Risks and Vulnerabilities to Poverty

The main purpose is to illuminate many dimensions that link between risk and poverty and attach more exact meaning to the idea of vulnerability in this context. Households and communities are units of conflict and co-operation; they have assets, such as labour, human capital, physical capital, social capital, commons and public goods at their disposal to make a living. Assets are used to generate income in various forms, including earnings and returns to assets, sale of assets, transfers and remittances. Households actively build up assets, not just physical capital but also social or human capital, as an alternative to spending. Incomes provide access to dimensions of well-being: consumption, nutrition, health, etc., mediated by information, markets, and public services and non- market institutions.

Generating incomes from assets is also constrained by information, the functioning of markets and access to them, the functioning of non-market institutions, public service provision and public policy. Poor households are seen in this framework as weighing current survival and well-being, with decisions affecting their future possibilities. They are typically severely constrained in their options by their assets and the conditions they face.

Assets are subject to risk themselves. Examples include destruction due to environmental factors or conflict, the erosion of human capital due to health or unemployment, the collapse of asset markets and values, problems with property rights and their enforcement, risks in social capital and access risk to public goods and commons. The transformation of assets into income is also subject to risk. Beyond obvious but important factors such as climate or health, one should focus on (inter alia) price risk, the covariances between different income risks, risks to access of rationed inputs, risks of exclusion from informal or formal safety nets, problems related to contract enforcement and risks to changes in policy. Entitlements from incomes are also mediated by risk, including price risk but also and importantly, risks related to imperfect information and to the provision of public goods and services, especially since they often are rationed.

Risk and vulnerability to poverty has both received renewed attention in recent years. Vulnerability to poverty is an important dimension of poverty and deprivation, but it is also a cause of deprivation. There are many dimensions to poverty which is not limited to vulnerability to moneymetric dimensions. Other dimensions such as related to educational opportunities, access to accurate information, mortality, nutrition and health are also in account. Broader dimensions, such as exclusion, insecurity, fear and deviated social codes are other dimensions which increase the risk of vulnerability to poverty.

In poverty policy contexts, vulnerability to poverty, in its various dimensions is an important factor. Vulnerability is not just a function of the environment a person lives in: it involves of risks, of person’s conditions but also of actions. In this sense, an environment exposed to disinformation increase the risks to vulnerability causing poor decision making and distorts function of the mind as problem solver. Dynamics of social moral condition strengthen capabilities of the poor to deal with deprivation.

The need for food, warmth, shelter, security – and more controversially social identity, a sense of belonging, and other less obviously biological requirements are considered common non-moral universals – so, and relatedly, there are moral universals – that is, moral principles accepted wherever and whenever men seek to codify socially acceptable behaviour, or even when they don’t, since such principles can be implicit in social practice without being overtly verbalised.

A new dimension to moral universals in today’s modern society implies to meaning making as knowledge. Knowledge is crucial aspect of enhancing capabilities. Today, profit-making information bombardment that is deliberately created and placed to divert people in their quest for knowledge is devastating for human moral. The strategy that seeks to disinform people and turn them into meek and simple creatures projects negative power players. They consciously promote anti intellectualism and have convinced many people that reading and studying have no value and questioning what is the point of all the efforts. Teaching profession is down graded, low paid and valued, and banal meanings are glorified.

For those who are not convinced and continue to seek knowledge, another strategy is unfolding that is info minefields which gives a whole new spin to the expression data mining. Huge amount of meaningless information is produced as literature, music and film. This is called freedom of expression for people who dont really have anything to say. A society preoccupied with trivialities falls behind positive challenges. The mind bombarded by disinformation turns to mush and is effectively destroyed. It is almost impossible to deprogram the brain washed since the person has been drained of creativity, has never learned critical thinking, and not educated to understand logic systems – the mind is unable to function constructively in solving problems. This is a human condition most vulnerable to multidimensional risks driving more and more people into helplessness to deal with poverty.