Why do we have poverty in a country as rich as America?
While many people, including some scholars, seem to think
the answer is simple, a thoughtful analysis suggests that the
antecedents of poverty are quite complex. The first complication is
that the poverty population is much more diverse than many people
imagine. The poverty population is a elaborate mix of people who
vary by age, race, sex, geographic location, and family structure. The
poor are generally stereotyped as primarily single women and their
children, illegitimate or otherwise, along with street people. But,
among the poor can be found the elderly, often living alone, married-
couple families with children in which one or sometimes even both
parents are employed, young healthy males who may or may not be
in the labor force, single or married adults without children, and farm
workers following crop rotations across the nation. The poor can be
found in every state, in central cities, in suburbs and rural areas in
every region of the nation. Does it seem reasonable that the same
factor or factors are responsible for the poverty of all these diverse
groups of people? Is an eighty-five-year-old widow poor for the same
reasons as an eighteen-year-old single mother or an alcoholic derelict?

Not likely. The most common mistake in thinking about the causes
of poverty is to generalize based on one group among the poor. If we

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