Artnit

The theory of a culture of poverty was created by the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis in his book, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty, first published in 1959. This theory states that living in conditions of pervasive poverty will lead to the development of a culture or subculture adapted to those conditions. Lewis uses his famous expression of poverty culture to describe it as the idea that poor people do not learn norms and values that can help them improve their conditions and therefore fall into a repeated pattern of poverty.