Poverty is a major problem in the United States today. This mind map includes the categories of individual behavior, social factors, economic factors, political factors, and cultural factors are all contributing forces that causes poverty.

For economic factors, low wages would be the variable that would lead to poverty. Families that receive low wages would barely support their living expenses. Thus they would not have enough money for programs that would aid their children's education. Some families think that crime has better incentives than working a low paying job and thus crime could be put in as an economic factor that leads to poverty.

Not having enough money for programs like education leads to the individual behavior of illiteracy and lower education, since the parents cannot afford to send their children to upper level education. And if these children know that they have no future in higher education, they will not have the motivation to do well in school and thus dropping out of school. In turn this will lead to having low self-esteem because they know that they will basically be stuck in poverty for the rest of their lives. This will eventually lead to substance abuse because they need something to overcome their high levels of stress that is produced by low self-esteem. In turn substance abuse could lead to sickness and disease, and then could possibly lead to mental illness. Once this happens, individual behavior will cause families to be in poverty.

For social factors, discrimination would be the variable that causes poverty. Racial discrimination from an employer could lead for that person to not receive a higher paying job, in which could lead to violence from the potential employee towards the employer. In turn a crime could be committed in revolt of the employer. Thus the social factor of violence interconnects with the economic factor of crime. Also racial discrimination could lead to institutional discrimination. Thus this will lead to substandard schools in which teachers are told to split up a class and place each student in a designated group depending on their race and the teacher's assumptions of the student's learning ability from their social classifications.

For cultural factors, biased IQ test would be interconnected to substandard schools. These tests measure a student's school achievement. And if there are substandard schools, the students who are placed into the higher groups, the will do better than those who are placed in a lower group. And thus these IQ tests would lead to the deficiency theory, which suggests that 'the poor are poor because they do not measure up to the more well to do in intellectual endowment.' Also the social factor of racial discrimination is interconnected to the cultural factor of minority race. Those who are the minority, the main culture will produce basic assumptions about minority's abilities to be successful or well to do.

For political factors, meritocracy would be interconnected to minority race. Meritocracy basically is the social classification by ability. Thus the assumptions produced will the levels of ability. The power elite produces meritocracy. These are the people who believe that 'the fundamental assumption of capitalism is individual gain without regard for what the resulting behaviors may mean for other people', especially those in poverty. Also the poor are not significantly counted in the US Census, so the government is misinformed on the levels of poverty.

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