Galbraith

In Galbraith’s article titled “The Position of Poverty”, I agreed with many of his points about poverty such as his division of poverty into case and insular poverty as well as his overall definition of poverty and some of the solutions to it. Also, Galbraith’s point about creating artificial needs and wants being wasteful and destructive definitely rings true today with our generation’s current obsession with having the latest technology that not only has the greatest ability but looks the coolest. This just makes people focus on getting the latest and greatest and no longer think about trying to help the poor and what would best benefit the poor.
Galbraith’s general definition of poverty conflicts with the government’s definition of poverty that says that a family of four that has an income of less than $20,000 is at the poverty level. Instead, Galbraith says that poverty could be defined as people being degraded for living outside the categories which the community regards as acceptable. I think Galbraith’s definition is closer to the truth in the way that it shows how people will be treated because of poverty, not just the actual statistics of income versus people in a family. Many people feel the social strains of poverty because they do not want to be seen as low or unsociable just because they might not have the same level of income as others do. One example of this on a much smaller scale could be found in my high school. We had a poor section of our community that went to our high school and many of the upper-class students would look down upon the lower-class students solely based on what they did not have. The students didn’t know the lower-class student’s incomes, they were just basing their judgments on their categories they considered to be acceptable. The majority of the lower-class students that lived in these communities were Hispanic or black, only furthering their perceptions of what it means to be a lower-class citizen, when in actuality the majority of those at the poverty level are white.
Galbraith also said that poverty is divided into two types. First he talks of case poverty as being related to some characteristic of an individual that is afflicted with a mental deficiency, bad health, alcohol or other shortcomings. The second type he talks about is insular poverty which is more like an “island” of people that are in poverty. Here it is not just an individual but a group problem. One of the reasons that Galbraith mentions for insular poverty is the land and resources available. I agree with this in certain cases and to a certain extent. In some countries where the majority of the economy and living conditions still depend on farming and the environment, I agree that they would experience major poverty problems if they had something wrong in their environment. For a culture and country like the United States, we are less directly dependent on our environment for our economy and lifestyle. Unless some major environmental issue lasted for a long time here, I don’t think the U.S. would be very greatly affected.