The culture of poverty is a concept in social theory that asserts that the values of people experiencing poverty play a significant role in perpetuating their impoverished condition, sustaining a cycle of poverty across generations. It attracted policy attention in the 1970s, and received academic criticism (; ; ), and made a comeback at the beginning of the 21st century. It offers one way to explain why poverty exists despite anti-poverty programs. Early formations suggest that poor people lack resources and acquire a poverty-perpetuating value system. Critics of the early culture of poverty arguments insist that explanations of poverty must analyze how structural factors interact with and condition individual characteristics (; ; ). As put by , "since human action is both constrained and enabled by the meaning people give to their actions, these dynamics should become central to our understanding of the production and reproduction of poverty and social inequality." Further discourse suggests thats Oscar Lewis’s work was misunderstood. Overview De Antuñano, E. (2019) states the theory of the culture of poverty was popularized in 1958 by anthropologist Oscar Lewis, following his research in Mexico City. The culture of poverty frames low-income earners as existing within a culture that perpetuates poverty in a generational cycle. The theory suggests that the economic climate does not play a significant role in poverty. Those existing within a culture of poverty largely bring poverty upon themselves through acquired habits and behaviours. Oscar Lewis’s work sparked debates in the following decades. Many people disagree with his theory and believe it has little to no merit, De Antuñano, E. (2019) quotes that the culture of poverty was “denounced as methodologically vague and politically misguided.” Early formulations The term "culture of poverty" (previously "subculture of poverty") made its first appearance in Lewis's ethnography Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. Lewis struggled to render "the poor" as legitimate subjects whose lives were transformed by poverty. He argued that although the burdens of poverty were systemic and imposed upon these members of society, they led to the formation of an autonomous subculture as children were socialized into behaviors and attitudes that perpetuated their inability to escape the underclass. Early proponents of the theory argued that the poor are not only lacking resources but also acquire a poverty-perpetuating value system. According to anthropologist Oscar Lewis, "The subculture [of the poor] develops mechanisms that tend to