Perspectives on Inequality and Poverty Essay

Our society today is currently experiencing a widening of the gap between the rich and the poor. As the saying goes, â€Å"the rich is getting richer and the poor is getting poorer,† our society attests to such truth, where the wealthy is gaining more money while the poor’s case is getting worse by the minute. Poverty is a big problem ever since the dawn of man. In an ideal world, the number of resources produced could feed more than any of the hungry mouths all over the world. But in reality, wealth is not distributed properly to every living individual. There are those who get more as compared to those who get less or get nothing at all. The sad reality If you take into consideration every living individual in a certain community, only a small fraction of its population enjoy living a well-off life, and a majority suffer from lack of resources or doesn’t have enough to fill their stomachs. A fraction of imbalance in the distribution of resources and wealth affects a greater number of people, wherein the sad reality lies on whom are the ones getting much and who are the ones gaining a lot. This is the sad reality in our society, where people thrive in a world filled with inequality and sadly, majority of the people suffer from the extra gains of some people (Besley & Cord, 2007). Class inequality can be traced way back in the history of men, when people learned to classify themselves, making some superior and some, well, rather inferior. Another sad reality is that the ones who are in the higher echelons of the society are the ones who are not doing actual hard labor. These people are the one’s capitalizing from the hard work of the poor working class, sweating their lungs out, literally giving their sweat and blood just to make money. This labor force is the one who is actually earning the money; it is their effort and strength that makes the real cash, not the ones bossing them around. But the harshness of life is reflected in this situation: the ones working hard gets paid less, barely enough to make a living out of it, while the ones bossing everyone around gets a much bigger share, wherein they have exerted minimal or no real effort in doing so (Kohl, 2003). This is the present situation of the working class of the past, the present, and maybe of the future. There are some great thinkers who have pondered on these things so to speak. This people, though separated by different views, expressed their opinions about how inequalities in the classes happen and why poverty exists, depending on how they see the situation. Their take on the realities are reciprocated by approval or by rejection from the people looking at their ideas. Some may seem radical to others, but some deem that is the necessary thought for that certain specific topic. These great thinkers include Karl Marx, Max Weber and Oscar Lewis.