ReviseSociology

Tag: poverty

  • Who is Poor in the UK?

    Who is Poor in the UK?

    22% of the UK population, or 13.9 million people live in poverty in the UK (2016). Poverty rates are higher for lone parent households (46%), disabled households (34), and rates also vary significantly by ethnicity (e.g. the Bangladeshi poverty rate = 50%).

  • UK Poverty Trends 1996 – 2017

    UK Poverty Trends 1996 – 2017

    How do we explain the long term decline in UK Poverty rate, and its more recent increase?

  • Social Mobility: Start Poor, Stay Poor?

    In July 2016 Theresa May gave a speech on the steps of Downing Street in which she proposed to build a ‘country that works for every one of us’ and not just for the ‘privileged few’. Seventeen months on, the board of the body charged with boosting social mobility resigned en masse, in a stunning…

  • Rich House, Poor House – Spreading the Myth of Meritocracy

    In this Channel 5 series, one family in the ‘wealthiest 10%’ of Britain swap lives for a week with a family in the ‘poorest 10% of Britain’. As I see it this programme performs an ‘ideological control function’ – spreading the myth of meritocracy. They two families swap houses, budgets and leisure-timetables for a week…

  • The End of Development?

    A summary of The End of Development: A Global History of Poverty and Prosperity, by Andrew Brooks (2017) This blog post covers Part 1: Making the Modern World Chapter 1: environmental determinism and early human history The argument in this chapter is that nature (as in the natural environment) does not determine human society and…

  • The End of Poverty? A Documentary taking a ‘Dependency Theory’ View of Underdevelopment and Development

    This 2008 Documentary seeks to answer the question of why there is still so much poverty in the world when there is sufficient wealth to eradicate it. In order to answer this question, the video goes back to 1492, which marks the start of European colonialism and the beginning of the global capitalist system, making…

  • The Myth of the American Dream

    Part of the traditional American Dream is that anyone, even children from low income families, can work their way through college, get a degree and be upwardly mobile. However, some recent research suggests that this is no longer the case – a full 50% of American university students from disadvantaged backgrounds drop out of college,…

  • The Effects of Poverty on Life Chances in the United Kingdom

    From lower educational attainment to poor mental health, poverty negatively affects life chances in several ways.

  • What is Poverty?

    Poverty is not having access to the basic things in life, considered normal in a society.

  • Global Gender Inequalities – A Statistical Overview

    Gender inequality is an extremely important aspect of development. Even if we put aside the significant social justice issues associated with the historical power differences between men and women, when you have half the population that are disempowered with less access to education, employment and healthcare, that alone is enough to drastically skew the social…