What Causes Individuals to Be Under

‐Resourced?

Therein lies the rub and the basic debate about poverty. Alice O’Connor, in her book

Poverty Knowledge, states that one of the reasons poverty has been such a difficult problem to solve is that there is little agreement on the cause or causes of poverty. In the research, there are four basic causes given for poverty: individual choices and behavior, absence of community resources, exploitation, and economic/financial/government systems.  In the early 1800s the prevalent theoretical construct in the United States was

genetic determinism, i.e., who you were and what you could become were determined by what you had inherited. With the socialist movements in government and the women’s movement came the theoretical construct of social  determinism, i.e., who you were and what you could become were determined by systems and social access. Social determinism also became the underlying theoretical construct for many social justice and multicultural studies. Concomitantly, colonialism largely came to an end throughout much of the world.

From the 1960s to 1980s in the United States, many systemic, social barriers were removed through

legislation—but not all. Starting in the 1970s, as the U.S. moved from industrial to knowledge

‐based economies, economic well

‐being increasingly was and is connected to education, social capital, and knowledge—i.e., human capacity. We talk about privilege being related to social class, race, or gender, and it is. Privilege also is heavily linked to the intergenerational transfer of knowledge. (1) For the last 30 years in social policy, social determinism has been the underlying theoretical construct for legislation, and so a huge amount of blame has been placed on the “system.” The “system” is bad.  All organizations and all systems have at their very essence two things: relationships and information (Wheatley, 1992). The human body is a system based upon the information (DNA) and the subsequent relationships (circulatory, muscular, nervous, etc.) to form the “system” that becomes your body.

All systems are limited by the capacity of the information and relationships within that system.

 

 

In other words, a system is only as strong as the individuals within the system and is very dependent upon human capacity.  Furthermore, all beginning learning occurs at a personal level in a “situated learning” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) where we find context, relationships, tasks, and language. Human capacity development begins in a “situated learning” environment and depends on the relationships and information within that environment.

Human capacity development (in this message) is also limited in this way: Some individuals will always need to be cared for; their human capacity cannot be developed to the extent that they can be selfsustaining (mental illness, physical illness, handicapping conditions, age, etc.).  The issue for any community is this: What percentage of poverty can you afford? If too many individuals

become under

resourced, eventually the resourced leave, and then virtually everyone is underresourced.
An example of this would be the country of Haiti.