Essay On Economic Inequality And Poverty

Think about this...

A homeless man, sits on the pavement in the scorching heat, hungry and on the verge of death. Along comes a well to do young man, holding a packet of potato crisps. He sees the homeless man, glances at him and walks away, chucking the packet of crisps into a dustbin a few metres away from the homeless man, upon realizing that he doesn’t quite like the flavour. Your initial reaction might be “That’s not fair!” What then, constitutes fairness/equality?

Equality is "the right of different groups of people to have a similar social position and receive the same treatment" (Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus, 2017).

Differentiating Economic Inequality and Poverty.

Barcalow (2007) differentiates economic inequality and poverty as, "People are economically unequal when some have more wealth or income than others. On the other hand, people are poor when they cannot or can barely afford what their society considers life's necessities."

It is possible to have a society with poverty and no economic inequality and also one with economic inequality and no poverty. Comparing the income of two societies, the society having the lower ratio of the lowest annual income to the highest annual income is

The question now becomes, is poverty in the midst of affluence immoral? Poverty, the state of having too little money to afford life's necessities could happen in two main ways, either voluntary or through involuntary actions. Those who argue that poverty in the midst of affluence is not moral would put up the argument that it is not immoral because the poor people are poor because they chose to be poor. That is something which might be true but not always because some people become poor not because they want to but because they end up in circumstances that force them to be