The Research Of Poverty In The Society Of The United States (1890-1960)

What is poverty? Simply means that one person has not sufficient income to maintain the basic standard of life. Even though such a quantified standard is a subjective judgment. Different countries have different poverty lines which are just the strategic positioning of each country. The United State has began to publish its poverty line every year after 1959. It has showed that the poverty ratio is at a high level.The reason why poverty happens in the early time of the human civilization was well explained by "An Essay on the Principle of Population". When the Industry Revolution happened there was a diversion. The same case was happened in small areas like in one country. The bottom Americans were richer and they had a better prosperity than the bottom in Europe in about 1774. But things changed as the industry process goes on. The nice prosperity and life was never exist. The United States began to produce new poverty and have the fundamental reason to produce more poverty.The poverty had not been relived after the end of 19th century when the US became the most financially powerful country in the world. The group who will most likely be trapped in poverty are workers in factories, the African Americans, the oversea migrants, one-parent family, disabled people, orphans. There are duplication in these groups but each group has its specific reason of falling into poverty. There are some event influence the whole country as well as the poverty, e.g. Acts of migration, Acts of employment, the economy cycle and economy crisis especially the "Big Depression", the twice world war and the "Cold War". The downtown poverty is also a feature of the poverty happened during the modernization. The former farmers left the farmlands and crowded to the cities, but lots of the farmers had trapped in poverty because of a differing style of survive. As the increasing population of the migrants and the developing of the industry, there had emerged more and more slums which trend to create more poverty and become larger and larger. All above are the focus of this essay. We also analysis the impacts of the American mainstream culture and the government system on poverty.This essay has collected and analysed lots of data to justify my points. There are some assumptions in the analysis, e.g. using the standard distribution model to analysis the whole when I only have the weighted number, and the intrinsic assumptions in the models we use. This essay uses the "Engel's coefficient", the "Kuznets curve", the "Iron law of wages", the theory of economy cycle, the natural unemployment rate, the Matthew effect and poverty culture when analyzing poverty and interpreting the reason of poverty. The conclusion is that during the modernization after the industry revolution the US had a structure of society which had failed mechanism created a high proportion of poverty. The life standard of poverty is increasing from extreme poverty to the level which is considerable rich to some other counties. This article is trying to uncover the reasons of the poverty in the U.S. as well as helping the decision making in the Chinese anti-poverty campaign.