When is poverty shaped by Culture?

When does poverty become part of the culture? The culture of poverty’s formal development is attributed to Oscar Lewis; he created a thesis to explain this question. He seeks to understand poverty as a culture, with its own structure and rationale, more as a way of life passed down from generation to generation along family lines. The culture of poverty is a feature of highly stratified, competitive systems. This economic system tends to have high rates of unemployment and low wages for the “unskilled” jobs with high turn over rates. The theory maintains that culturally based attitudes or predisposition such as “present-mindedness” is the major barrier to economic mobility for many of the poor .
It is argued that poverty in modern nations is not simply economic deprivation but often has a life of its own. Lewis explains that the culture of poverty is an adaptation to a set of objective conditions of the larger society. Once it comes into existence, it tends to perpet...