SOCY 1072 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Progressive Tax, Publicly Funded Health Care, Policy Analysis
Document Summary
Why the poor are poor: poverty as exploitation. Poverty is a product of the economic organization, not a product of individual behavior. Marxian theory asks you to look at the dynamic between laborers and owners. Laborers want to sell their labor at the highest price: get as much money as you can for your skills. Owners want to pay the lowest price possible for worker labor: the cheaper the labor, the higher the profits (which is actually true, in order to keep prices down. They try to keep surplus labor the more people want the job, the lower they can make the wage. Automation if the price of labor is too high in a certain region and they can"t create surplus labor, they"ll automate the pool to create surplus labor. People would want to unionize labor so that they can compete and have more power in the conflicting dynamics of management of workers.
