Poverty Causes and Effects

Causes of Poverty

Imagine searching through heaping piles of refuse at landfills, looking for anything that could seem partly edible, to satisfy an unending hunger. Many people around the world face this situation every day of their lives. What could have caused a situation like this to occur? The education and skill level, health or handicap status, and discrimination play a vital role in poverty.

A major factor determining whether someone will end up living in poverty, education or skill level can make or break an income. Education plays a vital role in acquiring jobs, learning new skills, and bringing home necessities and comforts of life. A person who doesn’t receive an education has a very small chance of making much money and acquiring skills that would bring home a desirable income. Many who do not have an education bring their family into a cycle of poverty, where their posterity doesn’t necessarily have the income to go to college or even don’t have a desire to acquire a high school diploma. A survey from www.worldwidelearn.com reveals that the average income with a high school education equals about $40,000 while dropouts can expect to receive $24,000 per year, $16,000 less. Education does not necessarily determine whether someone will make it or break it, but health statuses and handicaps can also play an important role.

Health handicaps and diseases bring a lot of disaster not only to families who seem to scrape by every month, but can also decimate families whose incomes already have fallen short of what it takes to purchase and maintain the necessities of life. From acquiring diabetes to getting HIV, health attributes and diseases make working almost impossible at some points. For example, a worker who has an injury that requires a wheelchair for movement may find obtaining a job, which could be performed not standing up, very difficult. The mental and emotional damage of trying to obtain a job while needing a wheelchair or other health conditions can overwhelm a worker. Battles not only occur physically and emotionally but also commonly occur through discrimination.

It may seem that racism and discrimination doesn’t exist anymore in the US, with the election of an African American as president, but discrimination still harbors here. To see discrimination first hand, just travel south a few hundred miles where pickup trucks still have the Confederate flag painted on their cabs and many houses have a Confederate flag flying, which a minority in the area views as racist. Discrimination has played a huge role in shaping economies and creating poverty; women, for instance, still reflect a small portion of engineering and higher income job percentages. A report from http://www.yemenpost.net/23/Reports/20081.htm says that women have a 600 percent higher unemployment rate and receive, at average, 13 percent less money then men do while having the same occupations and getting the same work done. Discrimination still affects the poverty rate and unemployment.

Numerous causes exist that affect poverty in the world, but most sources agree that lack of education, poor health, and discrimination play a key role in causing poverty. Those causes can have an immense impact on countries, continents, and the whole Earth. The education and skill level, health or handicap status, and discrimination play a vital role in poverty. As scholars and professors try to concoct a remedy to heal unemployment and poverty, maybe the most detrimental pieces of the puzzle involve those three elements.