Generally, poverty can be defined as a state whereby an individual’s income is inadequate and cannot cover the basic needs. When there are many poor people in an area, the poverty becomes large scale and the society at large that lives in that particular area is considered as poor. This can be a group of people, a nation, or even a continent. I believe that poverty is relative. This means that a poor individual who lives in a very developed country might not be considered as poor among a less developed community. For example, some of the poor people who are living in the United States receive more income and have better standard of living compared to the poor people in some countries in the third world.
Poverty is not necessarily related to money and income only; it can be spiritual. Someone who has a lot or enough amount of money is materially rich, but may be spiritually poor. This means that although the individual has money, he or she still feels empty or unhappy. In contrast, there are people who are poor in terms of income, but rich is terms of spirituality. Furthermore, I would like to highlight that many people assume that money brings happiness. Well, money can buy all the materials in the world, but not happiness, love, belonging, and the other psychological needs of the human being. Therefore, we can say that money can only buy the physical world.
In worldwide, everyone is thinking about the effects of poverty and how to reduce it. However, we need to find out and eliminate the root causes of poverty. From a famous workshop held by Dr Phil, he addressed the root causes of poverty which he called the Big Five and they are ignorance, hopelessness, disease, dishonesty, and dependency. If each and every cause is traced and eliminated, poverty will certainly reduce. Nevertheless, trying to reduce the effects is a waste of time and causes the perpetuation of poverty. To sum up, I would like to say that we, the human being, caused poverty by our hands and we can eliminate it to a reasonable extent by using our hands