User:JKJ08003

Jory Johnson

Student at University of Connecticut

Major: Economics

member of the Football Team

Big East All-Academic Team '10-'11, '11-'12

'''Critical Book Review: The Other America: Poverty in the United States by Michael Harrington '''

In The Other America: Poverty in the United States, Michael Harrington provides certain solutions that he feels will help close the inequality gap in America. I will review who the poor is, why they are poor, and some solutions that Harrington presented in this book. When author Michael Harrington talks about the “other” America, what exactly does he mean? He refers to the “other” America as the poor population. Harrington also stresses the point that the poor are not just in concentrated areas; they are all over the Untied States. There were the rural poor such as small farmers, farmhands, and migrant workers whose jobs were replaced by machines or worked jobs too dirty and specific for machinery. There were also the urban poor that included people who had moved from rural towns and found their transition difficult, beats who lived in poverty voluntarily, alcoholics who lived only for the drink, people who had always been poor, and people who lost their jobs or worked in jobs that were unskilled or semi-skilled. Harrington explains that this poverty was caused by a poverty cycle. He explains that they lived in a culture of poverty. He says, “, the United States contains an underdeveloped nation, a culture of poverty. Its in habitants do not suffer the extreme privation of the peasants of Asia or the tribesman of Africa, yet the mechanism of the misery is similar. They are beyond history, beyond progress, sunk in a paralyzing, maiming routine” (158). The poverty in these families lived by them were passed to their children, and the cycle would continue.One specific solution Harrington proposed was for the Federal Government to funnel more money down to the poor, and to freeze the distribution to the middle and upper class until the inequality gap closed. It is understandable that the gap should not be as large as it is, but taking away from top earners is not the answer either. Everyone does not make equal money because different jobs require different skills.

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