Poverty

As a child, what decisions can you really make for yourself? You can't decide where you're born, what culture you're born in, how rich you are, what religion you are born into, what you're going to look like, or if you have any talents. As far as your early years go, I don't think you have a decision of  wether or not you want to live in poverty. When you grow up however I would like to argue the other side. Say you were born in the worst of all conditions. You were born in a very bad neighborhood with lots of violence and your family is extremely poor. There is nothing stopping you from working your butt off during school so much so as to be able to move out of that neighborhood and get a good paying job and boom you're not in poverty anymore. So as it seems to me poverty is decision you get to make. As closing I would like to leave this quote from the late Christopher Hitchens. "The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it’s called the empowerment of women. If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some, say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some doctrine—religious doctrine—condemns them, and then if you’ll throw in a handful of seeds perhaps and some credit, the floor of everything in that village, not just poverty, but education, health, and optimism will increase. It doesn’t matter; try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works—works all the time."