Preying on the poor? Opportunities and challenges for tackling the social and environmental threats of cryptocurrencies for vulnerable and low-income communities

2022 ◽  
Vol 84 ◽  
pp. 102394
Author(s):  
Peter Howson ◽  
Alex de Vries
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 183449092110257
Author(s):  
Qiong Li ◽  
Chen Deng ◽  
Bin Zuo ◽  
Xiaobin Zhang

This study explored whether vertical position affects social categorization of the rich and the poor. Experiment 1 used high- and low-income occupations as stimuli, and found participants categorized high-income occupations faster when they were presented in the top vertical position compared to the bottom vertical position. In Experiment 2, participants responded using either the “up” or “down” key to categorize high- and low-income occupations, and responded faster to high-income occupations with the “up” key and low-income occupations with the “down” key. In Experiment 3, names identified as belonging to either rich or poor individuals were presented at the top or bottom of a screen, and the results were the same as in Experiments 1 and 2. These findings suggest that social categorization based on wealth involved perceptual simulations of vertical position, and that vertical position affects the social categorization of the rich and the poor.


2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Billies

The work of the Welfare Warriors Research Collaborative (WWRC), a participatory action research (PAR) project that looks at how low income lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming (LG-BTGNC) people survive and resist violence and discrimination in New York City, raises the question of what it means to make conscientization, or critical consciousness, a core feature of PAR. Guishard's (2009) reconceptualization of conscientization as “moments of consciousness” provides a new way of looking at what seemed to be missing from WWRC's process and analysis. According to Guishard, rather than a singular awakening, critical consciousness emerges continually through interactions with others and the social context. Analysis of the WWRC's process demonstrates that PAR researchers doing “PAR deep” (Fine, 2008)—research in which community members share in all aspects of design, method, analysis and product development—should have an agenda for developing critical consciousness, just as they would have agendas for participation, for action, and for research.


1971 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-357
Author(s):  
Russell L. Curtis, Jr. ◽  
Louis A. Zurcher, Jr.

1978 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 380-382
Author(s):  
M. Javed Akbar Zaki

To many social theoreticians, the population explosion, particularly in the developing nations presents a crippling threat to their developmental pro¬cesses. Their argument's validity rests mainly on the assumption that expected economic progress is swallowed up by unbalanced rise of numbers in the population. The book being reviewed deals mainly with this subject matter and is divided into two parts, each containing three articles contributed by various researchers. Part one, 'The Social context of Fertility Decision' is focused on analyzing the role of factors affecting fertility at the micro-level decision making process. The first article 'Fertility decision in rural India' by Vinod Jainath, examines the applicability to rural India of various models of the process of fertility decision making and finds most of these wanting with respect to the Indian social situation. While analyzing the fertility patterns of Rural India, he points out the positive need for larger families among the poor small farmers mainly due to labour supply considerations. The author argues that unemployment and under¬employment actually motivate the poor to have more children as it better ensures their economic security in their old age. As the chances of gaining employ¬ment for their offspring diminish, they are induced to increase the total number of children in order that atleast one will be able to support them. Thus a vicious circle of poverty arises in large families because of each of the parents wanting to increase their children's chances of employment by ultimately reducing the overall employment opportunities even further and exacerbating their poverty.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhibin Jiang ◽  
Fan Yang ◽  
Bu Zhong ◽  
Xuebing Qin

BACKGROUND The Covid-19 pandemic had turned the world upside down, but not much is known about how people’s empathy might be affected by the pandemic. OBJECTIVE This study examined 1) how empathy towards others might be influenced by the social support people obtained by using social media; and 2) how the individual demographics (e.g., age, income) may affect empathy. METHODS A national survey (N = 943) was conducted in China in February 2020, in which the participants read three real scenarios about low-income urban workers (Scenario I), small business owners in cities (Scenario II), and farmers in rural areas (Scenario III) who underwent hardship due to COVID-19. After exposure to others’ difficulties in the scenarios, the participants’ empathy and anxiety levels were measured. We also measured the social support they had by using social media. RESULTS Results show that social support not only positively impacted empathy, β = .30, P < .001 for Scenario I, β = .30, P < .001 for Scenario II, and β = .29, P < .001 for Scenario III, but also interacted with anxiety in influencing the degree to which participants could maintain empathy towards others, β = .08, P = .010 for Scenario I, and β = .07, P = .033 for scenario II. Age negatively predicted empathy for Scenario I, β = -.08, P = .018 and Scenario III, β = -.08, P = .009, but not for Scenario II, β = -.03, P = .40. Income levels – low, medium, high – positively predicted empathy for Scenario III, F (2, 940) = 8.10, P < .001, but not for Scenario I, F (2, 940) = 2.14, P = .12, or Scenario II, F (2, 940) = 2.93, P = .06. Participants living in big cities expressed greater empathy towards others for Scenario III, F (2, 940) = 4.03, P =.018, but not for Scenario I, F (2, 940) = .81, P = .45, or Scenario II, F (2, 940) = 1.46, P =.23. CONCLUSIONS This study contributes to the literature by discovering the critical role empathy plays in people’s affective response to others during the pandemic. Anxiety did not decrease empathy. However, those gaining more social support on social media showed more empathy for others. Those who resided in cities with higher income levels were more empathetic during the COVID-19 outbreak. This study reveals that the social support people obtained helped maintain empathy to others, making them resilient in challenging times.


Author(s):  
Koji Yamamoto

Projects began to emerge during the sixteenth century en masse by promising to relieve the poor, improve the balance of trade, raise money for the Crown, and thereby push England’s imperial ambitions abroad. Yet such promises were often too good to be true. This chapter explores how the ‘reformation of abuses’—a fateful slogan associated with England’s break from Rome—came to be used widely in economic contexts, and undermined promised public service under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. The negative image of the projector soon emerged in response, reaching both upper and lower echelons of society. The chapter reconstructs the social circulation of distrust under Charles, and considers its repercussions. To do this it brings conceptual tools developed in social psychology and sociology to bear upon sources conventionally studied in literary and political history.


Author(s):  
Claire Taylor

This chapter lays out the theoretical approach for the book and discusses the methodological problems of writing about poverty and the poor in the ancient world. Whilst studying the lives of the poor in the ancient world is to some extent elusive, it argues that historians can do more than simply imagine this group of people back into the gaps left by other evidence. As well as reviewing previous scholarship on poverty in the ancient world, it suggests a way forward which is more in line with contemporary poverty research within the social sciences.


Author(s):  
Brittany Pearl Battle

This chapter examines the sociocognitive dimensions of cultural categorizations of deservingness. The social issue of poverty has been a persistent source of debate in the American system of policy development, influenced by conceptual distinctions between the “haves” and “have-nots,” “working moms” and “unemployed dads,” and the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.” Although there is a wealth of literature discussing the ideological underpinnings of stratification systems, these discussions often focus on categorical distinctions between the poor and the nonpoor, with much less discussion of distinctions made among the poor. Moreover, while scholars of culture and policy have long referenced the importance of cultural categories of worthiness in policy development, the theoretical significance of these distinctions has been largely understudied. I expand the discourse on the relationship between cultural representations of worth and social welfare policy by exploring how these categories are conceptualized. Drawing on analytical tools from a sociology of perception framework, I create a model that examines deservingness along continuums of morality and eligibility to highlight the taken-for-granted cultural subtleties that shape perceptions of the poor. I focus on social filters created by norms of poverty, welfare, and the family to explore how the deserving are differentiated from the undeserving.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422198997
Author(s):  
Marianna Charitonidou

The article presents the reasons for which the issue of providing housing to low-income citizens has been a real challenge in Addis Ababa during the recent years and will continue to be, given that its population is growing extremely fast. It examines the tensions between the universal aspirations and the local realities in the case of some of Ethiopia’s most ambitious mass pro-poor housing schemes, such as the “Addis Ababa Grand Housing Program” (AAGHP), which was launched in 2004 and was integrated in the “Integrated Housing Development Program” (IHDP) in 2006. The article argues that the quotidian practices of communities and their socio-economic and cultural characteristics are related to the spatial attributes of co-housing practices. Drawing upon the idea that there is a mutual correspondence between social and spatial structures, it places particular emphasis on the analysis of the IHDP and aims to show that to shape strategies that take into account the social and cultural aspects of daily life of the poor citizens of Addis Ababa, it is pivotal to invite them to take part in the decision-making processes regarding their resettlement. Departing from the fact that a large percentage of the housing supply in Addis Ababa consists of informal unplanned housing, the article also compares the commoning practices in kebele houses and condominium units. The former refers to the legal informal housing units owned by the government and rented to their dwellers, whereas the latter concerns the housing blocks built in the framework of the IHDP for the resettlement of the kebele dwellers. The article analyzes these processes of resettlement, shedding light of the fact that kebele houses were located at the inner city, whereas the condominiums are located in the suburbs. Despite the fact that the living conditions in the condominium units are of a much higher quality than those in the kebele houses, their design underestimated or even neglected the role of the commoning practices. The article highlights the advantages of commoning practices in architecture and urban planning, and how the implementation of participation-oriented solutions can respond to the difficulties of providing housing. It argues that understanding the significance of the endeavors that take into account the opinions of dwellers during the phase of decision-making goes hand in hand with considering commoning practices as a source of architecture and urban planning frameworks for low-cost housing in this specific context. The key argument of the article is that urban planning and architecture solutions in Addis Ababa should be based on the principles of the so-called “negotiated planning” approach, which implies a close analysis of the interconnections between planning, infrastructure, and land.


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