A thought of Poverty

To prepare for class discussion related to the topic of poverty, each student’s required to ask several local people about their opinions and viewpoints regarding to this problem. I did try to approach to two people with different income level to see whether their ideas have any common as well as conflicting points to comment about that. In fact, it turned out that both shared the similar thought on poverty in terms of material life, expressing that poverty is a condition that almost everyone wants to escape from because of the lack in fundamental living conditions. Nevertheless, the woman who is department head with monthly salary counted in US thousand unit seemed to focus more on the access to social capital and social exclusion point when comparing between the poor and non-poor aspect. With the conception of a banker, she expressed: “Poor people in society never have chance to borrow a certain amount of money from the bank because of their high probability of default risk”. That’s a typical fact, with the exception of just few social policy that guarantee provided by Bank of Social Policy can become the reliable source to release limited funds to help the poor. Additionally, she also pointed out the non-monetary disadvantages that the poor have to suffer like powerlessness, lack of self-representation and freedom.

 In fact, poverty is a very complex social issue and it differs from people to people in terms of definition and characteristics. Some people, though full of everything needed to support for a luxurious life yet still claim that they haven’t enjoyed the happiness of life because of their poor spiritual life. And people have mo limit for satisfaction, once they got something yet looking to others around them and found out that they haven’t achieved what the others have, they become jealousy and do everything to be as equally fashionable and successful as the others.

To me, poverty is a multi-dimensional conception and if I have to make a short definition by myself, it would be said that poverty is both a monetary and non-monetary problem that lead to consequences everyone in society has to pay the price, no matter personally whether you have experienced a poor life or not.

I’ve read a recent news that Vietnam and Gana are the two nations in the world that have gained a lot of success in the campaign implementation of poverty reduction, with significantly high rate of people literacy. That’s a happy news, yet we still have many things to do if we want this achievements continue to be developed and received powerful progress in a long term schedule.