Karl Marx and Max Weber are historical sociologists who contributed to various human aspects such as economics and are known for their varied views towards capitalism and wealth. Despite the reconciliation that the two theories have later settled on, Max Weber’s view focused on the American protestant ethics of the 17 th and the 18 th century and its influence towards the social aspects of capitalism (Macionis, 2005). Weber tries to strike a balance between salvation and money using power and prestige while comparing the behaviors of earlier Protestants with the current ones in the way of understanding the origin of capitalism.
Karl Marx tries to define capitalism by focusing on the struggle between society, material conditions, religion, among other factors. He mainly highlights class struggle and the way it is shaped by factors of production and wealth generation. He separates the society into and owners and their workers and factory owners with their workers and uses psychological conditions to explain capitalism.
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Poverty
Poverty in the United States has over time been defined using factors that render it inadequate and unrepresentative. The poverty line is an arbitrary line that is used to know the number of people who are below the minimum wage and deserve to be classified as poor. Studies show that a fifth of Americans are poor which loosely translates to about 60 million people. The poverty line is mostly inadequate in defining poverty because of the difference in factors such as variation in the cost of living in different places such as Los Angeles and Oklahoma.
Race-ethnicity is one of the ways to define poverty, and recent studies show that approximately 10% of whites, 13% of Asian Americans, 27% of African-Americans, and 28% of Native Americans are classified as poor. This statistic suggests the impact that race has on poverty when based on race-ethnicity.
Education is another major influence on poverty, and it suggests that a quarter of people who drop out of high school end up to be poor irrespective of race or ethnicity. People who finish college have a higher chance to evade poverty than those who did not.
The increase in single-mother families has led to a higher likelihood of kids being raised poor. Single-mother families rate poorly in comparison to households with both parents in terms of poverty. Old people, on the other hand, are less likely to be poor because of the prevalence of social security, subsidized housing, and food stamps, Medicare, among others
Prejudice and Discrimination
Prejudice is an incorrect attitude of one group in the society towards an individual based on the person’s membership or belonging to another social group for example race or gender. Discrimination, on the other hand, is behavior or actions, mostly negative, towards an individual or a social group of people based on sex, race, religion or class (Macionis, 2005). Prejudice is usually composed of behavioral components of an attitude while discrimination encompasses all the aspects of an attitude ranging from cognitive, behavioral to affective attitudes.
Individual discrimination is a behavior of individual members in a society that has harmful effects to members of other social group for example discrimination based on age or sex. Institutional discrimination involves policies that are set by majority race, gender, or ethnicity that have control towards institutions and has negative effects on the social minority group.
Genocide involves the actions of a dominant group trying to destroy the minority group. Among the world’s famous genocides is the Rwandan genocide that led to the death of more than a million minorities in Rwanda, Africa. Population transfer involves the majority group trying to expel the minority group for example in the case of Germans against Jews in the World War II. Internal colonialism involves the majority group taking advantage of the minority group politically or economically.
Segregation involves the change in policies and rules to separate the minority with the dominant group. The most popular form of segregation was the Apartheid in South Africa where black people were not allowed to interact with the whites. Assimilation is when the dominant group tries to absorb the minority group socially. An example of assimilation is where the Native Americans were forced to attend government schools and banned from using their traditional language. Consequently, most of the languages spoken by the native Americans are no longer in use.
Reference
Macionis, J.J. (2005). Sociology. Upper Saddle River; New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.
