By Subhash Dhuliya
Poverty is not merely a lack of income—it is the outcome of historical injustices, unequal power structures, and global economic forces that shape who gets access to opportunities and who remains excluded. This article examines how colonial legacies, institutional failures, capability deprivation, and contemporary market dynamics converge to create persistent poverty, and why addressing it requires transforming systems—not just expanding welfare.
Photo: Nikola Tomašić. unsplash
The New Face of Poverty: How Historical Injustice and Digital-Era Inequality Shape Human Freedom Today Amid Global Upheaval
Poverty today is far more complex than a simple shortage of income; it is the cumulative result of historical injustices, entrenched power structures, and contemporary global forces that determine who thrives and who is systematically left behind. Colonial extraction, unequal land ownership, caste and racial hierarchies, and decades of policy neglect continue to shape the distribution of opportunities, even as neoliberal globalization deepens inequalities through volatile markets, precarious work, and the concentration of wealth in a few corporate giants.
At the same time, institutional weaknesses—from underfunded public health and education systems to governance failures—limit people’s ability to convert resources into real freedoms, echoing Amartya Sen’s capability approach. The digital era has created new divides: between those who benefit from AI-driven growth and those pushed further to the margins by automation, misinformation, and technological exclusion.
Climate change is intensifying these disparities, disproportionately affecting communities that contributed least to the crisis while eroding livelihoods and forcing migration. Understanding poverty in this present context means seeing it not as a natural condition but as a product of structural inequality—one that demands systemic reforms in economic governance, social protection, digital access, and global cooperation to ensure equity, dignity, and real human freedom.
Poverty is not merely a lack of income or resources; it is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon rooted in historical, social, economic, and political structures. Drawing from a range of seminal works, including Roots of Poverty by Fanindam Deo, Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen, Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, and others, this article explores the origins of poverty and the systemic factors that perpetuate it. By examining historical contexts, economic policies, social inequalities, and individual agency, we uncover the intricate web that sustains poverty and consider pathways toward its alleviation.
Historical and Social Foundations of Poverty
In Roots of Poverty: A Social History, Fanindam Deo traces poverty’s origins to historical systems of exploitation, including colonialism, feudalism, and caste-based hierarchies. Deo argues that these systems created enduring inequalities by concentrating wealth and power in the hands of elites while marginalizing large populations. For instance, colonial policies in Asia and Africa extracted resources and disrupted local economies, leaving lasting legacies of underdevelopment.
This historical perspective aligns with Gunnar Myrdal’s Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, which examines how colonial legacies, combined with weak institutions and cultural rigidities, entrenched poverty in South Asia. Myrdal emphasizes the “cumulative causation” of poverty, where low productivity, inadequate education, and poor health reinforce each other in a vicious cycle.
Ajit Kumar Dutta’s Poverty: Its Roots and Remedies further underscores the role of social structures, particularly in rural contexts. Dutta highlights how unequal land distribution and lack of access to credit perpetuate poverty among agrarian communities. These structural barriers limit economic mobility, trapping individuals in subsistence-level existence. Similarly, Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion focuses on the world’s poorest populations, arguing that poverty in certain countries is exacerbated by geographic isolation, conflict, and weak governance. Collier’s “poverty traps”—such as civil war, resource curses, and landlocked geography—illustrate how historical and structural factors converge to sustain deprivation.
Economic Systems and Globalization
Economic systems and global policies play a critical role in shaping poverty’s persistence. In Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz critiques the neoliberal policies promoted by institutions like the IMF and World Bank, which often prioritize market liberalization over social welfare. Stiglitz argues that structural adjustment programs in developing countries, intended to spur growth, frequently led to increased inequality and poverty by dismantling social safety nets and prioritizing exports over local needs.
This perspective is echoed in Viviane Forrester’s The Economic Horror, which portrays globalization as a force that marginalizes the poor by prioritizing corporate interests and technological advancements over human welfare.
Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat and The Lexus and the Olive Tree offer a more optimistic view of globalization, suggesting that technological advancements and interconnected markets can create opportunities for the poor. However, Friedman acknowledges that these benefits are unevenly distributed, often bypassing those without access to education or infrastructure. For example, rural farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, as described in Roger Thurow’s The Last Hunger Season, struggle to integrate into global markets due to inadequate transportation and storage facilities, leaving them vulnerable to price fluctuations and food insecurity.
Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty proposes that extreme poverty can be eradicated through targeted investments in health, education, and infrastructure. Sachs advocates for a “big push” approach, where international aid and government policies work together to lift populations out of poverty traps. However, critics like Banerjee and Duflo in Poor Economics argue that such macro-level interventions often overlook the nuanced realities of the poor. Their research emphasizes the importance of understanding the decision-making processes of impoverished individuals, revealing how small-scale, evidence-based interventions—such as providing mosquito nets or deworming treatments—can yield significant results.
The Human Dimension: Agency and Freedom
Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom reframes poverty as a deprivation of capabilities rather than merely a lack of income. Sen argues that poverty stems from the inability to exercise freedoms, such as access to education, healthcare, and political participation. For Sen, development is about expanding these capabilities, enabling individuals to lead lives they value. This perspective shifts the focus from economic metrics like GDP to human well-being, emphasizing the need for inclusive policies that empower marginalized groups.
Julissa Arce’s memoir, My (Underground) American Dream, illustrates this concept through a personal lens. As an undocumented immigrant, Arce faced systemic barriers that limited her access to education and employment. Her journey to becoming a Wall Street executive highlights how individual agency, coupled with opportunities for education and social mobility, can break cycles of poverty. However, Arce’s story also underscores the structural challenges—such as discriminatory immigration policies—that restrict capabilities for millions of others.
Similarly, Portfolios of the Poor by Daryl Collins and colleagues reveals the financial ingenuity of the poor. Through detailed studies of household budgets in India, Bangladesh, and South Africa, the authors show how impoverished families manage complex financial portfolios, balancing loans, savings, and informal insurance to survive. This resilience challenges stereotypes of the poor as passive victims, highlighting their agency in navigating economic constraints. However, the book also underscores the need for better financial tools, such as accessible microfinance, to enhance their capabilities.
Behavioral and Psychological Insights
Banerjee and Duflo’s Poor Economics and Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel’s More Than Good Intentions delve into the behavioral and psychological dimensions of poverty. Banerjee and Duflo argue that the poor often make decisions under extreme scarcity, which can lead to seemingly irrational choices, such as prioritizing immediate needs over long-term investments. For example, a family might forgo school fees to afford a festival, not out of irresponsibility but because social obligations provide a sense of dignity and community. Understanding these trade-offs is crucial for designing effective interventions.
Karlan and Appel emphasize the role of behavioral economics in poverty alleviation. They advocate for “nudges”—small changes in how choices are presented—that can encourage better outcomes. For instance, offering savings accounts with automatic deposits can help the poor build assets over time. These insights complement Mark Lutz’s Unpoverty, which highlights the transformative power of grassroots initiatives. Lutz argues that empowering communities through education, microenterprise, and local leadership can address poverty’s psychological toll, fostering hope and self-reliance.
The Role of Institutions and Policy
Weak institutions and misguided policies are recurring themes in the literature on poverty. Myrdal’s Asian Drama critiques the “soft states” of South Asia, where corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies hinder development. Similarly, Collier’s The Bottom Billion points to governance failures in the world’s poorest countries, where elites often prioritize personal gain over public welfare. These institutional weaknesses exacerbate poverty by limiting access to justice, education, and economic opportunities.
Sachs’ The End of Poverty and Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents both call for stronger international cooperation to address institutional failures. Sachs advocates for increased aid to build infrastructure and human capital, while Stiglitz emphasizes the need for fair trade policies and debt relief. However, Banerjee and Duflo caution against one-size-fits-all solutions, arguing that policies must be tailored to local contexts. Their randomized controlled trials demonstrate that small, context-specific interventions—such as teacher incentives or health subsidies—can outperform large-scale programs.
Case Studies and Real-World Applications
The books provide vivid case studies that illustrate poverty’s roots and potential solutions. Thurow’s The Last Hunger Season follows Kenyan farmers struggling with seasonal hunger due to unreliable rains and limited market access. Thurow advocates for agricultural innovations, such as drought-resistant seeds and mobile banking, to stabilize incomes and improve food security. Similarly, Lutz’s Unpoverty showcases success stories from microfinance programs in Asia and Africa, where small loans enabled women to start businesses and lift their families out of poverty.
Arce’s My (Underground) American Dream highlights the intersection of poverty and immigration, showing how legal status shapes economic opportunities. Her story underscores the need for inclusive policies that provide pathways to citizenship and economic integration. Meanwhile, Portfolios of the Poor offers a granular view of financial survival strategies, emphasizing the importance of flexible financial products tailored to the irregular incomes of the poor.
Critiques and Limitations
While these works offer valuable insights, they also face critiques. Sachs’ optimistic vision in The End of Poverty has been criticized for underestimating the political and logistical challenges of scaling aid programs. Collier’s focus on the “bottom billion” risks oversimplifying the diversity of poor countries, while Friedman’s globalization narratives may overstate the benefits of market integration for marginalized groups.
Additionally, behavioral approaches in Poor Economics and More Than Good Intentions have been questioned for focusing too narrowly on individual choices, potentially neglecting broader structural issues.
Sen’s capability approach, while influential, can be difficult to operationalize in policy terms, as measuring “freedoms” is inherently subjective. Myrdal’s and Deo’s historical analyses, while rich in context, may overemphasize deterministic factors, leaving less room for individual agency or innovation. These critiques highlight the need for a balanced approach that integrates historical, structural, and behavioral perspectives.
Photo: Muhammad Muzamil. unsplash
Pathways Forward
Synthesizing these works, several key strategies emerge for addressing poverty’s roots:
- Historical Redress and Structural Reform: Deo, Myrdal, and Dutta emphasize the need to address historical inequalities through land reform, equitable resource distribution, and inclusive institutions. Policies that dismantle caste, gender, and racial barriers are essential for breaking poverty traps.
- Capability Expansion: Sen’s framework calls for investments in education, healthcare, and political participation to enhance human freedoms. Programs that empower women, as seen in Lutz’s and Thurow’s case studies, are particularly effective in transforming communities.
- Evidence-Based Interventions: Banerjee, Duflo, Karlan, and Appel advocate for rigorous testing of poverty alleviation programs. Small-scale interventions, such as conditional cash transfers or microinsurance, can yield outsized impacts when tailored to local needs.
- Financial Inclusion: Portfolios of the Poor and Unpoverty highlight the importance of accessible financial tools. Microfinance, mobile banking, and savings schemes can stabilize incomes and foster economic resilience.
- Global Cooperation and Fair Policies: Sachs and Stiglitz call for reforming global economic systems to prioritize the poor. Debt relief, fair trade, and climate adaptation funds can help vulnerable nations overcome structural disadvantages.
- Empowering Agency: Arce’s story and Lutz’s grassroots examples underscore the power of individual and community agency. Policies should create opportunities for the poor to shape their own futures, whether through education, entrepreneurship, or political voice.
The Future of Poverty in a Fractured World
The roots of poverty are deeply embedded in historical injustices, economic systems, social inequalities, and institutional failures. Yet, as the works of Sen, Banerjee, Duflo, Sachs, and others demonstrate, poverty is not an intractable problem. By addressing its structural causes, expanding human capabilities, and leveraging evidence-based interventions, societies can make significant strides toward its eradication.
The stories of resilience in Unpoverty, The Last Hunger Season, and My (Underground) American Dream remind us that the poor are not passive victims but active agents capable of transforming their lives when given the right opportunities. As we navigate an increasingly interconnected world, the challenge lies in crafting policies that balance global cooperation with local realities, ensuring that the benefits of progress reach those at the margins.
Understanding the roots of poverty demands far more than statistics or isolated policy fixes—it requires confronting the converging upheavals that now define the global landscape. The world is entering an age marked simultaneously by unprecedented technological advance and deepening precarity: climate shocks displacing millions across Asia and Africa, wars in Europe and the Middle East disrupting food and energy markets, inflation eroding real wages, authoritarian politics undermining social protections, and global supply chains reorganizing in ways that leave poorer nations even more vulnerable.
These crises expose how fragile the lives of the poor remain and how quickly marginalised communities bear the heaviest burdens of geopolitical conflict, pandemics, and economic volatility. They also underscore a deeper truth echoed across disciplines—from Sen’s capability framework to Myrdal’s analysis of institutional backwardness and Collier’s warning about the “traps” of the bottom billion: poverty is not accidental. It is reproduced by systems that privilege stability, wealth, and opportunity for some while normalising insecurity for others.
If today’s world is more interconnected than ever, it is also more unequal than ever; and without global cooperation on climate adaptation, fair trade, migration, data governance, and ethical technology, inequality will widen in ways that redefine poverty for the next generation. Ultimately, any meaningful fight against poverty must confront these structural risks, reimagine development as the expansion of real freedoms, and build institutions capable of protecting human dignity amid a century that promises more turbulence than certainty.
References
- Banerjee, A., & Duflo, E. (2011). Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.
- Banerjee, A., & Duflo, E. (2019). Good Economics for Hard Times (for thematic reinforcement).
- Collier, P. (2007). The Bottom Billion.
- Collins, D. et al. (2009). Portfolios of the Poor.
- Deo, Fanindam. Roots of Poverty: A Social History.
- Dutta, A. K. Poverty: Its Roots and Remedies.
- Friedman, T. L. (1999). The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
- Friedman, T. L. (2005). The World Is Flat.
- Forrester, V. (1999). The Economic Horror.
- Karlan, D., & Appel, J. (2011). More Than Good Intentions.
- Lutz, M. (2007). Unpoverty.
- Myrdal, G. (1968). Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations.
- Sachs, J. (2005). The End of Poverty.
- Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom.
- Stiglitz, J. (2002). Globalization and Its Discontents.
- Thurow, R. (2012). The Last Hunger Season.
- Arce, J. (2016). My (Underground) American Dream.
Prof. Subhash Dhuliya is a distinguished academician, researcher, and educational administrator. He served as Vice Chancellor of Uttarakhand Open University and Professor at IGNOU, IIMC, and CURAJ. Earlier, he worked as Assistant Editor and Editorial Writer with the Times Group- Sunday Times and Navbharat Times, and as Chief Sub-Editor at Amrit Prabhat (Amrita Baza Patrika Group) . He has edited IIMC’s research journals Communicator and Sanchar Madhyam, founded Newswriters.in, and served as a UNESCO consultant for journalism education in the Maldives.
