Over the past summer, I participated in a World Vision Mission Trip with my church to a small town called Wallace, West Virginia. The culture of this Appalachian town was very different than the culture I grew up around in midwest Minnesota. In short, I was able to realize the huge wealth gap that is present in the United States through hands on experience with a family I worked with all week. However, instead of striving to get out of the immense poverty they lived in, I saw that it was generational poverty that was not going to end soon. They had no will to end it and they saw no way they could end it. This community had been working in coal mines their entire lives and had no other skills. So, once the mines shut down, they were out of jobs and out of luck.
While reading Chapter 13, my mind wandered back to this family and to this community. Charles Wheelan focused more on the different countries in the world that struggle with poverty and the continuous cycle of it but even though the United States is one of the most developed economies in the world, we struggle with the same issues as the poorest. At the very end of the chapter, Wheelan says, "things become better when there is an overwhelming political will to make them better." Along with the infamous saying of "where there's a will there's a way", I think that with increased political effort and increased human capital, these families and countries living in ill poverty can be better off. Wheelans provides many ideas and examples throughout the chapter other than human capital but at the end of the day, it comes down to the will to make it happen and carrying through with that will.
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