Cycles of Suffering

In today's heavily capitalistic, and inevitably classist society, poverty traps are prevalent. The wealth that any individual attains over their lifetime is almost always predetermined by the household that they are born into. This is caused by a plethora of factors, such as a lack of a proper education, social orthodoxy and deprivation of basic and fundamental social benefits. The theory that people born into poverty die in similar situations, is lovingly christened the ‘poverty trap theory.’ In a country where almost 70% of people live on less than $2 per day while it is experiencing a population boom at the same time, such a phenomena is extremely easy to spot, and it threatens to confine hundreds of millions of people to the substandard living conditions they are bound to- by birth.

The poverty trap theory was initially introduced by Ragnar Nurkse in 1953 to explain extremely low economic activity in several regions and countries. However, the existence of such  phenomena can be dated to the emergence of the human race itself. Despite the claims of several opponents to the economic ideology, poverty traps are observed in almost all societies, not just capitalist ones. Examples can be taken in the extremely hard conditions faced by the ‘serfs’ in the feudal system, where they were forced to provide agricultural labour for their lord’s, the ‘sharecropping system’ post the American Civil War, where entire African-American communities were forced to work in fields in exchange for usually inadequate amounts of food, as well as the Indian caste system, which limited social mobility and restricted lower castes to work odd jobs and prevented them from getting an adequate education. 

It is easy to find the root cause of poverty traps-poverty itself. In any society with an advanced form of governance, the emergence of classism has been an inevitable occurrence. The ability of humans to accumulate large amounts of wealth and power is usually negated by the extremely large number of people who are relegated to second and third classes. These people, as well as their children, are often restricted from accessing necessary facilities for human development, such as education and shelter. When children are not educated and forced to sustain for their families at an extremely young age, this cyclic poverty sustains itself. According to statistics, people ridden with poverty on average give birth to more children than their wealthier counterparts, due to factors such as socio-cultural orthodoxy, a need to support the family as well as desire to continue the family legacy.

Poverty traps do not impact just individuals and households, but economies and nations at a whole. Obviously, by causing the rampant propagation of poverty in a society, poverty traps have the potential to be deadly towards any economy. In any society with such widespread poverty, economic growth is unlikely to occur, since a large demographic of the population is unable to produce any income for themselves and their families. Since economic growth cannot take place in such an economy, development is almost impossible. As a result, there will be distinctions formed by the differences in wealth, and a large and ever-increasing percentage of the population will be bound within the inescapable confines of poverty.

Though no economy has ever been credited with completely eradicating poverty and the subsequently formed poverty traps, notable examples of economies where poverty has been exponentially reduced can be taken in the likes of post-Korean war South Korea and present-day Singapore. Successful measures such as a focus on social safety nets, an emphasis on investment in education, infrastructure and technology have been adopted by various economies in attempts to replicate their success. However, we, as humans, appear far from bridging inequalities and the prevalence of ‘poverty traps’ looks to be infallible, unless extraordinary action is to be taken.