Document Type
Article
Abstract
Poverty, throughout the pre-modern and modern periods, has elicited a variety of attitudes and responses. Attitudes of the middle and upper classes toward poverty have alternated between thinking of it as an unavoidable natural phenomenon cast upon an unfortunate group of people, and seeing it as being caused by slothful indigents who are too lazy to work. Responses to the problem of poverty have run the gamut from moral chastisement to indoor relief (laboring in a workhouse forinordem to qualify for benefits), to the outright granting of benefits. Yet until the early twentieth century, little was done in terms of attempting to define what poverty actually is.
Publication Date
1985
Recommended Citation
Medema, Steven, "Considerations of Economic Justics: A Movement towards a new definition of Poverty" (1985). Bouwsma Paper Contest. 3.
https://digitalcommons.calvin.edu/philosophy_bouwsma/3