Poverty as restriction of opportunities

The environment of poverty is one marked with unstable conditions and a lack of capital (both social and economical) which together create the vulnerability characteristic of poverty. Because a person’s daily life is lived within their environment, a person’s environment determines daily decisions and actions based on what is present and what is not.


Dipkanar Chakravarti argues that the poor’s daily practice of navigating the world of poverty generates a fluency in the poverty environment, but a near illiteracy in the environment of the larger society. Thus, when a poor person enters into transactions and interactions with the social norm, their understanding of it is limited, and thus decisions revert to decisions most effective in the poverty environment.


Through this a sort of cycle is born in which “[t]he dimensions of poverty are not merely additive, but are interacting and reinforcing in nature.”
According to Arjun Appadurai (2004), the key to the environment of poverty, which causes the poor to enter into this cycle, is the poor’s lack of capacities. Appardurai’s idea of capacity relates to Albert Hirschman’s ideas of “voice” and “exit” which are ways in which people can decline aspects of their environment; to voice displeasure and aim for change or to leave said aspect of environment. Thus, a person in poverty lacks adequate voice and exit (capacities) with which they can change their position.


Appadurai specifically deals with the capacity to aspire and its role in the continuation of poverty and its environment. Aspirations are formed through social life and its interactions. Thus, it can be said, that one’s aspirations are influenced by one’s environment. Appadurai claims that the better off one is, the more chances one has to not only reach aspirations but to also see the pathways which lead to the fulfillment of aspirations. By actively practicing the use of their capacity of aspiration the elite not only expand their aspiration horizon but also solidify their ability to reach aspirations by learning the easiest and most efficient paths through said practice. On the other hand, the poor’s horizon of aspiration is much closer and less steady than that of the elite.