ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the distinction between how our society responds to the needs of the poor and how it reacts to the very structure of poverty. The important and necessary process of reducing the suffering of the poor to tolerable limits, wittingly or not, can serve to perpetuate systemic poverty. Systemic poverty is perpetuated when dependence upon such workers is taken for granted in the structures and practices of institutions in society. The chapter provides the reader with a list of reasons people find themselves in poverty and carefully delineates the critical difference between what is meant by the terms the poor and poverty. Poverty also refers to a social arrangement by which the poor, while providing for essential needs of the non-poor, receive wages that are less than it costs them to live. It facilitates the process by which some can have higher social and economic status.
