Research and Notes From The Past Week

What are the main causes for poverty in the world?
"The causes are numerous, including a lack of individual responsibility, bad government policy, exploitation by people and businesses with power and influence, or some combination of these and other factors." http://www.globalissues.org/issue/2/causes-of-poverty

On Tuesday March 31st, we played musical chairs in class. This demonstration expressed the idea of competition for jobs or opportunities. When you play musical chairs there is always less amount of chairs than people, reflecting poverty because there are only so many slots that will get you a good job in America and there are not enough opportunities for everyone forcing people to be poor. Based on musical chairs we concluded that the reason poor people are poor is because there are not enough opportunities for everyone in society.

On Thursday April 2nd, to show how the rich own most of the wealth, there was a demonstration with ten chairs. one person would occupuy about five chairs(17.5%), that would be the rich owning more than their fair share. And gradually going down to where four people need to share half of a chair representing that the poor own very little of the wealth(2.2%).

Finally, on Friday the third we play musical chairs with a variation, where a couple of people would own chairs, representing the rich because they have more opportunities than they need and towards the end of the game there were only a couple chairs without names, so 4 people would have to fight for those couple chairs while there were several other ones that people owned but were untouchable. Overall, covering the three activities, the main reasons why poor people are poor is because there are not enough opportunities in the world and people the rich are occupying the opportunities and the wealth.