Poverty: Most Serious Problem in the Whole World

Peng Wu
03-08-2014 SOC 1
Professor Marlene Gallarde
Theories
I choose poverty as my topic for my essay because poverty has been considered as the most serious problem not only in the United State, but also in the whole world. It has been playing an important role in developing the entire society. There are three different theories in analyzing how society influences people, and how people influence society, which are functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interaction. There are five social institutions in functionalist perspective: family, government, economy, religion, and education. View poverty from functionalism perspective, it stops the development of the whole society. The effects of poverty to society is a very long list. Illness, crime, and hunger are major effects of poverty on society as a whole. Some of these effects can also be considered as a cause for poverty. Poverty also can lead to poor education for those children who are effected by poverty. It also will lead to revolution from the lower class people, who are suffering poverty, against the government. Sometimes it will also cause terrorism. But on the other hand, poverty can also create some jobs opportunities. Manifest function, consequences which are intended and recognized by the participants in a system, of poverty is that it gets the “dirty work” done. Latent function, consequences that are neither intended nor recognized, of poverty is that it separates people from different classes. Latent dysfunction of the poverty is that it will only enlarge the gap between the rich and the poor. Conflict theory is more focused on controlling the scarce resources. . Apply conflict theory to poverty, the poor will try to get out of their situation while the rich will do their best to protect the scarce resource. In this case, the scarce resource is money, The struggling groups of poverty are the “have nots” , and these “haves”, rich people, gain a lot more power in this case. Rich people have more power in an economic way, money. They want to keep their benefits, and they can give their children some advantages in this way at the same time. If the poor wins more power in this struggle, one of the biggest changes in would be wages. In this society, more money produces more power, more power produces more money. The riches will get richer, the poors get poorer. The third theory is symbolic interaction. It relies on the symbolic meanings that people develop and rely upon in the process of social interaction. In poverty, people who are labeled poor are always stigmatized as lazy, lack of motivation and education, or sometimes even criminal while wealthy people are always considered capable, hard working, well-educated and motivated. It separates people from different classes communicating with each other, that way it enlarges the disparity between the rich and the poor. In a conclusion, poverty is one of the most rigorous issues right now in our society. It applies to these three different theories in different ways. The theory that I agree with the most is the functionalism theory. It is happening every minute around us in our daily life. Some people are really trying their best to narrow the gap between the rich and poor, but it really takes some sufferance to overcome those difficulties.