When I began this journey, somewhere back in 2016, my original plan was quite different from what eventually happened. I imagined returning to university, conducting formal research on systemic poverty, and perhaps pursuing a PhD somewhere within the social sciences. I wanted to understand why poverty persists across generations, how social exclusion becomes self-reinforcing, and what kinds of interventions genuinely help people build better lives.
Along the way, I read extensively across a range of disciplines: economics, sociology, psychology, education, development studies, political philosophy, and history. I filled notebooks with observations, summaries, questions, and ideas that resonated with me. Over time, I started thinking those ideas further, in my own layman’s way.
In the end, I never enrolled in a university program. Partly because I never found a single academic field that seemed broad enough to encompass the questions I was interested in. And partly because I gradually came to believe that these questions extend beyond science alone. Understanding poverty requires data and rigorous analysis, but it also requires empathy, ethics, history, culture, and a willingness to engage with people as partners rather than subjects of study.
These writings are the result. They are not academic papers, and they make no claim to scholarly authority. They are research notes, reflections, thought experiments, and attempts to make sense of a complex world. Some are inspired by books I have read, others by conversations, projects, or observations from the field. Together, they form an ongoing exploration of the causes of poverty, the limits of conventional approaches, and the possibilities for building a more humane society.
The quest for a research topic
Scientific research? Which field?
The topic of systemic poverty first came to me as a social science research topic.
First I assessed this topic as a question of economics. But I soon figured out that economics is only looking at the big picture and from a very rational and dry perspective, and it lacks the empathy and “the human touch” which is needed for understanding the true forces at play in creating and perpetuating systems of poverty. Economics models human beings as rational players where everyone has access to all the information, and this is an overly simplistic model for understanding poverty.
Then I turned my attention to sociology. Sociology looked more promising for studying povery but I soon found out that it does not look at things at the individual human level, only at the statistical level, and so, sociology also proved an inadequalte tool for what I need. I still think that sociology is a useful tool for me, just not good enough (does not fit well) for the things I want to understand – circumstances of people – and the methods I applied with success – talking to people – in my journey so far.
Then I turned my attention to cultural anthropology. This was a promising field too, I even considered doing a masters degree in cultural anthropology to get more in depth in my work around poverty. Hovewer, I hit some walls here too. I found that according to cultural anthropologists, poverty is “just too broad” to be a topic of research.