The
United States has a poverty problem.
A third of the country’s people live in households making less than $55,000. Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line. And plenty far below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one in 25 people in America 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021, meaning that they’d have to, at minimum, double their incomes just to reach the poverty line.
Programs like housing assistance and food stamps are effective and essential, protecting millions of families from hunger and homelessness each year. But the United States devotes far fewer resources to these programs, as a share of its gross domestic product, than other rich democracies, which places America in a disgraced class of its own on the world stage.
On the eve of the Covid pandemic, in 2019, our child poverty rate was roughly double that of several peer nations, including Canada, South Korea and Germany. Anyone who has visited these countries can plainly see the difference, can experience what it might be like to live in a country without widespread public decay. When abroad, I have on several occasions heard Europeans use the phrase “American-style deprivation.”
Poverty is measured at different income levels, but it is experienced as an exhausting piling on of problems. Poverty is chronic pain, on top of tooth rot, on top of debt collector harassment, on top of the nauseating fear of eviction. It is the suffocation of your talents and your dreams. It is death come early and often. From 2001 to 2014, the richest women in America gained almost three years of life while the poorest gained just 15 days. Far from a line, poverty is a tight knot of humiliations and agonies, and its persistence in American life should shame us.
All the more so because we clearly have the resources and know-how to effectively end it. The bold relief issued by the federal government during the pandemic — especially expanded child tax credits, unemployment insurance and emergency rental assistance — plunged child poverty and evictions to record lows and powered a swift economic recovery. “I don’t think we have ever seen a policy have as much impact as quickly as the child tax credit in 2021,” Dorian Warren, a co-president of Community Change, a national organization aimed at empowering low-income people, told me. “In six months — six months — we reduced child poverty almost by half. We know how to do this.”
We do — but predictably, some Americans with well-fed and well-housed families complained that the country could no longer afford investing so deeply in its children. At best, this was a breathtaking failure of moral imagination; at worst, it was a selfish, harmful lie.
We could fund powerful antipoverty programs through sensible tax reform and enforcement. A recent study estimates that collecting all unpaid federal income taxes from the top 1 percent — not raising their taxes, mind you, just putting an end to their tax evasion — would add $175 billion a year to the public purse. That’s enough to more than double federal investment in affordable housing or to re-establish the expanded child tax credit. In fact, an additional $175 billion a year is almost enough to lift everyone out of poverty altogether.
The hard part isn’t designing effective antipoverty policies or figuring out how to pay for them. The hard part is ending our addiction to poverty.
Poverty persists in America because many of us benefit from it. We enjoy cheap goods and services and plump returns on our investments, even as they often require a kind of human sacrifice in the form of worker maltreatment. We defend lavish tax breaks that accrue to wealthy Americans, starving antipoverty initiatives. And we build and defend exclusive communities, shutting out the poor and forcing them to live in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.
Most Americans — liberals and conservatives alike — now believe people are poor because “they have faced more obstacles in life,” not because of a moral failing. Long overdue, however, is a reckoning with the fact that many of us help to create and uphold those obstacles through the collective moral failing of enriching ourselves by impoverishing others. Poverty isn’t just a failure of public policy. It’s a failure of public virtue.
To break this cycle, we must commit to becoming poverty abolitionists.
Like abolitionist movements against slavery or mass incarceration, abolitionism views poverty not as a routine or inevitable social ill but as an abomination that can no longer be tolerated. And poverty abolitionism shares with other abolitionist movements the conviction that profiting from another’s pain corrupts us all.
Ending poverty in America will require both short- and long-term solutions: strategies that stem the bleeding now, alongside more enduring interventions that target the disease and don’t just treat the symptoms.
For example, to address the housing crisis forcing most poor renting families to dedicate at least half of their income to rent and utilities, we need to immediately expand housing vouchers that reduce the rent burden. But we also need to push for more transformative solutions like scaling up our public housing infrastructure, enlarging community land banks and providing on-ramps to homeownership for low-income families.
When it comes to work, we should attack labor exploitation head-on by finding ways to even the playing field between workers and bosses — supporting collective bargaining, for instance, and requiring that worker representatives be given seats on corporate boards. At the bare minimum, Congress should increase the federal minimum wage — which hasn’t been raised since July 2009 — and, like dozens of other countries, allow the federal government to routinely adjust the wage without legislative approval, ensuring that workers wouldn’t have to wait around another 13-plus years (and counting!) for a pay bump.
If we apply the legal scholar John A. Powell’s “targeted universalism” approach to eradicating poverty — an approach that involves setting a goal and recognizing that certain groups will need distinctive interventions for that goal to be met — then our attitude toward different antipoverty policies should be “both and.” We don’t need new solutions to this problem as much as a new mind-set, a renewed national commitment to broad prosperity.
The ideal poverty rate in America is zero. Why settle for anything less? Why accept the boring, pernicious best-we-can-doism that has captured the inequality debate in recent years? “We have to challenge the tragedy, the catastrophe, of compromise,” the Rev. William Barber II, one of the chairmen of the Poor People’s Campaign, told me.
When the Johnson administration launched “an unconditional war on poverty in America” in 1964, it wasn’t just lofty rhetoric. It set a deadline. Sargent Shriver, the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, announced that “the target date for ending poverty in this land” would be 1976, the bicentennial. “We once had ambitions about poverty abolitionism,” Dorian Warren reminded me, and we can rekindle that sense of urgency.
So rather than wait around for Congress to act, we should begin to act ourselves. Poverty abolitionism isn’t just a political project, after all; it’s a personal one, too. For starters, just as many of us are now shopping and investing in ways that address climate change, we can also do so with an eye toward economic justice. If we can, we should reward companies that treat their employees well and shun those with a track record of union busting and exploitation. To do so, we can consult organizations like B Lab, which certifies companies that meet high social and environmental standards, and Union Plus, which curates lists of union-made products.
These everyday decisions can add up to something. If more of us adopted poverty abolitionism as a way of living — and of seeing the world and imagining a better one — that behavior would spread, which in turn could redefine what is socially acceptable and what is believed possible. If enough of us found ways to show that we will no longer stand for so much immiseration, we would put upward pressure on corporate and elected leaders, potentially creating a groundswell of political will and renewed calls for reform.
We need to “create a new common sense,” Jenn Stowe, the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told me. Working on behalf of nannies, house cleaners and home care workers, the alliance is seeking to reframe our expectations around care — that it is a right, not a commodity, for instance — by “creating a pathway for people to see themselves in this movement,” as Ms. Stowe put it. “It’s going to take all of us.”
We can also disrupt all the quotidian ways we normalize the status quo. It is commonplace for privileged Americans to gripe about taxes. But doing so ignores how the country’s welfare state does much more to subsidize affluence — with tax breaks for college savings accounts, wealth transfers and more — than to alleviate poverty.
What if, the next time a co-worker brought up the topic, we talked about that instead? What if we gawked at the fact that homeowners pocket billions of dollars each year because of the mortgage interest deduction, an absurd cutout that flows primarily to well-off Americans, while most poor renting families receive no government housing assistance? What if some of those homeowners began donating a portion or even all of their mortgage deduction windfalls to eviction defense and began lobbying Congress to wind down the benefit and redirect the money to antipoverty initiatives?
That this straightforward, milquetoast proposal will strike some of us as audacious, even radical, shows just how constricted our moral ambitions have become and how much we’ve backslid as a nation committed to freedom and equal opportunity.
And we cannot in good faith claim a commitment to poverty abolitionism — or antiracism — if we continue to embrace segregation in our neighborhoods and schools. Our values should not end where our property line begins. Poverty abolitionists oppose exclusionary zoning laws and work to create inclusive neighborhoods. This means doing the hard work of tearing down the walls so many of us have built around our communities, lobbying neighbors, sharing evidence that shows that smartly designed affordable housing doesn’t affect property values and showing up at zoning board meetings (where affordable housing proposals go to die) and voicing support for new developments.
In the 1960s, Dixiecrats aligned with Republicans to gum up the legislative process. Senators slept in their offices so they could filibuster liberal reforms. Governmental inertia was not only the outcome but also the goal. (Sound familiar?) And yet, in the face of all that political polarization and obstructionism, major pieces of civil and voting rights legislation were signed into law and the modern social safety net was created with the passage of the Great Society and War on Poverty.
These transformative initiatives lifted millions out of poverty, outlawed discrimination and protected Black Americans’ citizenship rights. If so much was accomplished despite the odds, it was because grass-roots organizers, and the civil rights and labor movements in particular, put unrelenting pressure on lawmakers.
Today, as then, the best hope we have of ending poverty is to bind ourselves together and demand this of our country. A mass movement for economic justice is necessary. One led by those who have had enough is stirring. We can join them, no matter our lot in life.
This rich country has the means to abolish poverty. Now we must find the will to do so — the will not to reduce poverty but to end it.
America Is in a Disgraced Class of Its Own. By Matthew Desmond. The New York Times, March 16, 2023.
A third of the country’s people live in households making less than $55,000. Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line. And plenty far below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one in 25 people in America 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021, meaning that they’d have to, at minimum, double their incomes just to reach the poverty line.
Programs like housing assistance and food stamps are effective and essential, protecting millions of families from hunger and homelessness each year. But the United States devotes far fewer resources to these programs, as a share of its gross domestic product, than other rich democracies, which places America in a disgraced class of its own on the world stage.
On the eve of the Covid pandemic, in 2019, our child poverty rate was roughly double that of several peer nations, including Canada, South Korea and Germany. Anyone who has visited these countries can plainly see the difference, can experience what it might be like to live in a country without widespread public decay. When abroad, I have on several occasions heard Europeans use the phrase “American-style deprivation.”
Poverty is measured at different income levels, but it is experienced as an exhausting piling on of problems. Poverty is chronic pain, on top of tooth rot, on top of debt collector harassment, on top of the nauseating fear of eviction. It is the suffocation of your talents and your dreams. It is death come early and often. From 2001 to 2014, the richest women in America gained almost three years of life while the poorest gained just 15 days. Far from a line, poverty is a tight knot of humiliations and agonies, and its persistence in American life should shame us.
All the more so because we clearly have the resources and know-how to effectively end it. The bold relief issued by the federal government during the pandemic — especially expanded child tax credits, unemployment insurance and emergency rental assistance — plunged child poverty and evictions to record lows and powered a swift economic recovery. “I don’t think we have ever seen a policy have as much impact as quickly as the child tax credit in 2021,” Dorian Warren, a co-president of Community Change, a national organization aimed at empowering low-income people, told me. “In six months — six months — we reduced child poverty almost by half. We know how to do this.”
We do — but predictably, some Americans with well-fed and well-housed families complained that the country could no longer afford investing so deeply in its children. At best, this was a breathtaking failure of moral imagination; at worst, it was a selfish, harmful lie.
We could fund powerful antipoverty programs through sensible tax reform and enforcement. A recent study estimates that collecting all unpaid federal income taxes from the top 1 percent — not raising their taxes, mind you, just putting an end to their tax evasion — would add $175 billion a year to the public purse. That’s enough to more than double federal investment in affordable housing or to re-establish the expanded child tax credit. In fact, an additional $175 billion a year is almost enough to lift everyone out of poverty altogether.
The hard part isn’t designing effective antipoverty policies or figuring out how to pay for them. The hard part is ending our addiction to poverty.
Poverty persists in America because many of us benefit from it. We enjoy cheap goods and services and plump returns on our investments, even as they often require a kind of human sacrifice in the form of worker maltreatment. We defend lavish tax breaks that accrue to wealthy Americans, starving antipoverty initiatives. And we build and defend exclusive communities, shutting out the poor and forcing them to live in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.
Most Americans — liberals and conservatives alike — now believe people are poor because “they have faced more obstacles in life,” not because of a moral failing. Long overdue, however, is a reckoning with the fact that many of us help to create and uphold those obstacles through the collective moral failing of enriching ourselves by impoverishing others. Poverty isn’t just a failure of public policy. It’s a failure of public virtue.
To break this cycle, we must commit to becoming poverty abolitionists.
Like abolitionist movements against slavery or mass incarceration, abolitionism views poverty not as a routine or inevitable social ill but as an abomination that can no longer be tolerated. And poverty abolitionism shares with other abolitionist movements the conviction that profiting from another’s pain corrupts us all.
Ending poverty in America will require both short- and long-term solutions: strategies that stem the bleeding now, alongside more enduring interventions that target the disease and don’t just treat the symptoms.
For example, to address the housing crisis forcing most poor renting families to dedicate at least half of their income to rent and utilities, we need to immediately expand housing vouchers that reduce the rent burden. But we also need to push for more transformative solutions like scaling up our public housing infrastructure, enlarging community land banks and providing on-ramps to homeownership for low-income families.
When it comes to work, we should attack labor exploitation head-on by finding ways to even the playing field between workers and bosses — supporting collective bargaining, for instance, and requiring that worker representatives be given seats on corporate boards. At the bare minimum, Congress should increase the federal minimum wage — which hasn’t been raised since July 2009 — and, like dozens of other countries, allow the federal government to routinely adjust the wage without legislative approval, ensuring that workers wouldn’t have to wait around another 13-plus years (and counting!) for a pay bump.
If we apply the legal scholar John A. Powell’s “targeted universalism” approach to eradicating poverty — an approach that involves setting a goal and recognizing that certain groups will need distinctive interventions for that goal to be met — then our attitude toward different antipoverty policies should be “both and.” We don’t need new solutions to this problem as much as a new mind-set, a renewed national commitment to broad prosperity.
The ideal poverty rate in America is zero. Why settle for anything less? Why accept the boring, pernicious best-we-can-doism that has captured the inequality debate in recent years? “We have to challenge the tragedy, the catastrophe, of compromise,” the Rev. William Barber II, one of the chairmen of the Poor People’s Campaign, told me.
When the Johnson administration launched “an unconditional war on poverty in America” in 1964, it wasn’t just lofty rhetoric. It set a deadline. Sargent Shriver, the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, announced that “the target date for ending poverty in this land” would be 1976, the bicentennial. “We once had ambitions about poverty abolitionism,” Dorian Warren reminded me, and we can rekindle that sense of urgency.
So rather than wait around for Congress to act, we should begin to act ourselves. Poverty abolitionism isn’t just a political project, after all; it’s a personal one, too. For starters, just as many of us are now shopping and investing in ways that address climate change, we can also do so with an eye toward economic justice. If we can, we should reward companies that treat their employees well and shun those with a track record of union busting and exploitation. To do so, we can consult organizations like B Lab, which certifies companies that meet high social and environmental standards, and Union Plus, which curates lists of union-made products.
These everyday decisions can add up to something. If more of us adopted poverty abolitionism as a way of living — and of seeing the world and imagining a better one — that behavior would spread, which in turn could redefine what is socially acceptable and what is believed possible. If enough of us found ways to show that we will no longer stand for so much immiseration, we would put upward pressure on corporate and elected leaders, potentially creating a groundswell of political will and renewed calls for reform.
We need to “create a new common sense,” Jenn Stowe, the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told me. Working on behalf of nannies, house cleaners and home care workers, the alliance is seeking to reframe our expectations around care — that it is a right, not a commodity, for instance — by “creating a pathway for people to see themselves in this movement,” as Ms. Stowe put it. “It’s going to take all of us.”
We can also disrupt all the quotidian ways we normalize the status quo. It is commonplace for privileged Americans to gripe about taxes. But doing so ignores how the country’s welfare state does much more to subsidize affluence — with tax breaks for college savings accounts, wealth transfers and more — than to alleviate poverty.
What if, the next time a co-worker brought up the topic, we talked about that instead? What if we gawked at the fact that homeowners pocket billions of dollars each year because of the mortgage interest deduction, an absurd cutout that flows primarily to well-off Americans, while most poor renting families receive no government housing assistance? What if some of those homeowners began donating a portion or even all of their mortgage deduction windfalls to eviction defense and began lobbying Congress to wind down the benefit and redirect the money to antipoverty initiatives?
That this straightforward, milquetoast proposal will strike some of us as audacious, even radical, shows just how constricted our moral ambitions have become and how much we’ve backslid as a nation committed to freedom and equal opportunity.
And we cannot in good faith claim a commitment to poverty abolitionism — or antiracism — if we continue to embrace segregation in our neighborhoods and schools. Our values should not end where our property line begins. Poverty abolitionists oppose exclusionary zoning laws and work to create inclusive neighborhoods. This means doing the hard work of tearing down the walls so many of us have built around our communities, lobbying neighbors, sharing evidence that shows that smartly designed affordable housing doesn’t affect property values and showing up at zoning board meetings (where affordable housing proposals go to die) and voicing support for new developments.
In the 1960s, Dixiecrats aligned with Republicans to gum up the legislative process. Senators slept in their offices so they could filibuster liberal reforms. Governmental inertia was not only the outcome but also the goal. (Sound familiar?) And yet, in the face of all that political polarization and obstructionism, major pieces of civil and voting rights legislation were signed into law and the modern social safety net was created with the passage of the Great Society and War on Poverty.
These transformative initiatives lifted millions out of poverty, outlawed discrimination and protected Black Americans’ citizenship rights. If so much was accomplished despite the odds, it was because grass-roots organizers, and the civil rights and labor movements in particular, put unrelenting pressure on lawmakers.
Today, as then, the best hope we have of ending poverty is to bind ourselves together and demand this of our country. A mass movement for economic justice is necessary. One led by those who have had enough is stirring. We can join them, no matter our lot in life.
This rich country has the means to abolish poverty. Now we must find the will to do so — the will not to reduce poverty but to end it.
America Is in a Disgraced Class of Its Own. By Matthew Desmond. The New York Times, March 16, 2023.
In the past 50 years, scientists have mapped the entire human genome and eradicated smallpox. Here in the United States, infant-mortality rates and deaths from heart disease have fallen by roughly 70 percent, and the average American has gained almost a decade of life. Climate change was recognized as an existential threat. The internet was invented.
In this
discussion, Matthew Desmond presents his new book and is joined by leading UK
experts to discuss what can be done to eradicate poverty in both the UK and
United States, in the historic Toynbee Hall.
Panellists: Chaired by Dr Omar Khan, Director, TASO and incoming chair of Trust for London,
Matthew Desmond, sociologist and the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, Shami Chakrabarti, Labour Peer, former shadow AG and former director of Liberty, and human rights campaigner, Peter Brierley, assistant director, Citizens UK
Poverty, by America - In conversation with Matthew Desmond. Trust For London, March 13, 2023.
Panellists: Chaired by Dr Omar Khan, Director, TASO and incoming chair of Trust for London,
Matthew Desmond, sociologist and the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, Shami Chakrabarti, Labour Peer, former shadow AG and former director of Liberty, and human rights campaigner, Peter Brierley, assistant director, Citizens UK
Poverty, by America - In conversation with Matthew Desmond. Trust For London, March 13, 2023.
What if we told you socialism does exist - but only for rich people? The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond has a new book - Poverty, by America - and it answers big questions. Why do we spend lots on dealing with poverty, but without solving it? How has poverty become a profitable industry? Why is it so expensive to be poor? And can we really abolish poverty?
Owen Jones, March 17, 2023.
Books
about poverty tend to be books about the poor,” the sociologist Matthew Desmond
writes in “Poverty, by America” (Crown). That’s true whether the motivation is
to blame the poor for their lot—chronicling the supposed pathologies creating a
“culture of poverty”—or, more commonly nowadays, to generate empathy via
detailed ethnographies of survival and agency amid deprivation. It was true of
the first books that set out to systematically map and measure poverty, such as
the Victorian reformer Charles Booth’s seventeen-volume “Life and Labour of the
People in London,” and of Progressive Era attempts to rattle the consciences of
the well-off, like Jacob Riis’s document of New York tenement life, “How the
Other Half Lives.”
When Michael Harrington wrote his 1962 classic, “The Other America,” a work of morally charged narrative nonfiction often credited with helping to inspire the War on Poverty, his aim was to reveal the “socially invisible” poor to the rest of America. A cocoon of postwar prosperity and complacency, he wrote, blinkered “middle-class women coming in from Suburbia on a rare trip,” who might “catch the merest glimpse of the other America on the way to an evening at the theater”; it also blinkered “the business or professional man,” who might “drive along the fringes of slums in a car or bus” without regarding it as “an important experience.” The book’s dominant rhetorical modes, as Harrington’s biographer Maurice Isserman notes, were paradox and revelation. If the scales were pulled from the eyes of his well-meaning readers, they would see, in the shadows of American plenty, tens of millions of poor people, whom Harrington catalogued and described: rural poor, city-dwelling slum poor, alcoholic skid-row poor, and so on—all of them urgently needing the help of the government and liberal élites. Even a book like Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground,” an influential neocon attack on “welfare dependency,” from 1984, focussed on the poor themselves, if only so that Murray might make an argument about how they had immiserated themselves by adapting to anti-poverty policies.
Desmond’s terrific previous book, “Evicted” (2016), is emphatically about the lives of the poor. It followed eight struggling families trying to stay housed in Milwaukee, where, in the poorest neighborhoods, “median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was only $50 less than the citywide median.” Families were spending up to seventy per cent of their monthly incomes on housing that might have stopped-up plumbing, broken windows, filthy carpets, and front doors that wouldn’t lock. And when they fell behind on rent for any of the multitude of reasons that people living precariously do—a trip to the emergency room, an unexpected car repair, a steep utility bill paid to keep the lights or the heat on—they faced the chaos and humiliation of eviction.
“Evicted” illuminated big and sometimes novel themes: the outsized role of housing costs in the creation and perpetuation of poverty across the nation, the fact that evictions had become so common that businesses found ways to profit from them (moving companies, for instance, would extract the last of a tenant’s belongings, down to the shower curtain in the bathroom, and place them in storage, which would cost more than many tenants had to reclaim them). But the book’s power resided in its stories, which Desmond told with a keen eye for detail and scene-setting drama. His reporting was intimate and particular. “Jori and his cousin were cutting up, tossing snowballs at passing cars,” reads the first line of the book’s prologue, evocatively named “Cold City.” One of those snowballs proved fateful: the driver of the car it hit got mad, and kicked in the door of Jori’s mom’s apartment; the landlord evicted the family.
“Evicted,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, was almost universally acclaimed, praised especially for the vividness of its portraiture. So it’s brave, in a way, that Desmond has chosen such a different approach for his bracing new book. Books about the poor are vital, he says; they do the important work of “bearing witness.” But “Poverty, by America,” he explains, is a book about how and why the rest of us abide poverty and are complicit in it. Why do many of us seem to accept that the problem is one of scarcity—that there is simply not enough to go around in our very rich country? Where there is exploitation, there are exploiters, and this time Desmond sees many more of them, including most of his prospective readers. Corporations batten on low-wage labor, but so do consumers, who have come to expect the cheap goods and services—the illusorily frictionless food deliveries, the Amazon orders that arrive like conjuring tricks the afternoon you place them—that poorly paid, nonunionized, often temporary workers provide.
“Landlords are not the only ones who benefit from housing exploitation; many homeowners do, too, their property values propped up by the collective effort to make housing scarce and expensive,” Desmond writes, noting that most homeowners receive federal aid in the form of mortgage-interest deductions and other subsidies. (The payout to homeowners in 2020—a hundred and ninety-three billion dollars—far exceeded the fifty-three billion dollars in direct housing assistance that the government gave to low-income families.) “We need not be debt collectors or private prison wardens to play a role in producing poverty in America,” Desmond goes on. “We need only to vote yes on policies that lead to private opulence and public squalor and, with that opulence, build a life behind a wall that we tend and maintain.”
More manifesto than narrative, “Poverty, by America” is urgent and accessible. It’s also austere. There aren’t many stories about individuals; Desmond seems to dole these out with purposeful spareness, perhaps so that we won’t get distracted by them. But the one he tells about himself is affecting. Before he went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, or won a MacArthur, or became a professor at Princeton, Desmond grew up outside a little town near Flagstaff, Arizona, living with his family in a modest wood-panelled house that he loved. Then his father, a pastor, lost his job, and the bank took the family’s home. “Mostly I blamed Dad,” he writes. “But a part of me also wondered why this was our country’s answer when a family fell on hard times.” He kept wondering while he was in college, using scholarships and loans, at Arizona State University, supporting himself as a barista, a telemarketer, and a wildland firefighter. The question compelled him to write “Evicted.” Behind that question, always, were the bigger questions that animate this new book: How is it that the United States, a country with a gross domestic product “larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy,” has a higher relative poverty rate than those other advanced democracies? Why do one in eight Americans, and one in six children, live in poverty—a rate about the same as it was in 1970? Why do we put up with it?
The short answer, Desmond argues, is that as a society we have made a priority of other things: maximal wealth accumulation for the few and cheap stuff for the many. At the same time, we’ve either ignored or enabled the gouging of the poor—by big banks that charge them stiff overdraft fees, by predatory payday lenders and check-cashing outlets of what Desmond calls the “fringe banking industry,” by landlords who squeeze their tenants because the side hustle of rent collecting has turned into their main hustle, by companies that underpay their workers or deny them benefits by confining them to gig status or that keep them perpetually off balance with “just-in-time scheduling” of shifts. To the extent that middle- and upper-class people unthinkingly buy products from such companies and invest in their stock, or park their money in those banks, or oppose public housing in their neighborhoods despite a professed commitment to it, or bid up the prices of fixer-uppers in Austin or San Francisco or Washington, D.C., they, too, are helping to buttress the system.
You might assume that government action would do more to help, maybe even to lower the poverty rate. Programs like food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are lifelines for many. Recent research suggests that even public housing, much maligned, is strikingly beneficial for the families that can get a spot, which can involve a years-long wait. The intimidating towers are now far outnumbered by more dispersed and approachable low-rises. Children who grow up in public housing show lower lead levels in their bloodstreams, more robust mental health, and better results in school than those whose families are scraping by in the private housing market, according to a trio of recent studies; a fourth study, published last year in the American Economic Journal, found that kids who’d lived in public housing had higher incomes and lower rates of incarceration as young adults. Moreover, it turns out that the United States is not all that tightfisted when it comes to social spending. “If you count all public benefits offered by the federal government, America’s welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France’s,” Desmond tells us. Why doesn’t this largesse accomplish more?
For one thing, it unduly assists the affluent. That statistic about the U.S. spending almost as much as France on social welfare, he explains, is accurate only “if you include things like government-subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well above the poverty line.” To enjoy most of these, you need to have a well-paying job, a home that you own, and probably an accountant (and, if you’re really in clover, a money manager).
“The American government gives the most help to those who need it least,” Desmond argues. “This is the true nature of our welfare state, and it has far-reaching implications, not only for our bank accounts and poverty levels, but also for our psychology and civic spirit.” Americans who benefit from social spending in the form of, say, a mortgage-interest tax deduction don’t see themselves as recipients of governmental generosity. The boon it offers them may be as hard for them to recognize and acknowledge as the persistence of poverty once was to Harrington’s suburban housewives and professional men. These Americans may be anti-government and vote that way. They may picture other people, poor people, as weak and dependent and themselves as hardworking and upstanding. Desmond allows that one reason for this is that tax breaks don’t feel the same as direct payments. Although they may amount to the same thing for household incomes and for the federal budget—“You can benefit a family by lowering its tax burden or by increasing its benefits, same difference”—they are associated with an obligation and a procedure that Americans, in particular, find onerous. Tax-cutting Republican lawmakers want the process to be both difficult and Swiss-cheesed with loopholes. (“Taxes should hurt,” Ronald Reagan once said.) But that’s not the only reason. What Desmond calls the “rudest explanation” is that if, for whatever reason, we get a tax break, most of us like it. That’s the case for people affluent and lucky enough to take advantage of the legitimate breaks designed for their benefit, and for the wily super-rich who game the system with expensive lawyering and ingenious use of tax shelters.
And there are other ways, Desmond points out, that government help gets thwarted or misdirected. When President Clinton instituted welfare reform, in 1996, pledging to “transform a broken system that traps too many people in a cycle of dependence,” an older model, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or A.F.D.C., was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. Where most funds administered by A.F.D.C. went straight to families in the form of cash aid, TANF gave grants to states with the added directive to promote two-parent families and discourage out-of-wedlock childbirth, and let the states fund programs to achieve those goals as they saw fit. As a result, “states have come up with rather creative ways to spend TANF dollars,” Desmond writes. “Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents. Only Kentucky and the District of Columbia spent over half of their TANF funds on basic cash assistance.” Between 1999 and 2016, Oklahoma directed more than seventy million dollars toward initiatives to promote marriage, offering couples counselling and workshops that were mostly open to people of all income levels. Arizona used some of the funds to pay for abstinence education; Pennsylvania gave some of its TANF money to anti-abortion programs. Mississippi treated its TANF funds as an unexpected Christmas present, hiring a Christian-rock singer to perform at concerts, for instance, and a former professional wrestler—the author of an autobiography titled “Every Man Has His Price”—to deliver inspirational speeches. (Much of this was revealed by assiduous investigative reporters, and by a 2020 audit of Mississippi’s Department of Human Services.) Moreover, because states don’t have to spend all their TANF funds each year, many carry over big sums. In 2020, Tennessee, which has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the nation, left seven hundred and ninety million dollars in TANF funds unspent.
“Poverty, by America” is a slim book, at fewer than three hundred pages of text, but it’s packed with revelations like these—and with statistics and studies, though, fortunately, a reader need never find herself stranded in a thicket of them. (Seventy-odd pages of endnotes help take care of that problem.) Desmond writes particularly well about the ways in which the poor—though they’re said to be hidden from the rest of us—have never escaped the notice of the markets. For years, big banks treated overdraft fees as a reliable stream of income, extracted from the chronically overdrawn. In 2020, the average fee for overdrawing your account was $33.58, and, because banks can charge these fees multiple times a day, a tiny overdraft can rack up fees of more than a hundred dollars in a matter of hours. Payday-loan stores and check-cashing outlets step in where banks fear to tread, and make good money off the venture. (Unlike traditional banks, they are more common in low-poverty Black neighborhoods than in high-poverty white ones. Black and Hispanic families are five times as likely to have no bank account as white families are.) The reason these lenders charge extortionate fees is, Desmond says, not that the poor are such risky prospects—most payday borrowers ultimately pay back the loans—but that, in a market where the poor have little choice, it’s easy to make money off them. Desmond quotes an observation of James Baldwin’s to this point: “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
And Desmond offers solutions as well, scattered throughout the book and exhibiting varying levels of ambition. The relatively simple ones include helping people claim the aid owed to them. Less than a quarter of families eligible for TANF cash receive it; less than half of elderly Americans who could apply for food stamps do. The phenomenon is so widespread across social programs that Desmond maintains it’s more appropriate to speak of welfare avoidance than of welfare dependency. Yet there are small fixes that have been shown to make a difference, including better-designed applications and targeted assistance with filling out forms. The harder goals include raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour, a rate at which it has been lodged since 2009, and having the Secretary of Labor oversee its regular resetting—a method closer to what many other countries do—rather than waiting for Congress to act. Other measures: supporting unions, still the best way to empower workers; calling on states to better regulate payday lending; making sure that people have access to contraception and abortion (a little tricky these days), since these are proven ways of keeping women and children out of poverty; making it easier for the poor to become homeowners—monthly mortgage payments are generally far less than rent—by getting the government to provide additional backing for small mortgages when banks won’t offer them (a program that encourages rural homeownership in this way already exists); creating more public housing so that people don’t have to languish on waiting lists; eliminating exclusionary zoning policies that ban apartments or other multifamily dwellings in higher-income neighborhoods; making sure that developers are then given incentives—through tax relief, for example—to set aside percentages of the housing for low-income families.
That last part is important: you don’t want a scenario in which rich developers get richer off industrial-chic condos designed for moneyed singles, while city officials congratulate themselves on their commitment to urban density. And it’s tough to pull off. Desmond cites New Jersey as having become a leader in this regard, ever since its Supreme Court issued a series of rulings, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, that produced what’s known as the Mount Laurel doctrine, requiring municipalities to offer a “fair share” of affordable housing—the fair share varying by a town’s income distribution. He says that the policy has forced hundreds of towns in New Jersey to “break ground on affordable housing developments.” (Unfortunately, as he doesn’t say, the Mount Laurel doctrine has also been somewhat undercut by elected officials, cleverly exploited by developers, including the Kushner family, and slowed by litigation. Still, it’s a start.)
Finally, Desmond wants us to think of ourselves as “poverty abolitionists.” He wants us to bear in mind a company’s labor policies when we make decisions about where to invest and what to buy; to conquer nimby-ish instincts and welcome true economic diversity in our neighborhoods and schools; to think about and act on our own roles in perpetuating income inequality. “The goal is singular—to end the exploitation of the poor—but the means are many,” he writes. It’s an appealingly ad-hoc and flexible approach.
In part because this book is aimed at the hearts and minds of the widest possible swath of readers, it doesn’t have much to say about politics. To be a poverty abolitionist means avoiding businesses that don’t treat their workers fairly, as some people shun businesses that contribute to global warming or promote tobacco products or engage in animal cruelty. But, in the absence of politically organized public boycotts, such actions won’t be legible to companies. If, on my own, I stop mailing packages by FedEx and switch to UPS—FedEx employees generally aren’t unionized, Desmond points out, while UPS employees generally are—will anybody notice? Perhaps because Congress and many state governments are in the hands of a Republican Party that sees the mildest adjustments of pure market forces as redistributive pit stops on the road to socialist hell, it’s discouraging to talk about electoral or legislative politics. Activists and elected officials who want to take up his proposals will have to devise their own strategy.
In this book, anyway, Desmond mostly sets aside the kind of systemic explanations—deindustrialization, globalization, neoliberal ideology, even capitalism itself—that have held sway in progressive circles for a long time now. “We typically don’t talk about poverty as a condition that benefits some of us,” he writes. “It seems we prefer more absolving theories of the problem. There is, of course, the old habit of blaming the poor for their own miseries, as if Americans were made of lesser stuff than people in countries with far less poverty. But structural explanations are more in fashion these days, explanations that trace widespread poverty back to broken institutions and seismic economic transformations.” At times, Desmond’s dismissal of such analysis seems too quick. He complains about the passivity of a word like “deindustrialization,” the way it can make the phenomenon sound like an unintentional calamity. Fair enough, but it’s still a useful term (and one that he relied on in “Evicted,” to discuss the loss of manufacturing jobs in Milwaukee).
In fact, one of the more encouraging findings Desmond cites is a 2020 Pew survey showing that a large majority of Americans have come to blame structural obstacles, not personal failings, for poverty, and to believe that most of the rich got that way not through hard work but through advantages. That’s a big shift in a country that has long been enamored of bootstrap mythology. It seems like a precondition for taking poverty abolition seriously and believing it to be possible. And presumably some of that shift can be attributed to structural analysis of inequality and the way it has trickled down into familiar talk about the one per cent. Moreover, even if, as he notes, “systemic” racism and poverty are “made up of untold numbers of individual decisions motivated by real or imagined self-interest,” some kinds of self-interest—that of international corporations, for example—are a lot more powerful than other kinds.
Still, Desmond is right to warn us that a dependence on such buzzwords can have the effect of excusing us, soothing away the apprehension that those of us who abhor such forces are getting something out of their machinations nonetheless. And it’s refreshing to read a work of social criticism that eschews the easy and often smug allure of abstraction, in favor of plainspoken practicality. “Poverty, by America” deserves to be one of those books you see people reading on the subway, or handing around at organizing meetings, or citing in congressional hearings. Its moral force is a gut punch. ♦
How America Manufactures Poverty. By Margaret Talbot. The New Yorker, March 13, 2023.
When Michael Harrington wrote his 1962 classic, “The Other America,” a work of morally charged narrative nonfiction often credited with helping to inspire the War on Poverty, his aim was to reveal the “socially invisible” poor to the rest of America. A cocoon of postwar prosperity and complacency, he wrote, blinkered “middle-class women coming in from Suburbia on a rare trip,” who might “catch the merest glimpse of the other America on the way to an evening at the theater”; it also blinkered “the business or professional man,” who might “drive along the fringes of slums in a car or bus” without regarding it as “an important experience.” The book’s dominant rhetorical modes, as Harrington’s biographer Maurice Isserman notes, were paradox and revelation. If the scales were pulled from the eyes of his well-meaning readers, they would see, in the shadows of American plenty, tens of millions of poor people, whom Harrington catalogued and described: rural poor, city-dwelling slum poor, alcoholic skid-row poor, and so on—all of them urgently needing the help of the government and liberal élites. Even a book like Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground,” an influential neocon attack on “welfare dependency,” from 1984, focussed on the poor themselves, if only so that Murray might make an argument about how they had immiserated themselves by adapting to anti-poverty policies.
Desmond’s terrific previous book, “Evicted” (2016), is emphatically about the lives of the poor. It followed eight struggling families trying to stay housed in Milwaukee, where, in the poorest neighborhoods, “median rent for a two-bedroom apartment was only $50 less than the citywide median.” Families were spending up to seventy per cent of their monthly incomes on housing that might have stopped-up plumbing, broken windows, filthy carpets, and front doors that wouldn’t lock. And when they fell behind on rent for any of the multitude of reasons that people living precariously do—a trip to the emergency room, an unexpected car repair, a steep utility bill paid to keep the lights or the heat on—they faced the chaos and humiliation of eviction.
“Evicted” illuminated big and sometimes novel themes: the outsized role of housing costs in the creation and perpetuation of poverty across the nation, the fact that evictions had become so common that businesses found ways to profit from them (moving companies, for instance, would extract the last of a tenant’s belongings, down to the shower curtain in the bathroom, and place them in storage, which would cost more than many tenants had to reclaim them). But the book’s power resided in its stories, which Desmond told with a keen eye for detail and scene-setting drama. His reporting was intimate and particular. “Jori and his cousin were cutting up, tossing snowballs at passing cars,” reads the first line of the book’s prologue, evocatively named “Cold City.” One of those snowballs proved fateful: the driver of the car it hit got mad, and kicked in the door of Jori’s mom’s apartment; the landlord evicted the family.
“Evicted,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, was almost universally acclaimed, praised especially for the vividness of its portraiture. So it’s brave, in a way, that Desmond has chosen such a different approach for his bracing new book. Books about the poor are vital, he says; they do the important work of “bearing witness.” But “Poverty, by America,” he explains, is a book about how and why the rest of us abide poverty and are complicit in it. Why do many of us seem to accept that the problem is one of scarcity—that there is simply not enough to go around in our very rich country? Where there is exploitation, there are exploiters, and this time Desmond sees many more of them, including most of his prospective readers. Corporations batten on low-wage labor, but so do consumers, who have come to expect the cheap goods and services—the illusorily frictionless food deliveries, the Amazon orders that arrive like conjuring tricks the afternoon you place them—that poorly paid, nonunionized, often temporary workers provide.
“Landlords are not the only ones who benefit from housing exploitation; many homeowners do, too, their property values propped up by the collective effort to make housing scarce and expensive,” Desmond writes, noting that most homeowners receive federal aid in the form of mortgage-interest deductions and other subsidies. (The payout to homeowners in 2020—a hundred and ninety-three billion dollars—far exceeded the fifty-three billion dollars in direct housing assistance that the government gave to low-income families.) “We need not be debt collectors or private prison wardens to play a role in producing poverty in America,” Desmond goes on. “We need only to vote yes on policies that lead to private opulence and public squalor and, with that opulence, build a life behind a wall that we tend and maintain.”
More manifesto than narrative, “Poverty, by America” is urgent and accessible. It’s also austere. There aren’t many stories about individuals; Desmond seems to dole these out with purposeful spareness, perhaps so that we won’t get distracted by them. But the one he tells about himself is affecting. Before he went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, or won a MacArthur, or became a professor at Princeton, Desmond grew up outside a little town near Flagstaff, Arizona, living with his family in a modest wood-panelled house that he loved. Then his father, a pastor, lost his job, and the bank took the family’s home. “Mostly I blamed Dad,” he writes. “But a part of me also wondered why this was our country’s answer when a family fell on hard times.” He kept wondering while he was in college, using scholarships and loans, at Arizona State University, supporting himself as a barista, a telemarketer, and a wildland firefighter. The question compelled him to write “Evicted.” Behind that question, always, were the bigger questions that animate this new book: How is it that the United States, a country with a gross domestic product “larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy,” has a higher relative poverty rate than those other advanced democracies? Why do one in eight Americans, and one in six children, live in poverty—a rate about the same as it was in 1970? Why do we put up with it?
The short answer, Desmond argues, is that as a society we have made a priority of other things: maximal wealth accumulation for the few and cheap stuff for the many. At the same time, we’ve either ignored or enabled the gouging of the poor—by big banks that charge them stiff overdraft fees, by predatory payday lenders and check-cashing outlets of what Desmond calls the “fringe banking industry,” by landlords who squeeze their tenants because the side hustle of rent collecting has turned into their main hustle, by companies that underpay their workers or deny them benefits by confining them to gig status or that keep them perpetually off balance with “just-in-time scheduling” of shifts. To the extent that middle- and upper-class people unthinkingly buy products from such companies and invest in their stock, or park their money in those banks, or oppose public housing in their neighborhoods despite a professed commitment to it, or bid up the prices of fixer-uppers in Austin or San Francisco or Washington, D.C., they, too, are helping to buttress the system.
You might assume that government action would do more to help, maybe even to lower the poverty rate. Programs like food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are lifelines for many. Recent research suggests that even public housing, much maligned, is strikingly beneficial for the families that can get a spot, which can involve a years-long wait. The intimidating towers are now far outnumbered by more dispersed and approachable low-rises. Children who grow up in public housing show lower lead levels in their bloodstreams, more robust mental health, and better results in school than those whose families are scraping by in the private housing market, according to a trio of recent studies; a fourth study, published last year in the American Economic Journal, found that kids who’d lived in public housing had higher incomes and lower rates of incarceration as young adults. Moreover, it turns out that the United States is not all that tightfisted when it comes to social spending. “If you count all public benefits offered by the federal government, America’s welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France’s,” Desmond tells us. Why doesn’t this largesse accomplish more?
For one thing, it unduly assists the affluent. That statistic about the U.S. spending almost as much as France on social welfare, he explains, is accurate only “if you include things like government-subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well above the poverty line.” To enjoy most of these, you need to have a well-paying job, a home that you own, and probably an accountant (and, if you’re really in clover, a money manager).
“The American government gives the most help to those who need it least,” Desmond argues. “This is the true nature of our welfare state, and it has far-reaching implications, not only for our bank accounts and poverty levels, but also for our psychology and civic spirit.” Americans who benefit from social spending in the form of, say, a mortgage-interest tax deduction don’t see themselves as recipients of governmental generosity. The boon it offers them may be as hard for them to recognize and acknowledge as the persistence of poverty once was to Harrington’s suburban housewives and professional men. These Americans may be anti-government and vote that way. They may picture other people, poor people, as weak and dependent and themselves as hardworking and upstanding. Desmond allows that one reason for this is that tax breaks don’t feel the same as direct payments. Although they may amount to the same thing for household incomes and for the federal budget—“You can benefit a family by lowering its tax burden or by increasing its benefits, same difference”—they are associated with an obligation and a procedure that Americans, in particular, find onerous. Tax-cutting Republican lawmakers want the process to be both difficult and Swiss-cheesed with loopholes. (“Taxes should hurt,” Ronald Reagan once said.) But that’s not the only reason. What Desmond calls the “rudest explanation” is that if, for whatever reason, we get a tax break, most of us like it. That’s the case for people affluent and lucky enough to take advantage of the legitimate breaks designed for their benefit, and for the wily super-rich who game the system with expensive lawyering and ingenious use of tax shelters.
And there are other ways, Desmond points out, that government help gets thwarted or misdirected. When President Clinton instituted welfare reform, in 1996, pledging to “transform a broken system that traps too many people in a cycle of dependence,” an older model, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or A.F.D.C., was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. Where most funds administered by A.F.D.C. went straight to families in the form of cash aid, TANF gave grants to states with the added directive to promote two-parent families and discourage out-of-wedlock childbirth, and let the states fund programs to achieve those goals as they saw fit. As a result, “states have come up with rather creative ways to spend TANF dollars,” Desmond writes. “Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents. Only Kentucky and the District of Columbia spent over half of their TANF funds on basic cash assistance.” Between 1999 and 2016, Oklahoma directed more than seventy million dollars toward initiatives to promote marriage, offering couples counselling and workshops that were mostly open to people of all income levels. Arizona used some of the funds to pay for abstinence education; Pennsylvania gave some of its TANF money to anti-abortion programs. Mississippi treated its TANF funds as an unexpected Christmas present, hiring a Christian-rock singer to perform at concerts, for instance, and a former professional wrestler—the author of an autobiography titled “Every Man Has His Price”—to deliver inspirational speeches. (Much of this was revealed by assiduous investigative reporters, and by a 2020 audit of Mississippi’s Department of Human Services.) Moreover, because states don’t have to spend all their TANF funds each year, many carry over big sums. In 2020, Tennessee, which has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the nation, left seven hundred and ninety million dollars in TANF funds unspent.
“Poverty, by America” is a slim book, at fewer than three hundred pages of text, but it’s packed with revelations like these—and with statistics and studies, though, fortunately, a reader need never find herself stranded in a thicket of them. (Seventy-odd pages of endnotes help take care of that problem.) Desmond writes particularly well about the ways in which the poor—though they’re said to be hidden from the rest of us—have never escaped the notice of the markets. For years, big banks treated overdraft fees as a reliable stream of income, extracted from the chronically overdrawn. In 2020, the average fee for overdrawing your account was $33.58, and, because banks can charge these fees multiple times a day, a tiny overdraft can rack up fees of more than a hundred dollars in a matter of hours. Payday-loan stores and check-cashing outlets step in where banks fear to tread, and make good money off the venture. (Unlike traditional banks, they are more common in low-poverty Black neighborhoods than in high-poverty white ones. Black and Hispanic families are five times as likely to have no bank account as white families are.) The reason these lenders charge extortionate fees is, Desmond says, not that the poor are such risky prospects—most payday borrowers ultimately pay back the loans—but that, in a market where the poor have little choice, it’s easy to make money off them. Desmond quotes an observation of James Baldwin’s to this point: “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
And Desmond offers solutions as well, scattered throughout the book and exhibiting varying levels of ambition. The relatively simple ones include helping people claim the aid owed to them. Less than a quarter of families eligible for TANF cash receive it; less than half of elderly Americans who could apply for food stamps do. The phenomenon is so widespread across social programs that Desmond maintains it’s more appropriate to speak of welfare avoidance than of welfare dependency. Yet there are small fixes that have been shown to make a difference, including better-designed applications and targeted assistance with filling out forms. The harder goals include raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour, a rate at which it has been lodged since 2009, and having the Secretary of Labor oversee its regular resetting—a method closer to what many other countries do—rather than waiting for Congress to act. Other measures: supporting unions, still the best way to empower workers; calling on states to better regulate payday lending; making sure that people have access to contraception and abortion (a little tricky these days), since these are proven ways of keeping women and children out of poverty; making it easier for the poor to become homeowners—monthly mortgage payments are generally far less than rent—by getting the government to provide additional backing for small mortgages when banks won’t offer them (a program that encourages rural homeownership in this way already exists); creating more public housing so that people don’t have to languish on waiting lists; eliminating exclusionary zoning policies that ban apartments or other multifamily dwellings in higher-income neighborhoods; making sure that developers are then given incentives—through tax relief, for example—to set aside percentages of the housing for low-income families.
That last part is important: you don’t want a scenario in which rich developers get richer off industrial-chic condos designed for moneyed singles, while city officials congratulate themselves on their commitment to urban density. And it’s tough to pull off. Desmond cites New Jersey as having become a leader in this regard, ever since its Supreme Court issued a series of rulings, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, that produced what’s known as the Mount Laurel doctrine, requiring municipalities to offer a “fair share” of affordable housing—the fair share varying by a town’s income distribution. He says that the policy has forced hundreds of towns in New Jersey to “break ground on affordable housing developments.” (Unfortunately, as he doesn’t say, the Mount Laurel doctrine has also been somewhat undercut by elected officials, cleverly exploited by developers, including the Kushner family, and slowed by litigation. Still, it’s a start.)
Finally, Desmond wants us to think of ourselves as “poverty abolitionists.” He wants us to bear in mind a company’s labor policies when we make decisions about where to invest and what to buy; to conquer nimby-ish instincts and welcome true economic diversity in our neighborhoods and schools; to think about and act on our own roles in perpetuating income inequality. “The goal is singular—to end the exploitation of the poor—but the means are many,” he writes. It’s an appealingly ad-hoc and flexible approach.
In part because this book is aimed at the hearts and minds of the widest possible swath of readers, it doesn’t have much to say about politics. To be a poverty abolitionist means avoiding businesses that don’t treat their workers fairly, as some people shun businesses that contribute to global warming or promote tobacco products or engage in animal cruelty. But, in the absence of politically organized public boycotts, such actions won’t be legible to companies. If, on my own, I stop mailing packages by FedEx and switch to UPS—FedEx employees generally aren’t unionized, Desmond points out, while UPS employees generally are—will anybody notice? Perhaps because Congress and many state governments are in the hands of a Republican Party that sees the mildest adjustments of pure market forces as redistributive pit stops on the road to socialist hell, it’s discouraging to talk about electoral or legislative politics. Activists and elected officials who want to take up his proposals will have to devise their own strategy.
In this book, anyway, Desmond mostly sets aside the kind of systemic explanations—deindustrialization, globalization, neoliberal ideology, even capitalism itself—that have held sway in progressive circles for a long time now. “We typically don’t talk about poverty as a condition that benefits some of us,” he writes. “It seems we prefer more absolving theories of the problem. There is, of course, the old habit of blaming the poor for their own miseries, as if Americans were made of lesser stuff than people in countries with far less poverty. But structural explanations are more in fashion these days, explanations that trace widespread poverty back to broken institutions and seismic economic transformations.” At times, Desmond’s dismissal of such analysis seems too quick. He complains about the passivity of a word like “deindustrialization,” the way it can make the phenomenon sound like an unintentional calamity. Fair enough, but it’s still a useful term (and one that he relied on in “Evicted,” to discuss the loss of manufacturing jobs in Milwaukee).
In fact, one of the more encouraging findings Desmond cites is a 2020 Pew survey showing that a large majority of Americans have come to blame structural obstacles, not personal failings, for poverty, and to believe that most of the rich got that way not through hard work but through advantages. That’s a big shift in a country that has long been enamored of bootstrap mythology. It seems like a precondition for taking poverty abolition seriously and believing it to be possible. And presumably some of that shift can be attributed to structural analysis of inequality and the way it has trickled down into familiar talk about the one per cent. Moreover, even if, as he notes, “systemic” racism and poverty are “made up of untold numbers of individual decisions motivated by real or imagined self-interest,” some kinds of self-interest—that of international corporations, for example—are a lot more powerful than other kinds.
Still, Desmond is right to warn us that a dependence on such buzzwords can have the effect of excusing us, soothing away the apprehension that those of us who abhor such forces are getting something out of their machinations nonetheless. And it’s refreshing to read a work of social criticism that eschews the easy and often smug allure of abstraction, in favor of plainspoken practicality. “Poverty, by America” deserves to be one of those books you see people reading on the subway, or handing around at organizing meetings, or citing in congressional hearings. Its moral force is a gut punch. ♦
How America Manufactures Poverty. By Margaret Talbot. The New Yorker, March 13, 2023.
By viewer request, I am responding to this NYT opinion piece, which is also an excerpt of a book, from Matthew Desmond. As the title suggest, Desmond lays out his view on why poverty persists in America. I think the piece is a bit of a mess and Desmond has mostly gone down the wrong path when it comes to understanding poverty.
Response to Matthew Desmond's "Why Poverty Persists in America". Matt Bruenig, March 14, 2023.
After
Matthew Desmond won the Pulitzer for Evicted, about families struggling to stay
housed, the Princeton sociologist realized he still didn't understand why the
U.S. has more poverty than any other advanced democracy.
His new book Poverty, By America, provides a provocative and compelling answer: It's because the rest of us benefit from it, and act to keep it that way.
Desmond admits it feels rude to accuse ordinary people of exploiting others, especially as many don't even realize they're doing it. But he says to understand poverty requires examining not just the relentlessly demonized 1% but "ourselves ... we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky."
This means Poverty, By America is not an immersive attempt to bear witness to suffering like Evicted. Instead, Desmond lays out public policies, laws, and tax breaks to show how the U.S. actually spends big on social programs — second only to France! — but gives the most to those who need it the least. Welfare dependency? Yes indeed, for the richer half.
He packs in a sweeping array of examples and numbers to support his thesis and it can be overwhelming to absorb. But the accumulation has the effect of shifting one's brain ever so slightly to change the entire frame of reference.
One example among many he offers: In 2020, the federal government spent more than $193 billion on subsidies for homeowners — "most families who enjoy this benefit have six-figure incomes and are white" — but just $53 billion on direct housing assistance for low-income families. That's not for lack of need. Because of chronic federal underinvestment, only 1 in 4 extremely low-income Americans who qualify for housing aid get it.
Desmond notes that more affluent Americans also disproportionately benefit from subsidized retirement and college savings plans. Exclusionary zoning laws keep their segregated neighborhoods prosperous with well-funded schools, while concentrating poverty elsewhere.
Meanwhile, lower-income families locked out of those neighborhoods — disproportionately Black and Latinx — pay more at every turn. Higher interest rates on mortgages when they can get one — and higher rent when they can't. Desmond's analysis finds U.S. landlords in poor neighborhoods typically make double the profit as those in richer ones. Poor people are also hit with billions in bank overdraft fees every year, a policy that became more widespread after banking deregulation in the 1980s.
These inequities and others are self-perpetuating. The wealthy have more political power, Desmond says, and wield it by lobbying for lower taxes, lower wages, and other laws that give them even more money and power.
When it comes to solutions, Poverty, By America first offers its own reality check.
Two of the biggest U.S. anti-poverty programs are the Earned Income Tax Credit and housing vouchers to subsidize rent. But Desmond says writing this book has forced him to see how they "rescue millions of families from a social ill, but they do nothing to address its root causes." The tax credit allows companies to keep wages low, he says, and housing vouchers don't keep landlords from raising rent when their tenants' wages go up.
"We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets," he says.
To that end, Desmond calls for policies that give the poor more power in the workplace and housing market, and sees hope in the growing push for unions and a resurgent tenants rights movement.
He also wants a return to bigger investments in the general welfare, which he says would amount to "more poor aid and less rich aid" and less segregation. How to pay? "We could just about fill the entire poverty gap in America if the richest among us simply paid all the taxes they owed," he says.
The IRS recently did get more money to go after rich tax dodgers. Maybe it's a start.
But by this point in the book, Desmond has made crystal clear just how difficult it is to change policies that keep so many cozy in their relative prosperity. In 2015, President Obama proposed ending the tax credits in 529 college savings plan; the uproar from his own party was so intense that it was quashed the next day.
Then Desmond suggests something that felt contrived at first, but stuck with me and seems smart for this moment. Taking a cue from the anti-racist push and consumer movements, he says Americans can join to create change by being "poverty abolitionists."
"Poverty in America is not simply the result of actions taken by Congress and corporate boards," he says, "but the millions of decisions we make each day when going about our business."
Changing those decisions can be simple, like choosing UPS over FedEx because their drivers are unionized. Or more disruptive, like examining whether your company exploits workers or your stock market portfolio includes some that do.
Of course, for those who are able, investing and buying to counter poverty can be time consuming and even costly. But Desmond says it's precisely in understanding those costs that we acknowledge our shared complicity.
'Poverty, By America' shows how the rest of us benefit by keeping others poor. By Jennifer Ludden. NPR, March 17, 2023.
His new book Poverty, By America, provides a provocative and compelling answer: It's because the rest of us benefit from it, and act to keep it that way.
Desmond admits it feels rude to accuse ordinary people of exploiting others, especially as many don't even realize they're doing it. But he says to understand poverty requires examining not just the relentlessly demonized 1% but "ourselves ... we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky."
This means Poverty, By America is not an immersive attempt to bear witness to suffering like Evicted. Instead, Desmond lays out public policies, laws, and tax breaks to show how the U.S. actually spends big on social programs — second only to France! — but gives the most to those who need it the least. Welfare dependency? Yes indeed, for the richer half.
He packs in a sweeping array of examples and numbers to support his thesis and it can be overwhelming to absorb. But the accumulation has the effect of shifting one's brain ever so slightly to change the entire frame of reference.
One example among many he offers: In 2020, the federal government spent more than $193 billion on subsidies for homeowners — "most families who enjoy this benefit have six-figure incomes and are white" — but just $53 billion on direct housing assistance for low-income families. That's not for lack of need. Because of chronic federal underinvestment, only 1 in 4 extremely low-income Americans who qualify for housing aid get it.
Desmond notes that more affluent Americans also disproportionately benefit from subsidized retirement and college savings plans. Exclusionary zoning laws keep their segregated neighborhoods prosperous with well-funded schools, while concentrating poverty elsewhere.
Meanwhile, lower-income families locked out of those neighborhoods — disproportionately Black and Latinx — pay more at every turn. Higher interest rates on mortgages when they can get one — and higher rent when they can't. Desmond's analysis finds U.S. landlords in poor neighborhoods typically make double the profit as those in richer ones. Poor people are also hit with billions in bank overdraft fees every year, a policy that became more widespread after banking deregulation in the 1980s.
These inequities and others are self-perpetuating. The wealthy have more political power, Desmond says, and wield it by lobbying for lower taxes, lower wages, and other laws that give them even more money and power.
When it comes to solutions, Poverty, By America first offers its own reality check.
Two of the biggest U.S. anti-poverty programs are the Earned Income Tax Credit and housing vouchers to subsidize rent. But Desmond says writing this book has forced him to see how they "rescue millions of families from a social ill, but they do nothing to address its root causes." The tax credit allows companies to keep wages low, he says, and housing vouchers don't keep landlords from raising rent when their tenants' wages go up.
"We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets," he says.
To that end, Desmond calls for policies that give the poor more power in the workplace and housing market, and sees hope in the growing push for unions and a resurgent tenants rights movement.
He also wants a return to bigger investments in the general welfare, which he says would amount to "more poor aid and less rich aid" and less segregation. How to pay? "We could just about fill the entire poverty gap in America if the richest among us simply paid all the taxes they owed," he says.
The IRS recently did get more money to go after rich tax dodgers. Maybe it's a start.
But by this point in the book, Desmond has made crystal clear just how difficult it is to change policies that keep so many cozy in their relative prosperity. In 2015, President Obama proposed ending the tax credits in 529 college savings plan; the uproar from his own party was so intense that it was quashed the next day.
Then Desmond suggests something that felt contrived at first, but stuck with me and seems smart for this moment. Taking a cue from the anti-racist push and consumer movements, he says Americans can join to create change by being "poverty abolitionists."
"Poverty in America is not simply the result of actions taken by Congress and corporate boards," he says, "but the millions of decisions we make each day when going about our business."
Changing those decisions can be simple, like choosing UPS over FedEx because their drivers are unionized. Or more disruptive, like examining whether your company exploits workers or your stock market portfolio includes some that do.
Of course, for those who are able, investing and buying to counter poverty can be time consuming and even costly. But Desmond says it's precisely in understanding those costs that we acknowledge our shared complicity.
'Poverty, By America' shows how the rest of us benefit by keeping others poor. By Jennifer Ludden. NPR, March 17, 2023.
Matthew Desmond, a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and Pulitzer winner, is at a restaurant at the corner of Ninth Avenue and 25th Street in Manhattan. He has taken the train up from Princeton University, where he teaches sociology and runs a data lab, for this interview—something he didn’t need to do.
Smiling easily in a light gray sweater that matches his silvering hair, Desmond says offhand that he’s been on so many video calls over the past year that he was eager to meet face-to-face. It’s a simple enough statement, but in this case it offers a clue as to what makes Desmond tick: he seems to possess a powerful intuition that the best way to understand anything is to encounter it firsthand.
Desmond was catapulted from promising young professor (he won his MacArthur in 2015) to one of the country’s leading authorities on poverty with the 2016 publication of his bestselling Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.
In March, Crown will release his next book, Poverty, by America, in which Desmond takes a big swing at diagnosing why poverty exists in this country. His conclusion: we could, as a society, alleviate poverty—if only we had the stomach to give up benefitting from poverty ourselves.
Why is there poverty in the first place? It’s a question that has animated Desmond’s work since graduate school. “There was something about the poverty debate that was bugging me,” he says. “There are all these books about poverty, and I started asking, Where’s the tension in the story? Who is the bad guy? Is there a bad guy? Are there really 38 million people in this country who are poor, and it’s no one’s fault?”
For Evicted, which grew out of the ethnographic research he did in Milwaukee while working on his PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Desmond realized he needed to ground this abstract question in a relationship between two real human beings. “That’s how I came upon writing about eviction,” he says. “That’s an ethnographic scene, where I can have landlords and tenants in the same room. And it turned out that eviction—unbeknownst to me—was something we just didn’t know a lot about.” He moved into a Milwaukee trailer park, and later an urban rooming house, and followed 10 tenants and landlords (eight made it into the final book) as they navigated poverty and eviction.
Writing about landlords and tenants came out of a need to see a problem firsthand, but it also reflected a keen writerly instinct for character and narrative tension. Desmond’s academic adviser had long encouraged him to write for an audience beyond the academy (years earlier, Desmond had turned his master’s thesis into a book titled On the Firelines), and soon Desmond was looking to turn his fieldwork in Milwaukee into a book for the trade.
“I met a lot of agents,” he recalls, “and a lot of the conversations went like this: ‘Let’s trim this paragraph and we’ll go to market. Let’s fix this thing and we’ll go to market.’ Power lunch agents.” Then he met Jill Kneerim, at what was then Kneerim, Williams, & Bloom. “Jill was just like, ‘This is crap. This doesn’t make any sense. This just isn’t working at all.’ She was like another dissertation adviser. She just handed me my ass all the time.”
Kneerim sold Evicted to Crown at auction, but Desmond’s work was far from over. The field work itself had been grueling—long days with his subjects, followed by long nights typing up his notes—and the process of writing the book wasn’t any easier.
“I got invited to give a talk in Paris,” Desmond says, “and I brought all this butcher paper there, and I had a coding mechanism for ‘this is exactly where this is in the field notes.’ I wrote all these themes, and then I had this other piece of butcher paper where I wrote all the ideas: Where am I going to talk about domestic violence? Where am I going to tell you about the racial disparities in eviction? And then I just connected the people to the ideas, and that’s how the book took shape.”
After Evicted came out, Desmond’s life changed dramatically. The attention, praise, and awards were gratifying, but he kept thinking of the relationships he’d formed with his subjects in Milwaukee. A Pulitzer was great, but how was it going to help Arleen—perhaps the most memorable character in Evicted—get out of poverty?
Desmond channeled his discomfort into action. “Publishing a book is step three of making a difference,” he says. “There’s all this follow-through work that was new to me.” That work brought him into a bigger national conversation about how to alleviate poverty, this time with policymakers who were actually in positions to effect change. He also started the Eviction Lab at Princeton, which compiled the first comprehensive data set of evictions in the U.S.
But eventually Desmond found himself thinking back to graduate school, and the question he used to ask himself about the origins of poverty: “I remember in my dissertation defense there was a scholar who asked this question, ‘What’s your theory of poverty?’ I should have an answer to that.” Perhaps this time he could try to tackle the question not as an ethnographer and sociologist, but as a public intellectual.
Poverty, by America is his answer. A departure from the narrative approach of Evicted, Poverty is as direct as a manifesto, with a message as damning as its title: Desmond argues that the problem of poverty in the richest country in the world isn’t unsolvable—it’s just that a bloc of highly entrenched, privileged citizens live comfortable lives that are enabled and
preserved by the systematic exploitation of the poor and powerless. Who are these people? Look in the mirror, Desmond argues; they’re us.
“I have a deep suspicion of theories of poverty that are just letting us off the hook,” he says. “The progressives have them, and the conservatives have them.” Abolishing poverty, he argues, will only be possible if we can face our own complicity in its existence.
Desmond points to recent changes in the national conversation around race as evidence that there’s a real opportunity for middle- and upper-middle-class people to begin examining that complicity critically. “I’ve given talks all over the country,” he says, “and America is ready for a different poverty conversation.” He hopes that Poverty will help launch it.
Kneerim died last year. Desmond visited her in a sunbathed hospice room, where she asked him what he was working on next. “She loved her work,” he says, moved by her singular focus even on her deathbed. “She really did believe ideas can change the world.”
Desmond believes that, too. When asked if he thinks his work will become more policy focused in the future, he says that the experience of Evicted helped clarify for him how he can best make a difference. “The last time I testified in front of Congress, I said we’ve got to have someone who was evicted testify. We brought this gentleman from Virginia who had stayed up all night working security, who then came to the House to testify. He didn’t have a jacket, so one of the staff let him borrow a jacket. And of course, he’s the one that everyone remembers. He took the air out of the room.”
“I want my writing to be read by policymakers,” Desmond adds. “I want to be in the meetings, but I’m getting to this place in my career where I think I’m a writer.” By elevating people like that security guard from Virginia—so that readers and policymakers alike can encounter the problem of poverty firsthand—he has realized that perhaps the most powerful thing someone in his position can do is get out of the way and let the powerless speak for themselves.
Poverty Could End. Matthew Desmond Doesn't Think America Wants It To. By Andy Kifer. Publishers Weekly, January 27, 2023
No comments:
Post a Comment