A social phenomenon is anything that influences or is influenced by organisms sufficiently alive to respond to one another. Social phenomena are the ones studied by Social Sciences. Poverty is a social phenomenon and is studied with the same methods used for other such phenomena. A broad sense of poverty is the lack of some basic resources in comparison to the general standard. What a basic resource is varies depending on the society that sets them. Thus, basic needs to cover may be health, hunger, etc. in one society, but it may be a car purchase in another society. For this reason we can define relative and absolute poverty. In our work we define relative poverty as: "a human condition that does not allow an individual to cover, for themselves and their family, whatever needs their society defines as basic in a particular socio-historical context." We assume that the conditions which affect poverty depend on specific attributes of a local setting, such as social norms, economic structures, the natural environment, public organizations and institutions. Thus, these attributes form the prism through which we study poverty. To calculate poverty we use the methodological approach of objective-unidimensional poverty, which fits our aforementioned definition. The agent-based computational model is a new tool for empirical research. It offers a natural environment for the study of connectionist phenomena in social science. Agent-based modeling provides a powerful way to address certain enduring questions. It allows one to subject certain core theories(such as neoclassical microeconomics) to important types of stress. Agent-based modeling offers powerful new forms of hybrid theoretical computational work. These are particularly relevant to the study of non-equilibrium systems. The agent- based approach invites the interpretation of society as a distributed computational device, and in turn the interpretation of social dynamics as a type of computation. This interpretation raises important foundational issues in social science. Social simulation has progressed from simple toy models to increasingly realistic models of complex social systems, such as agent-based models where heterogeneous agents interact with changing natural or artificial environments. These larger, multidisciplinary projects require a scientific research methodology distinct from, say, simpler social simulations with more limited scope, intentionally minimal complexity, and typically under a single investigator. In summary, our methodology starts with questioning what should be answered, then we build a simple model with basic attributes and we iteratively increase complexity until we have a model that answers our initial questions. The questions in this work are as follows: Is there something that can be done so that poverty is reduced; do contemporary policies address the issue; are individuals alone capable of addressing poverty. The structure of the final model consists of: a) the environment, which includes local attributes, b) the agents who act in this environment and, finally, c) the way agents interact with each other and with their environment, which is defined by a Social Network. The agents are autonomous, heterogeneous, self-directed and based on BDI (belief, desire, intention) architecture. The model was built with MASON, a tool—developed at George Mason University (GMU)—that simulates social phenomena. Finally, we experimented with five cases and concluded that our initial questions are answerable.
University of the Aegena
