by Ahmed Habib

Created on: October 25, 2009   Last Updated: October 29, 2009

Humans have reached into an age where there is dream of formulating a single global village. But even the age could not free it from one of the earliest curses; that is - poverty. No matter how scholars are having arguments on measuring or defining poverty; whether it is prosperous time or recession, whether the society is agricultural, industrial or post industrial, it continues.

According to United Nations, one fifth of the human races live in poverty and 600 million of them are extremely poor. In the western industrial countries, poverty ranges from 10 to 15 percent of the population and developing countries face a high rate of 70 percent. Now the question is why can't we say goodbye to this ancient curse?

Before going into the reasons, let's have a look at the conceptions on poverty. At its simplest expression, poverty refers to a basic lack of the means of survival. The poor are those who, even in normal circumstances are unable to feed and clothe themselves properly and risk death as a consequence.

Definition of poverty based on basic needs state that - failure to meet the minimum requirements of a family for personal consumption: food, shelter, clothing. It implies access to essential services, such as pure drinking water, sanitation, transport, health and education.

There is another concept of relative poverty and that is - those whose resources do not allow them to fulfill the elaborate social demands and customs which has been placed upon citizens of the society. So, when there are people whose lack of basic needs and incapable of fulfilling demands, there are people who have abandon of property at the same time. Mathematically there arise a chance to comprise an equation between poverty and inequality.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, the great French philosopher set the equation in his own languages. According to him, the origin of private property lay in private property. In his famous book 'On the origin of inequality and mankind', written in 1794, he showed that exploiting others was the base of rich and so of poverty. Poverty grows means somehow inequality also rises.

Hegel advanced the idea and came to a conclusion that poverty was the inevitable outcome of market forces. He mentioned that the modern world's challenge would be abolishing poverty. The idea becomes simple; a man cannot always live by his work and his wages cannot be sufficient to maintain him and that's why he is poor. The situation why a man cannot earn sufficient is created by the state

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