Poverty, by America

Matthew Desmond achieved rock star status in academia with his first book “Evicted,” a prize-winning report on people living on the edge of homelessness in Milwaukee’s predominantly black North Side and the city’s white South Side. I welcomed this follow-up book because Desmond goes beyond good story-telling to a no-holds-barred indictment of America’s appalling poverty problem and its origins.

Locked into a dysfunctional economic system that benefits the wealthiest (slumlords actually profit more than luxury condo developers), millions of Americans live precariously close to destitution, and the wealth gap increases annually. I hope to take up Desmond’s call to become… show more.

From the opening page, Desmond challenges us to confront our role in maintaining poverty in America. He uses simple examples: Why do we view a tax deduction for home mortgage interest differently than a housing voucher for a low-income renter? Both are government subsidies, yet many people consider the first one “earned” and the second one a “handout.”

Desmond provides many similar examples that force us to confront the varied ways that our society maintains an ongoing underclass. He makes clear that the maintenance of poverty is a choice. If we truly want to end poverty, we can, and he… show more.

Desmond describes in searing and vivid terms what it means to be poor today, and posits that poverty continues for the simple reason that some in America benefit from it.

Desmond manages the challenge of synthesizing an impassioned critique with facts and ethnography while crafting a narrative. Among other brilliant interventions, he reminds us, at a time when the social safety net gets routinely trashed, that the War on Poverty actually worked to diminish poverty.

His last chapter articulates an argument that I’ve often made: living with forms of inequality hurts all of us. It hurts those who suffer most… show more.

Why do we have so much poverty in America? Matthew Desmond writes that we have such poverty because the rest of American society benefits from having poor people.

This is a tough pill to swallow, but Desmond certainly convinced me. We live in the richest country in the world—with our gated communities, our tax savings and incentives, our private schools, and our ability to weather the economic storms of life.

We needn’t have such high rates of poverty; policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels could make life more bearable for the poor—through schooling, decent wages, health care, and… show more.