Jo Goodwin Parker Poverty

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Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Poverty is the worst form of violence”. According to Investopedia, poverty is a state or condition in which a person or community lacks the financial resources and essentials to enjoy a minimum standard of life and well-being that's considered acceptable in society. Poverty status in the United States is assigned to people that do not meet a certain threshold level set by the Department of Health and Human Services. Often poverty is something one would relate with people in the bottom of the social class. Jo Goodwin Parker’s “What is Poverty” essay changed change my ideas about what it means to be poor in the United States, and explained how poverty function in a class-based system, which exploits the poor, by showing a poor woman’s point of view on her life.
Reducing poverty has become an international concern, yet there is no international consensus on guidelines for measuring poverty. In pure economic terms, income poverty is when a family's income fails to meet a federally …show more content…
Typically it is measured with respect to families and not the individual, and is adjusted for the number of persons in a family. Economists often seek to identify the families whose economic position (defined as command over resources) falls below some minimally acceptance level. Similarly, the international standard of extreme poverty is set to the possession of less than 1$ a day. Frequently, poverty is defined in either relative or absolute terms. Absolute poverty measures poverty in relation to the amount of money necessary to meet basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. (unesco.org) In Parker’s essay, the woman seems to suffer from absolute poverty and seems to suffer for the basic needs in life for her kids and herself. This essay changed my idea of who suffers the most and to what extent that poverty plays in one’s life. Also how the social class system sees the people who are at the
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