Does poverty have functions to explain its persistence?

Poverty makes possible the existence or expansion of respectable professions and

occupations (e.g., penology, criminology, social work, public health). Poverty provides jobs
for social scientists, social workers, journalists, and other 'poverty warriors.'

The functions of poverty:

1. Poverty ensures that society's 'dirty work' will get done. Poverty provides a low-wage
labor pool that is willing--or rather, unable to be unwilling--to preform dirty work at
low cost.
2. Because the poor are required to work at low wage, they subsidize a variety of
economic activities that benefit the affluent. The poor pay a larger share of their
income in property and sales taxes.
3. Poverty creates jobs for many occupations that serve the poor: police, gambling,
peacetime army, etc.
4. The poor buy goods others do not want and thereby prolong their economic
usefulness.
5. The poor can be identified and punished as alleged or real deviants to uphold the
legitimacy of conventional norms. To justify the desirability of hard work and thrift,
for example, the defender of these norms must be able to find persons they can
accuse of being lazy and spendthrifts.
6. The poor offer vicarious participation in deviant activities in which they are alleged to
participate.
7. The poor serve as culture heroes and as cultural artifacts.
8. Poverty helps to guarantee the status of those who are not poor. In every
hierarchical society, there has to be someone at the bottom to hold up the rest of the
population.
9. The poor aid the upward mobility of groups just above them in the class hierarchy.
Many persons have entered the middle class by providing goods and services to the
poor.
10. The poor help to keep the aristocracy busy as providers of charity.
11. The poor, being powerless, can be made to absorb the costs of change and growth in
American society (e.g., 'urban renewal' vs. 'poor removal').
12. The poor facilitate and stabilize the American political process because they vote and
participate less than other groups.
13. Not only does the alleged moral deviancy of the poor reduce the moral pressure on
the political economy to reduce poverty, but socialist alternatives can be made to
look unattractive if those who will benefit most from them can be described as lazy,
spendthrift, dishonest, and promiscuous.

Ref.

Herbert Gans, Classic Readings in Sociology.