Why does poverty exist, and why and how do poor people end up being poor? The sociological perspectives introduced in the prior chapter provide some possible answers to these questions through their attempt to explain why American society is stratified – that is, why it has a range of wealth ranging from the extremely wealthy to the extremely poor. We review what these perspectives say generally about social stratification (rankings of people based on wealth and other resources a society values) before turning to explanations focusing specifically on poverty.
In general, the functionalist perspective and conflict perspective both try to explain why social stratification exists and endures, while the symbolic interactionist perspective discusses the differences that stratification produces for everyday interaction. The Snapshot table below summarizes these three approaches.
Theoretical Perspectives Snapshot
| Theoretical perspective |
Major assumptions |
| Functionalism |
Stratification is necessary to encourage people with special intelligence, knowledge, and skills to enter the most important occupations. For this reason, stratification is inevitable. However, poverty may also be viewed as a dysfunction of social institutions. |
| Conflict theory |
Stratification results from lack of opportunity and from discrimination and prejudice against the poor, women, and people of color. It is neither necessary nor inevitable. People in power make decisions that benefit them and widen economic inequality. |
| Symbolic interactionism |
Stratification affects people’s daily interactions, beliefs, and conceptions of themselves. The experience of poverty is a hardship that involves endless challenges. |
Structural Functionalism
As discussed, functionalist theory assumes that society’s structures and processes exist because they serve important functions for society’s stability and continuity. In line with this view, functionalist theorists in sociology assume that social class stratification or economic inequality exists because it serves important functions for society. This explanation was developed more than sixty years ago by Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (Davis & Moore 1945) in the form of several logical assumptions that imply stratification is both necessary and inevitable. When applied to American society, their assumptions would be as follows:
- Some jobs are more important than other jobs.
- These jobs require more skills and knowledge than other jobs.
- Relatively few people have the ability to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to do these jobs.
- Societies must promise higher incomes and other rewards to encourage people with the skills and knowledge to do these jobs.
For example, the job of a brain surgeon is more important than the job of a retail cashier. It takes more skills and knowledge to perform brain surgery than to check out customers. Most of us would be able to do a decent job of retail cashier, but very few of us would be able to become brain surgeons. Brain surgeons are paid far, far higher than retail cashiers, and likely have other benefits such as strong retirement packages and vacation days. Thus, stratification is thus necessary and inevitable.
To illustrate their assumptions further, say we have a society where retail cashiering and doing brain surgery both provide an income of $150,000 per year. (This example is very hypothetical, but please keep reading.) If you decide to work retail, you can begin making this money at age 16, but if you decide to become a brain surgeon, you will not start making this same amount until about age 35, as you must first go to college and medical school and then acquire several more years of medical training and testing. While you have spent 19 additional years beyond age 16 getting this education and training, and potentially taking out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, you could have spent those years in retail making $150,000 a year, or $2.85 million extra overall. Which job would you choose?
Functionalist theory argues that the promise of high income is necessary to encourage talented people to pursue important careers such as surgery. If physicians and restaurant servers made the same high income, would enough people decide to become physicians?
Public Domain Images – CC0 public domain
As this example suggests, many people might not choose to become brain surgeons unless considerable financial and other rewards awaited them. By extension, we might not have enough people filling society’s important jobs unless they know they will be similarly rewarded. If this is true, we must have stratification. And if we must have stratification, then that means some people will have much less money than other people. The functionalist view further implies that if people are poor, it is because they do not have the ability to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for the important, high-paying jobs.
This particular functionalist view may sound somewhat logical, but a few years after Davis and Moore published their theory, other sociologists pointed out some serious problems in their argument (Tumin 1953; Wrong 1959).
First, it is difficult to compare the importance of many types of jobs. For example, which is more important, doing brain surgery or mining coal? Although you might be tempted to answer with brain surgery, if no coal were mined then much of our society could not function. In another example, which job is more important, attorney or professor? (Be careful how you answer this one!)
Second, the functionalist explanation implies that the most important jobs have the highest incomes and the least important jobs the lowest incomes, but many examples, including the ones just mentioned, counter this view. Coal miners make less money than physicians, and professors earn less on average than lawyers. A professional athlete making millions of dollars a year earns many times the income of the president of the United States, but who is more important to the nation? Elementary school teachers do a very important job in our society, but their salaries are much lower than those of sports agents, advertising executives, and many other people whose jobs are far less essential.
Third, this functionalist view assumes that people move up the economic ladder based on their abilities, skills, knowledge, and, more generally, their merit. This implies that if they do not move up the ladder, they lack the necessary merit. However, this view ignores the fact that much of our stratification stems from lack of equal opportunity. Race, class, gender, and other areas of social location impact people's opportunities. Some people have less opportunity than others to acquire the skills and training they need to fill the types of jobs addressed by the functionalist approach.
Finally, this functionalist explanation does not justify the extremes of wealth and poverty found in the US and other nations. Even if we do have to promise higher incomes to get enough people to become physicians, does that mean we also need the amount of poverty we have? Do CEOs of corporations really need to make millions of dollars annually to get enough qualified people to become CEOs? Do people take on a position as CEO or other high-paying job at least partly because of the challenge, work conditions, and other positive aspects they offer? The functionalist view does not answer these questions adequately.
Another line of functionalist thinking focuses more directly on poverty than on stratification. This particular functionalist view provocatively argues that poverty exists because it serves certain positive functions for our society. These functions include the following: (1) poor people do the work that other people do not want to do; (2) the programs that help poor people provide a lot of jobs for the people employed by the programs; (3) the poor purchase goods, such as day-old bread and used clothing, that other people do not wish to purchase, and thus extend the economic value of these goods; and (4) the poor provide jobs for doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other professionals who may not be competent enough to be employed in positions catering to wealthier patients, clients, students, and so forth (Gans 1972). Because poverty serves all these functions and more, according to this argument, the middle- and upper-classes have a vested interested in neglecting poverty to help ensure its continued existence.
However, a different functionalist perspective focuses on how poverty may be a dysfunction of social institutions such as the state (government, law, policy), education, work, or family. For instance, if the state fails to provide for its poor or if higher ed is inaccessible to the poor, then society is missing out on the innovations and contributions of low-income individuals. Thus, there is instability in the social structure that must be addressed.
Conflict Theory
Conflict theory’s explanation of economic inequality draws on Karl Marx’s view of class societies and incorporates the critique of the functionalist view just discussed. Many different explanations grounded in conflict theory exist, but they all assume that stratification stems from a fundamental conflict between the needs and interests of the powerful or 'haves' in society and those of the weak or 'have-nots' (Kerbo 2012). The former take advantage of their position at the top of society to stay at the top, even if it means oppressing those at the bottom. At a minimum, they can heavily influence the law, media, and other social institutions in a way that maintains society’s class structure.
In general, conflict theory attributes stratification and thus poverty to lack of opportunity from discrimination and prejudice against the poor, women, people of color, and other marginalized groups. In this regard, it reflects one of the early critiques of the functionalist view that the previous section outlined. As we will see in this textbook, there are various obstacles that make it difficult for the poor, women, and people of color in the US to move up the socioeconomic ladder and to otherwise enjoy healthy and productive lives.
Because he was born in a log cabin and later became president, Abraham Lincoln’s life epitomizes the American Dream, which is the belief that people born into poverty can become successful through hard work. The popularity of this belief leads many Americans to blame poor people for their poverty.
US Library of Congress – public domain
Conflict theory emphasizes that individuals and groups at the top of social hierarchies have the power to make decisions about the nation that benefit them, which then reproduce existing social hierarchies. One concept that aligns with this perspective is the power elite, proposed by C. Wright Mills (of the sociological imagination), which describes the close ties between individuals at the top of the government, military, and corporate sectors. These highly-networked and wealthy individuals have strong influence over national policy decisions, such as the lowering of tax rates for the wealthy or the weakening of regulations for corporations, policies which benefit them. They may also pass legislation that cuts into social welfare programs, worsening conditions for people at the bottom of the social class hierarchy and widening economic inequality.
Symbolic Interactionism
Consistent with its micro-orientation, symbolic interactionism tries to understand poverty and economic inequality by looking at people’s interaction, experience, and understandings in their daily lives. Unlike the functionalist and conflict views, it does not necessarily try to explain why we have class inequality in the first place. Rather, it examines the differences that stratification makes for people’s lives and their interactions with other people.
Many detailed, insightful sociological books on the lives of the poor reflect the symbolic interactionist perspective (e.g., Anderson 1999; Liebow 1993; Rank 1994). These texts focus on different people in different places, but they all make very clear that the poor often lead lives of quiet desperation and must find ways of coping with being poor. In this view, the consequences of poverty discussed later in this chapter acquire a human face, and readers learn in great detail what it is like to live in poverty on a daily basis.
After years of systematically studying people in poverty, scholar Matthew Desmond (2023: 13-23) describes poverty like this:
"poverty is about money, of course, but is also a relentless piling on of problems. Poverty is pain, physical pain. ... Poverty is traumatic, and since society isn't investing in its treatment, poor people often have their own ways of coping with their pain. ... On top of the pain, poverty is instability. ... Poverty is the constant fear that it will get even worse. ... Poverty is the loss of liberty. ... Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you; that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed, roughed up and handcuffed. ... Poverty is embarrassing, shame inducing. ... Poverty is diminished life and personhood. It changes how you think and prevents you from realizing your full potential."
Sociological accounts of the poor provide a vivid portrait of what it is like to live in poverty on a daily basis.
Photo by Oto Godfrey is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
On a more lighthearted note, examples of the symbolic interactionist framework are also seen in the many literary works and films that portray the difficulties that the rich and poor have in interacting on the relatively few occasions when they do interact. For example, in the classic film Pretty Woman, Richard Gere plays a rich businessman who hires a sex worker, played by Julia Roberts, to accompany him to fancy parties and other affairs. Roberts' character has to buy a new wardrobe and learn how to dine and behave in these social settings, and much of the film’s humor and poignancy come from her awkwardness in learning the lifestyle of the rich. Thus, we are socialized into social class just as we are into gender and other social identities.
Levels of Explanations of Poverty
The functionalist and conflict views focus broadly on social stratification but only indirectly on poverty. When poverty finally attracted national attention during the 1960s, scholars began to try specifically to understand why poor people become poor and remain poor. Two competing explanations developed, with the basic debate turning on whether poverty arises from problems either within the poor themselves or in the society in which they live (Rank 2011). The first type of explanation follows logically from the functional theory of stratification and may be considered an individualistic explanation. The second type of explanation follows from conflict theory and is a structural explanation that focuses on problems in American society that produce poverty. The Explanations of Poverty table below summarizes these explanations.
Explanations of Poverty
| Explanation |
Major assumptions |
| Individualistic |
Poverty results from the fact that poor people lack the motivation to work and have certain beliefs and values that contribute to their poverty. |
| Structural |
Poverty results from problems in society that lead to a lack of opportunity and a lack of jobs. |
It is critical to determine which explanation makes more sense because, as sociologist Theresa C. Davidson (2009) observes, “beliefs about the causes of poverty shape attitudes toward the poor.” To be more precise, the particular explanation that people favor affects their view of government efforts to help the poor. Those who attribute poverty to problems in the larger society are much more likely than those who attribute it to deficiencies among the poor to believe that the government should do more to help the poor (Bradley & Cole 2002). The explanation for poverty we favor presumably affects the amount of sympathy we have for the poor, and our sympathy, or lack of sympathy, in turn affects our views about the government’s role in helping the poor. With this backdrop in mind, what do the individualistic and structural explanations of poverty say?
Individualistic Explanation
According to the individualistic explanation, the poor have personal problems and deficiencies that are responsible for their poverty. In the past, the poor were thought to be biologically inferior, a view that has not entirely faded, but today the much more common belief is that they lack the ambition and motivation to work hard and to achieve success. According to survey evidence, the majority of Americans share this belief (Davidson 2009). A more sophisticated version of this type of explanation is called the culture of poverty theory (Banfield 1974; Lewis 1966; Murray 2012). According to this theory, the poor generally have beliefs and values that differ from those of the nonpoor and that doom them to continued poverty. For example, they are said to be impulsive and to live for the present rather than the future.
Regardless of which version one might hold, the individualistic explanation is a blaming-the-victim approach. Critics say this explanation ignores discrimination and other problems in American society and exaggerates the degree to which the poor and nonpoor do in fact hold different values (Ehrenreich 2012; Holland 2011; Schmidt 2012). Regarding the latter point, they note that poor employed adults work more hours per week than wealthier adults and that poor parents interviewed in surveys value education for their children at least as much as wealthier parents. These and other similarities in values and beliefs lead critics of the individualistic explanation to conclude that poor people’s poverty cannot reasonably be said to result from a culture of poverty.
Structural Explanation
According to the second, structural explanation, which is a blaming-the-system approach, US poverty stems from problems in American society that lead to a lack of equal opportunity and a lack of jobs. These problems include (a) racial/ethnic, gender, age, and other forms of discrimination; (b) lack of good schooling and adequate health care; and (c) structural changes in the American economic system, such as the departure of manufacturing companies from American cities in the 1980s and 1990s that led to the loss of thousands of jobs. These problems help create a vicious cycle of poverty in which children of the poor are often fated to end up in poverty or near poverty themselves as adults.
As Rank (2011) summarizes this view, “American poverty is largely the result of failings at the economic and political levels, rather than at the individual level…In contrast to [the individualistic] perspective, the basic problem lies in a shortage of viable opportunities for all Americans.” Rank points out that the US economy during the past few decades has created more low-paying and part-time jobs and jobs without benefits, meaning that Americans increasingly find themselves in jobs that barely lift them out of poverty, if at all. Sociologist Fred Block and colleagues (2006) share this critique of the individualistic perspective:
“Most of our policies incorrectly assume that people can avoid or overcome poverty through hard work alone. Yet this assumption ignores the realities of our failing urban schools, increasing employment insecurities, and the lack of affordable housing, health care, and child care. It ignores the fact that the American Dream is rapidly becoming unattainable for an increasing number of Americans, whether employed or not.”
Most sociologists favor the structural explanation. As later chapters in this textbook document, racial/ethnic discrimination, lack of adequate schooling and health care, and other problems make it difficult to rise out of poverty. On the other hand, some ethnographic research supports the individualistic explanation by showing that the poor do have certain values and follow certain practices that augment their plight (Small et al. 2010). For example, the poor have higher rates of cigarette smoking (Goszkowski 2008), which causes them to have more serious health problems.
Adopting an integrated perspective, some researchers say these values and practices are ultimately the result of poverty itself (Small et al. 2010). These particular scholars concede that a culture of poverty does exist, but they also say it exists because it helps the poor cope daily with the structural effects of being poor. If these effects lead to a culture of poverty, they add, poverty then becomes self-perpetuating. If poverty is both cultural and structural in origin, these scholars say, efforts to improve the lives of people in the “other America” must involve increased structural opportunities for the poor and changes in some of their cultural values and practices.
