Blog Assignment 2 - Post 1. entry 1: Rank Chapter 3

A Structural Vulnerability Explanation of Poverty

Mark Robert Rank :

  
 Supports this contention by defining three premisses of structural vulnerability of poverty:

1.)   He discusses the particular characteristics, such as the lack of human capital, tend to place individuals in 

 a state of vulnerability when detrimental events and crisis occur, an example of this is, not having a job or loss of a job, Family break up and ill health all are often the result of poverty.   

Rank states that lack of human capital also increases the likelihood that such that such events will occur (particularly in the labor market).   Human capital characteristics help to explain who in the population is likely to encounter poverty more frequently and for longer periods of  time.

2.)   The acquisition of human capital is strongly influenced by the impact of social class in the process.   The ones who grow up in working-class or lower-income homes face greater obstacles in their attempts to acquire marketable educations and skills during their lifetime.   Additional background characteristics also play a role in the acquisition of human capital, including race, gender and particular innate abilities.

3.)   Individual characteristics help to explain who loses out at the economic game, the structural forces described ensure that there will be losers in the first place.   The dynamics of poverty can be described  as a game of musical chairs in which those with the least advantageous characteristics are likely to find themselves without a chair and therefore left standing, with a heightened risk of economic vulnerability.  

Given that  poverty is largely rooted in the structure of American society, how might we better understand the specific patterns of poverty and how they plat themselves out on a daily basis.