The belief that poverty stems from individual deficiencies is old. Religious doctrine that equated wealth with the favor of God was central to the Protestant reformation (Weber 2001) and blind, crippled, or deformed people were believed to be punished by God for either their or their parents’ sins. With the emergence of the concept of inherited intelligence in the 19th century, the eugenics movement went so far as to rationalize poverty and even sterilization for those who appeared to have limited abilities. Books like Hurrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994) are modern uses of this explanation. Rainwater (1970:16) critically discusses individualistic theories of poverty as a “moralizing perspective” and notes that the poor are “afflicted with the mark of Cain. They are meant to suffer, indeed must suffer, because of their moral failings. They live in a deserved hell on earth.” Rainwater goes on to say that it is difficult to overestimate the extent to which this perspective (incorrectly) under-girds our visions of poverty, including the perspective of the disinherited themselves.