The Culture of Poverty 3/13/10 Revision

The chronically poor populations seem to all share certain characteristics. I believe this is due to a Culture of Poverty, inflicted by outside forces, but maintained in large part by the poor people themselves. It is not a racial or ethnic phenomenon except inasmuch as certain races and ethnicities suffer from poverty more than others.

Some evidence for this - black African immigrants are more of a "model minority" than East Asians. Black Americans, however, are not. Why? Because Black Americans' ancestors had their cultures systematically obliterated and a culture of poverty was intentionally put in place by white slaveowners.

Cultures of poverty are all over the place; Ciudad Juarez; Palestine; Appalachia; USA inner cities (Eminem?); all through Latin America and the Middle East; Russia; etc. The culture of poverty has certain predictable effects on the people of that culture. Violence; lack of value of intellectualism; treating women and other races badly; lack of respect for the law; a sense of entitlement (which I am not sure is unwarranted - poverty in the presence of extreme wealth violates the Right to Own (and Earn) Property).

Also, single moms, high incidence of AIDS, many children per family...These are, I believe, because poor people stop using k-type breeding strategies and move towards r-type breeding strategies. You'll also see either chaos (Somalia) or brutal oppression (China).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-selection

I do recognize that this is a biological theory that I am applying to sociology - Social Darwinism kind of thinking - and so is not necessarily valid.

I suspect this may be related to the commonality that Communists see in all people of the working class.

Because these are predictable effects, there is clearly something about poverty that influences people heavily to behave this way.

Basically, people get desperate and they'll start playing rough. It's human nature. There's little opportunity cost for their choices as far as they can tell. What do they have to lose?