Why Poor Countries are Poor | Cultural Perspective |

“Culture is a share, learned, and symbolic system of values, ideas, beliefs and practices that shapes and influences our perceptions and behavior”. We can draw the following things from this definition of culture:

1. Culture is shared by members of society. There is no culture of one.

2. The process of learning one’s culture is known as “enculturation”

3. Culture is unavoidable subjective.

4. Culture exists inside our collective minds.

5. Culture is what we collectively think or want it to be.

6. Culture must be learned and constantly reproduced.

7. When culture Is reproduced, there occur significant variations.

The significance of culture includes “Culture has the power”. Culture can shape and influence the behavior of individuals at both individual and collective levels. We can best explain the phenomenon of terrorism and genocide from the perspectives of culture.

“Lack of sufficient resources to meet the basic necessities of life” is called poverty. This is also called “Absolute Poverty” or “Extreme Poverty”. One of the basic sufficient resources includes enough food to survive, clean water, and shelter. This we can say is a qualitative definition of poverty.

The World Bank gives us a statistical definition of poverty. According to the World Bank, the person who earns less the $1.90 per day is a poor man. According to this definition, we can say that there are no poor people in the United States. To cope with this problem, we have a concept of Relative Poverty. Through Relative Poverty, we measure the rate of poverty according to the perspective of one country under discussion.

We can also measure poverty in terms of health, education, employment opportunities, sanitation, political empowerment, and the Human Development Index (HDI).

Oscar Lewis‘s Culture of Poverty: Oscar Lewis gives us his culture of poverty model to show that all the poor people of poor countries share some common characteristics. This makes them different from the non-poor countries. With the passage of time, these people constitute a “way of life” which he termed as “Culture of Poverty”. The explanation of this is given in the video.

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