Been trying to follow the thread, without much time to post-or think-for that matter. It is good to read your 'voice', Dickey.

I agree with the comments of Dickey, mg, and others in that they highlight major societal problems. (And also tend to agree with Dickey's comments about big Brother and the ACLU.) I think they are universal issues for our modern culture that negatively effect nearly all families, schools, children. Among the poor, their impact is multiplied. Address those issues, and we would see a decrease in a number of the ills of modern society.

However, at the macro level, to the extent any of these issues or problems are more prevalent among the poor, they are much more a product of the conditions of poverty than cause. They are in no way 'root' causes of poverty. Some of them represent descriptive attributes found more commonly among people who live in poverty than among those who don't. But attribute and cause should not be confused. I think I said in an earlier post that the skills needed to survive are often not the same skills needed to thrive. They can, in fact, be mutually exclusive. And it may be necessary to have a different set of values in situations where physical, psychological and/or social survival is precarious. Ask Barry. Read his own story. Once he was put in an environment where the survival skills he had learned from an early age in the projects were no longer necessary, they were also no longer appropriate. But it is a good thing he learned and used them while he was in that environment. And it was a lot of work to set those survival ways of being in the world aside to a significant degree, and to learn a different set of skills and social values.

The 'root' cause of poverty is, and always will be, not enough resources. In societies where there are actually enough resources, but access to those resources is severly restricted by public policies that favor gross inequitable distribution of resources, what you are calling root causes, are actually simply some of the ways a society evolves to insure the playing field remains uneven. To the extent you address these issues, you are indeed creating greater opportunity for people to compete for resources. But the system itself will insure those resources will still be distributed in a grossly inequitable manner.

Janie