When does poverty become part of the culture? The culture of poverty’s formal development is attributed to Oscar Lewis; he created a thesis to explain this question. He seeks to understand poverty as a culture, with its own structure and rationale, more as a way of life passed down from generation to generation along family lines. The culture of poverty is a feature of highly stratified, competitive systems. This economic system tends to have high rates of unemployment and low wages for the “unskilled” jobs with high turn over rates. The theory maintains that culturally based attitudes or predisposition such as “present-mindedness” is the major barrier to economic mobility for many of the poor. (more…)





