What are the social forces that cause poverty? How can they be changed?
No one knows; no one knows. There are at least two classes of poverty: developing nations where almost everyone is absolutely poor and developed countries where a much smaller percentage is relatively poor and almost no one is absolutely poor. http://aspe.hhs.gov/POVERTY/papers/relab… http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/hi… The first group have been studied extensively by developmental economists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development… with little consensus other the fact that social and cultural factors are critical. (One of the classical questions is why there is such disparate wealth inside developed countries: northern Italy vs. southern Italy; the extreme eastern part of Canada vs. the rest of the country; etc. There, it is clear, the
