Poverty And Social Inequality Sociology Essay

Social inequality is a situation in which there can be found differences between individual groups in a society from the point of view of their social groups, social circles or social status. In some parts of the world there are different social groups that do not have the same rights to propriety, vote, freedom of speech, health care or education.

Researches show that inequalities are still present now as well as in the past, but with some minor changes depending on the countries.

The easiest way to measure the differences in social classes is to grade people by their occupation. These differences are: differences in earning, standard of education, differences in style of dressing, accent, values, behaviour, prestige, power and wealth.

According to Stephen Moore in “Sociology Alive” one example of social scale is Registrar-General’s classification which divides all jobs in five categories: Professional and higher such as doctors, architects; Intermediate professionals and administrative personnel such as teachers and farmers; skilled for non-manual work such as assistants and skilled for manual such as miners, metalworkers; semi-skilled such as farm workers, train conductors; unskilled such as labourers on construction sites.

Every society has its own ways to decide the place in the hierarchy and in some cases, once an individual occupies a certain place in the hierarchy it may be hard to change but that depends entirely on the society they live in.

Over time the principle of stratifying classes has changed and varies from society to society. Some stratification systems based on the ascription idea say that people position in society is given at birth. Other relay on the idea that individuals can achieve their position in society by marriage, hard working, education or lottery winnings, but there are cases when people can gain their status from a mix of achievement and ascription.

A stratification system is opened or closed depending on how easy it is for an individual to move up or down the layers of society. This is also called social mobility and it can take place easier in opened societies rather than the closed ones where this is very unlikely to happen.

One example of a closed stratification system that was used in the past and it is still present today is the Caste system that can be found in modern day India. This system was founded on Hinduism and on the reincarnation belief, where each person is born and must remain in the same caste as seen in the table below:

Brahmin teachers / priests higher status

Kshatryas soldiers / landlords

Vaishyas merchants / traders lower status

Shudras servants / manual workers

Dalits (“untouchables”) do the worst jobs in society social outcasts

Another stratification example it is found in South Africa with its basis in ethnicity background is the apartheid system. In this society everything is classed in relation to a person’s skin colour, even education, health system benefits, employment and housing. Because in this society the position of an individual is ascribed to him at birth the system is similar to the caste system. The higher status was given to the white individuals in the detriment of black persons. In a civilised society this is called racism and it is condemned.

In the early 20th century across Europe, Russia and Japan the dominant stratification system was the Feudalism. The society was divided in four layers: Kings, Nobility, Knights and Peasants. The dominant class was the king’s class which was seen as a god given authority. Nobility and knights were mostly owners of lands given to them by the higher classes. Peasants, in their turn, were given small piece of land for which they had to serve the higher classes. In this system there was no chance of social mobility.

The term social mobility is the ability of an individual or groups to move from one social status to another. This can be measure on two different time scales, intra-generational which refers to the movement an individual has within his lifetime, and inter-generational which refers to the movement of a individual in reference with his parent generation. Taking in consideration inter-generational social mobility when a individual is born in a lower class family his chances to achieve a higher status would be lower than the ones of a child born in a upper class family, because of the differences in the parents income and so the education that would be available to him.

Today in some countries some governments have put in place a system which is trying to help the children from lower social classes to have the same chance in education as the rest. Some governments give a monthly allowance to the parents to be used on the school needs of their children; most of the European countries have free education up to a certain level so the children that are from a lower class family would have the chance to study at the same level as the rest of the children.

There has always been an association between health and social class and despite the welfare state and the improvements in health in all sections of societies over the years, this discrepancy remain. It applies to all aspects of health, including life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality and general levels of health. For some people, the failure to close the social gap is a disgrace, but others will claim that as long as these parameters are improving in all levels of society, there is no need for concern.

The inverse care law states that “in relation to health care and the welfare state, the idea that those who have the greatest need are least likely to get the resources and those whose need is least get the most resources” quoted from handout 19.09.2012

The welfare state in Britain is a system that is put in place in which the state takes responsibility to protect the welfare and health of its citizens to meet social needs, it is done trough provision of services and benefits. This is viewed as a safety net to protect the most vulnerable people and to guarantee them access to health care, housing, education and income. Pros towards this system are that everyone has easy access to it and it is fair towards everyone that needs it, Cons there are some people that abuse the system and would rather stay in a council house and live on the benefits than search for a job that would pay just a little bit more.

Theories of inequalities

In Karl Marx’s opinion the capitalist society is split into two different social classes: the bourgeoisie – the social class which were the owners of businesses, the employers; and the proletariat – the social class which were the working class, the employees. The two different classes have a conflict of interest because the employers wanted to increase their profit and the employees wanted higher wages. Because the bourgeoisie were the ones that owned everything they were able to decide on the wages they would give to the proletariat and because their interest was higher profit those wages would diminish, until one point where the poverty of the proletariat would reach a point where they would rebel against the bourgeoisie and a revolution would start. The result would be Socialism.

The Functionalist viewpoint comes from Davis and Moore which sees society working in a harmonious way, just like an organism, where every institution has its own role to play. This viewpoint needs a good hierarchy system put in place where each person knows what role they need to accomplish to be able to do their part in the evolution of the society. The functionalists agree that this society needs to allow mobility between classes ensuring that the most talented individuals are given the possibility to reach the top of the ladder so they can perform their duties most vital to the society.

Poverty

There are three types of poverty: absolute, relative and subjective poverty.

As it is shown in Sociology, GCSE-Collins, Walker and Walker (1997) argue that the definition of poverty chosen by the state is crucial from two points of view, first shows the government acceptance of the existence of poverty and second because it influence what policies are adopted to tackle poverty and how it will deal with poor people.

Absolute poverty relate to the insufficiency of income for providing minimum needed to survive. People living in absolute poverty are barely able to survive because they lack even the most basic needs like food, clean water, shelter and clothing. Absolute poverty is hard to define because it is hard to state what exactly the limit of survival is. This differs according to age, lifestyle and climate.

Strength: it can be compared from society to society; it can be compared over time

Weakness: what counts as necessity or requirements vary from society to society.

Relative poverty is measured in relationship to the society around the individual, because a relatively poor individual has less than the average income. This differs from society to society. What is considered a necessity in some country may not be the same in others.

Strength: takes into account expectation in the society; can afford to celebrate certain holydays.

Weakness: can’t be compared over time or between societies; have inequalities rather than poverty; agreement over what is essential; expectations differ from individual to individual.

Subjective poverty is harder to measure because it differs from one individual to another. Some consider themselves poor because they do not have the same buying power as someone they relate to.

Culture of poverty

This approach takes in consideration that if one individual is brought up in a poor household they have a slim to none chance of escaping poverty because of the poverty of their parents. The Culture of poverty argument was developed by Oscar Lewis while studying the poverty in Central America. The culture of these people was different from the society they lived in.

Weakness: it is deterministic- can’t get out

Poverty Cycle

Because some poor people do not support their children and do not encourage them to strive to do better and finish school they condemn the next generation to a life of poverty from childhood.

Strength: predictable

Weakness: it is deterministic and generational.

New right view

This idea is based on the fact that the poor stopped to look after themselves and have developed a dependency culture and have no incentive to change that. All of this is caused by high enough benefits offered by the state.

Strength: inequalities are desirable for society; creates incentives to work harder

Weakness: discourage self-improvement, without welfare state there will be a need for these people to work.

Situational constraints

These usually appear in areas where the dominant social class is predominantly poor, unemployed or employed in a low wage job. Those who grow up here have a hard time to get out of this social class and a high percentage of them end up being unemployed or working in a low paid jobs.

Marxist view about poverty says that it is a good idea to have poverty because in that way there will always be a pool of labourers that will be in need of jobs and it will give employers the possibility to keep the wages down because they will always have people looking for work. In this way unions will not have the power to ask for higher wages. In fact having a welfare state stops people from revolting.

Taking in consideration all of the above, the best system was the functionalism, because even though they stated a need for class stratification, also wanted harmony in society and enough social mobility for those talented to move up on the ladder in achieving their goals and in helping of society. For a society to work properly, it will always be a need of class stratification, but with enough mobility between the social layers where everyone works primarily for the benefit of the rest and then for their own.