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Poverty is a depressing condition in which an individual or a family is unable to afford an adequate level of living in keeping with the society's standards. Absolute poverty is a life-threatening condition of deprivation of access to basic necessities of life such as food, shelter, clothing, and health care (Burton, 1992). The paradox of poverty in the midst of affluence has been a major challenge faced by the United States historically. While the rich gets richer, the conditions of the poor are getting much worse. Approximately 40 million people in the U.S. are classified as poor by the U.S. Census Bureau (2004). Thus, poverty remains as a major social problem in the country despite several decades of the War on Poverty.
Social scientists have raised questions such as: why are so many people poor in a nation endowed with abundant resources unparalleled by any international or historical standards? What are the causes and consequences of poverty in the U.S.? Are the poor solely responsible for being poor or are they passive victims of structural forces beyond their control? Scholars and policy makers have attempted to address these salient questions with multiple and often conflicting answers. Up-to-date, there is a lack of consensus on explanations of poverty. Different authors bring their paradigms, ideological orientations, and disciplines to bear on how poverty is explained. The intersection of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and nativity in social inequality and resource deprivation is often emphasized by scholars embracing structural attribution while individual level traits are noted by others favoring individual level explanations.
As noted by Cotter (2002), despite the long standing sociological interest in poverty, social science research on this subject tends to oscillate with economic cycles-with less attention paid to the plights of the poor during the period of economic expansion and much interest revitalized during the period of economic contraction as occurred in the 1980s during the Reagan Administration and recently during the present George W. Bush's Administration. Wilson's 1987 book "The Truly Disadvantaged," energized a resurgence of interest in the study of poverty and sociological research has proliferated hitherto (see Brady, 2003:716).
While poverty was ubiquitous during the Great Depression, the War on Poverty launched during the mid-1960s was a cause for optimism that poverty can be...