Compare poverty throughout the world and explain its consequences

What does it mean to be poor? Does it mean being a single mother with two kids in New York City, waiting for the next paycheck in order to buy groceries? Does it mean living with almost no furniture in your apartment because your income doesn’t allow for extras like beds or chairs? Or does it mean having to live with the distended bellies of the chronically malnourished throughout the peripheral nations of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia? Poverty has a thousand faces and a thousand gradations; there is no single definition that pulls together every part of the spectrum. You might feel you are poor if you can’t afford cable television or buy your own car. Every time you see a fellow student with a new laptop and smartphone you might feel that you, with your ten-year-old desktop computer, are barely keeping up. However, someone else might look at the clothes you wear and the calories you consume and consider you rich.

What you’ll learn to do:

• Understand the differences between relative, absolute, and subjective poverty
• Describe the economic situation of some of the world’s most impoverished areas
• Explain the cyclical impact of the consequences of poverty

Learning Activities

The learning activities for this section include:

• Reading: Types of Global Poverty
• Reading: Poverty Around the World
• Reading: The Impact of Poverty
• Self-Check: Global Wealth and Poverty