INSTITUTIONALIZED POVERTY

A number of years ago an Asian Indian theologian named Jayakumar Christian wrote an excellent book about poverty & the church’s response to it.

He identifies one of the causes of poverty as fallen institutions & cultures. A related term is “systemic causes” of poverty.

In every setting where poverty exists, there are systemic reasons. In some places the caste system is a major factor. In other places political corruption or the concentration of wealth & other resources are symptoms of systemic contributors to poverty. Often, religious or philosophical beliefs affirm the idea that the poor are rightly in a condition of poverty.

Because poverty is increasing in the US, it is appropriate to look at systemic causes & contributors that perpetuate & deepen it.

It is my conviction that poverty in the US has deepened & been perpetuated in large part because it has been institutionalized. The identification radicalization of various “classes” in the culture & the attempt to radicalize them tends to pit one class against another (such as the “disenfranchised” 99% versus the “wealthy: 1%).

There is an entire bureaucracy that has evolved since LBJ’s Great Society of the 1960s which thrives because of the existence of poverty. (After all, what would happen to all those faceless, nameless people sitting in cubicles if poverty were eliminated?)

If we want to think seriously about systemic factors that cause or perpetuate poverty, we must be willing to anticipate a day when the ideologies & values that undergird the institutions of poverty will end or become irrelevant.

Class identification & warfare must be cast aside. Making a lifetime of working with so-called poverty alleviating programs that always seem to grow rather than diminish must not be the career path of aspiring young people. Rejecting the myth that Big Government has the answers to our social problems will also bring us along the path of healing & the empowerment of the poor.