Poverty and Social Exclusion – Social Class (SOC)

00:00 Now, getting in to class, social class and higher class versus lower class.

00:07 We have to at least address the notion of poverty.

00:10 So that is defined as the general scarcity or the state of one who would relax the certain amount of material possessions or money, okay.

00:18 Now it has a lot of different components to it.

00:21 So it’s a multifaceted concept which includes both social, economic, and political contributors.

00:27 But there is sort if more specific definitions around the type of poverty that we are talking about.

00:34 So there is two types that you can have. Absolute and Relative.

00:37 Now, relative refers to the inability to meet the average standard of living within the society.

00:41 So if we look and say, in north America, you’re considered to be relatively poor If you don’t have an IPhone, and if you don’t have 2 cars and of you don’t have a kids to go in summer camps.

00:56 Some will say, well they are a little less well off than we are.

00:59 You have a home. You might have an amazingly landscape yard. You don’t have an awesome iPhone.

01:05 You might have an old flip phone. Things like that.

01:08 So relatively speaking you might be poor compared to maybe the national norm or the societal norm.

01:14 But in comparison to say those in parts of Africa that have nothing. You’re not poor, okay.

01:21 So its kind of related to standard of living.

01:25 Absolute poverty is like even applies. This is absolute. It’s not relative. We are not comparing to the other place.

01:32 This are bare minimums. You have the inability to meet the bare minimum basic necessities of life like clean drinking water, water, food, safe housing, access to health care.

01:42 These are the basics you need to live and survive.

01:44 If you don’t have these things you’d be considered impoverish.

01:49 That’s absolute poverty versus a relative poverty.

01:54 Okay, now we are going to look at social exclusion.

01:57 This is the process by which individuals or entire communities or people are systematically blocked from (or denied full access to) social rights.

02:04 And this can include things like access to housing, employment, healthcare, democratic participation, due process.

02:13 This are marginalized individuals and that’s because of their poverty. So if you think of an individual who's living on the street, who has nothing, who has panhandling, they haven’t showered in weeks.

02:25 They may not carry unfortunately the same social rights that somebody else would.

02:31 So it’s not that they don’t – they are not deserving.

02:34 They just simply, in terms the way the society setup they don’t have the same access.

02:38 A lot of times they won’t be allowed into restaurants, they won’t be allowed in to places For to you to try to get housing, access to health care becomes limited.

02:46 And so, that really, really becomes a difficult issue to manage.

02:50 And this isn’t something that we are talking about in terms we say relative poverty although that can happen.

02:56 This is hands down absolute poverty is one of where for sure you’ll have the social exclusion this marginalized portions of our society.