How do functionalists define poverty?
I don’t know about a direct “definition” of poverty by functionalists, but I do know that they thought it was necessary for some people to be poor. Functionalists were of the era when positivism and social darwinism were very popular, so they believed that people that worked the hardest succeeded the most. Everything in society had a purpose to them, so the threat of poverty in the reality of a competitive economy was a motivator for success. Sociologists now understand that this perspective has little to do with reality, and functionalism has since become very unpopular in sociology for its conservative ideology.
