Why is poverty a social problem?
The philosophy of free enterprise may suggest that people fall into poverty through making bad personal choices; that poverty is a personal problem. Through its ramifications, however, poverty may involve society at large.DefinitionA problem is a social problem insofar as it involves many people and requires not just individual action but a program of action to achieve remedies, according to Medical.Webends.com, an online medical terminology dictionary.IllustrationPoor people may refrain from expending their meager resources on vaccination against tuberculosis. This may endanger not only them but their neighbors, as tuberculosis spreads rampantly, suggests the book “Foundations of Community Health Nursing,” by Marcia Stanhope and Jeanette Lancaster.ImplicationIf poverty contributes to contagion, then society at large has an interest in alleviating it.Social SolutionAdam Smith, champion of free enterprise, saw the inability to enforce contracts as meriting a social solution because it a
