you, and fool you to turn completely away from trying to discover and optimize your own potential riches. 7) Poverty that is politically, culturally, and religiously driven.        - Politics that suppress one faction and keep them poor in order to rule and constantly dictate to them; a culture with outmoded practices and mindset that refuses to consider and accept anything modern that is contrary to old or ancestral traditions; and religious beliefs and practices that misinterpret God's goodness and provision to mean no effort, creativity, and diligence on the part of the Believer etc. --- all these and their ramifications will produce or enhance poverty.   8) Selfishness and Greed         - People in our society who have been privileged and blessed by God to inherit or acquire wealth, could callously and unkindly close their hearts, eyes, and minds to the needs of those around them. They refuse or neglect to support and help their less fortunate family members, friends, and neighbors.

FACTORS AFFECTING  : Poverty

1.IGNORANCE 

        -Ignorance means having a lack of information, or lack of knowledge. It is different from stupidity which is lack of intelligence, and different from foolishness which is lack of wisdom. The three are often mixed up and assumed to be the same by some people."Knowledge is power," goes the old saying. Unfortunately, some people, knowing this, try to keep knowledge to themselves (as a strategy of obtaining an unfair advantage), and hinder others from obtaining knowledge. Do not expect that if you train someone in a particular skill, or provide some information, that the information or skill will naturally trickle or leak into the rest of a community.It is important to determine what the information is that is missing. Many planners and good minded persons who want to help a community become stronger, think that the solution is education. But education means many things. Some information is not important to the situation. It will not help a farmer to know that Romeo and Juliet both died in Shakespeare's play, but it would be more useful to know which kind of seed would survive in the local soil, and which would not.The training in this series of community empowerment documents includes (among other things) the transfer of information. Unlike a general education, which has its own history of causes for the selection of what is included, the information included here is aimed at strengthening capacity, not for general enlightenment

2.DISEASE 

        - When a community has a high disease rate, absenteeism is high, productivity is low, and less wealth is created. Apart from the misery, discomfort and death that results from disease, it is also a major factor in poverty in a community. Being well (well-being) not only helps the individuals who are healthy, it contributes to the eradication of poverty in the community.Here, as elsewhere, prevention is better than cure. It is one of the basic tenets of PHC (primary health care). The economy is much healthier if the population is always healthy; more so than if people get sick and have to be treated. Health contributes to the eradication of poverty more in terms of access to safe and clean drinking water, separation of sanitation from the water supply, knowledge of hygiene and disease prevention ─ much more than clinics, doctors and drugs, which are costly curative solutions rather than prevention against disease.Remember, we are concerned with factors, not causes. It does not matter if tuberculosis was introduced by foreigners who first came to trade, or if it were autochthonic.& ; It does not matter if HIV that carries AIDS was a CIA plot to develop a biological warfare weapon, or if it came from green monkeys in the soup. Those are possible causes. Knowing the causes will not remove disease. Knowing the factors can lead to better hygiene and preventive behaviour, for their ultimate eradication.Many people see access to health care as a question of human rights, the reduction of pain and misery and the quality of life of the people. These are all valid reasons to contribute to a healthy population. What is argued here, further than those reasons, is that a healthy population contributes to the eradication of poverty, and it is also argued that poverty is not only measured by high rates of morbidity and mortality, but also that disease contributes to other forms and aspects of poverty

3. APATHY 

       -Apathy is when people do not care, or when they feel so powerless that they do not try to change things, to right a wrong, to fix a mistake, or to improve conditions.Sometimes, some people feel so unable to achieve something, they are jealous of their family relatives or fellow members of their community who attempt to do so. Then they seek to bring the attempting achiever down to their own level of poverty. Apathy breeds apathy.Sometimes apathy is justified by religious precepts, "Accept what exists because God has decided your fate." That fatalism may be misused as an excuse . It is OK to believe God decides our fate, if we accept that God may decide that we should be motivated to improve ourselves. "Pray to God, but also row to shore," a Russian proverb, demonstrates that we are in God's hands, but we also have a responsibility to help ourselves.We were created with many abilities: to choose, to cooperate, to organize in improving the quality of our lives; we should not let God or Allah be used as an excuse to do nothing. That is as bad as a curse upon God. We must praise God and use our God-given talents.In the fight against poverty, the mobilizer uses encouragement and praise, so that people (1) will want to and (2) learn how to ─ take charge of their own lives.

4.DISHONESTY

      -When resources that are intended to be used for community services or facilities, are diverted into the private pockets of someone in a position of power, there is more than morality at stake here. In this training series, we are not making a value judgement that it is good or bad. We are pointing out, however, that it is a major cause of poverty. Dishonesty among persons of trust and power. The amount stolen from the public, that is received and enjoyed by the individual, is far less than the decrease in wealth that was intended for the public.The amount of money that is extorted or embezzled is not the amount of lowering of wealth to the community. Economists tell of the "multiplier effect." Where new wealth is invested, the positive effect on the economy is more than the amount created. When investment money is taken out of circulation, the amount of wealth by which the community is deprived is greater than the amount gained by the embezzler. When a Government official takes a 100 dollar bribe, social investment is decreased by as much as a 400 dollar decrease in the wealth of the society.It is ironic that we get very upset when apetty thief steals ten dollars' worth of something in the market, yet an official may steal a thousand dollars from the public purse, which does four thousand dollars worth of damage to the society as a whole, yet we do not punish the second thief. We respect the second thief for her or his apparent wealth, and praise that person for helping all her or his relatives and neighbours. In contrast, we need the police to protect the first thief from being beaten by people on the street.The second thief is a major cause of poverty, while the first thief may very well be a victim of poverty that is caused by the second. Our attitude, as described in the above paragraph, is more than ironic; it is a factor that perpetuates poverty. If we reward the one who causes the major damage, and punish only the ones who are really victims, then our misplaced attitudes also contribute to poverty. When embezzled money is then taken out of the country and put in a foreign (eg Swiss) bank, then it does not contribute anything to the national economy; it only helps the country of the offshore or foreign bank.

5.DEPENDENCY

:Dependency results from being on the receiving end of charity. In the short run, as after a disaster, that charity may be essential for survival. In the long run, that charity can contribute to the possible demise of the recipient, and certainly to ongoing poverty.It is an attitude, a belief, that one is so poor, so helpless, that one can not help one's self, that a group cannot help itself, and that it must depend on assistance from outside. The attitude, and shared belief is the biggest self justifying factor in perpetuating the condition where the self or group must depend on outside help.Dependency, and Revealing Hidden Resources. When showing how to use the telling of stories to communicate essential principles of development, the story of Mohammed and the Rope is used as a key illustration of the principle that assistance should not be the kind of charity that weakens by encouraging dependency, it should empower.The community empowerment methodology is an alternative to giving charity (which weakens), but provides assistance, capital and training aimed at low income communities identifying their own resources and taking control of their own development –becoming empowered. All too often, when a project is aimed at promoting self reliance, the recipients, until their awareness is raised, expect, assume and hope that the project is coming just to provide resources for installing a facility or service in the community

Among the five major factors of poverty, the dependency syndrome is the one closest to the concerns of the community mobilizer.

CONCLUSION

These five factors are not independent of one another. Disease contributes to ignorance and apathy. Dishonesty contributes to disease and dependency. And so on. They each contribute to each other.In any social change process, we are encouraged to "think globally, act locally." 

The Big Five factors of poverty appear to be widespread and deeply embedded in cultural values and practices. We may mistakenly believe that any of us, at our small level of life, can do nothing about them.Do not despair. If each of us make a personal commitment to fight the factors of poverty at whatever station in life we occupy, then the sum total of all of us doing it, and the multiplier effect of our actions on others, will contribute to the decay of those factors, and the ultimate victory over poverty.

The training material on this web site, is aimed at poverty reduction on two fronts, (1) reduction of communal poverty by mobilizing community groups to unite, organize and take community action, and (2) reduction of personal poverty by the creation of wealth through the development of micro enterprise.You, as a mobilizer, are in a key position to have an effect on the big five of poverty factors. By conducting your mobilizing and training for poverty reduction, you can ensure your own integrity, hinder those who would corrupt the system, and encourage all your participants to practice the attack on factors of poverty in the course of the actions they choose, when guided and trained by you.The big five factors of poverty (as a social problem) include: ignorance, disease, apathy, dishonesty and dependency.These, in turn, contribute to secondary factors such as lack of markets, poor infrastructure, poor leadership, bad governance, under-employment, lack of skills, lack of capital, and others.

The solution to the problem of poverty is the social solution of removing the factors of poverty.──»«──Community Awareness; Health and Hygiene and proper education.z