Poverty, by America
 | |
| Author | Matthew Desmond |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Poverty in the United States |
| Publisher | Crown Publishing Group |
Publication date | March 21, 2023 |
| ISBN | 9780593239919 |
Poverty, by America is a 2023 non-fiction book by Matthew Desmond, a sociology professor. Published by Crown Publishing Group, it was released on March 21, 2023.
Overview[edit]
Poverty, by America is a sociological analysis of poverty and its causes in the United States. Desmond's central thesis is that wealthy Americans, even those who would otherwise consider themselves progressive, tacitly benefit from government policies that keep people in poverty. Desmond also presents systemic solutions to the issue of poverty in the United States, arguing that tax reform and increasing investment in public services would reduce poverty.[1] He also recommends that individual consumers become "poverty abolitionists" by withdrawing support "from corporations that exploit their workers" and patronize businesses that have a unionized workforce.[2]
Development history[edit]
Publication history[edit]
Poverty, by America was published by Crown Publishing Group and released on March 21, 2023.[3]
Reception[edit]
Poverty, by America received critical acclaim upon release.[4] Kirkus Reviews wrote positively about Desmond's policy proposals, describing the book as a "clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America."[3] Booklist and BookPage similarly praised the book, singling out Desmond's solutions as a highlight.[5][6] While positive overall, Eyal Press negatively compared Poverty, by America to Desmond's earlier book Evicted, criticizing Poverty, by America for being drier and containing little original research.[7]
The Washington Post's Timothy Noah wrote positively about the book, describing it as "a darker view" than other books about poverty.[8] Paul Gleason wrote a positive review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, noting that Desmond criticized politicians on all sides of the political spectrum, writing that "he reserves a lot of blame for his peers, the kind of people who are likely to buy his book."[9] Historian Samuel Moyn wrote positively about the book in The Guardian, praising Desmond for his scope, but criticized his proposed solutions for lacking a concrete plan to implement them. Moyn adds that "Desmond shows that the American economy has increasingly allowed business to enjoy power to coerce people into earning less for doing more. He insists he’s not a Marxist – though he writes that raising the spectre of exploitation always makes him sound like he is."[10] Writing in The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot said the book is "urgent and accessible," and that its "moral force is a gut punch" which should be widely read and "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."[11]
In a mixed review of the book for Jacobin, Clark Randall writes that while its content "is not entirely lacking in truth, the way it is conceived reflects rather than challenges neoliberal ideas of subjective choice". Randall argues that Desmond retains what he sees as a pro-capitalist vision of combatting poverty, as any analysis or critique of the nature of capitalism and its contradictions is omitted, and insists that "to create a system whose primary goal is mass poverty eradication would necessitate the overthrow of the capitalist state."[12]
In a positive review for The Nation, Marcia Chatelain writes that the book makes a strong case why we should come together "to put an end to poverty in the United States once and for all," but this can only happen (according to Desmond's argument) when we reckon with the fact that too many high and middle income Americans "enjoy financial stability as a result of the suffering of the poor," including landlords, payday lenders, employers in the service industry, and consumers themselves who "want low prices, an abundance of market options, and a plethora of gig workers to drive them to airports or clean their homes." She suggests that Desmond does not zero in on capitalism itself as the target as his objective with the book is to "bring people with disparate viewpoints and perspectives to a common place on poverty."[13]
Dylan Matthews of Vox was critical of Desmond's core thesis, that poverty in the US has not improved in 50 years, which Matthews said is simply wrong.[14] Matthews states that by any measure of poverty in the United States, absolute or relative, poverty has been reduced, and the only measure of poverty which does not demonstrate this is the Census Bureau's Official Poverty Measure (OPM), a measure widely regarded as extremely flawed because it fails to include non-cash poverty reduction programs.[14] Matthews stated that Desmond marvels at the 130 percent increase in federal anti-poverty spending but fails to understand where that money went and what it accomplished.[14]
References[edit]
- ^ Davies, Dave (2023-03-21). "Private opulence, public squalor: How the U.S. helps the rich and hurts the poor". NPR. Retrieved 2023-04-10.
- ^ Desmond, Matthew (2023). Poverty, by America. Crown Publishing Group. p. 191. ISBN 9780593239919.
- ^ a b "Poverty, by America". Kirkus Reviews. 2022-12-01. Retrieved 2023-04-10.
- ^ "Poverty, by America". BookMarks. Retrieved 2023-04-10.
- ^ Mondor, Colleen (2023-01-01). "Poverty, by America". Booklist. Retrieved 2023-04-10.
- ^ Harvieux, Annie. "Poverty, by America". BookPage. Retrieved 2023-04-10.
- ^ Press, Eyal (2023-03-21). "The One Cause of Poverty That's Never Considered". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2023-04-10.
- ^ Noah, Timothy (2023-03-16). "Why are so many Americans poor? Because we allow it, two books argue". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2023-04-10.
- ^ Gleason, Paul W. (2023-03-21). "How to Be a Poverty Abolitionist: On Matthew Desmond's 'Poverty, by America'". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2023-04-10.
- ^ Moyn, Samuel (2023-03-22). "Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond review - how the rich keep the poor down". The Guardian. Retrieved 2023-04-10.
- ^ Talbot, Margaret (March 13, 2023). "How America Manufactures Poverty". The New Yorker. Retrieved September 3, 2023.
- ^ Randall, Clark (July 1, 2023). "No, We're Not All to Blame for Poverty". Jacobin. Retrieved 2023-07-04.
- ^ Chatelain, Marcia (August 21, 2023). "Tens of Millions: The persistence of American poverty". The Nation. Retrieved August 22, 2023.
- ^ a b c Matthews, Dylan (2023-03-10). "Why even brilliant scholars misunderstand poverty in America - Housing expert Matthew Desmond argues poverty has stagnated in America, but misses something big". Vox.
That is, Desmond's core premise, that expanding safety net programs haven't slashed poverty, is wrong. They have. You just need to measure poverty carefully. ... Desmond, in his essay, spends some time marveling that "federal investments in means-tested programs increased by 130 percent from 1980 to 2018," a fact he finds hard to square with the official poverty rate remaining flat. Surely that spending should have reduced poverty! The answer here is simple: It did reduce poverty. The escalation of government investment made a difference, no matter what reputable poverty data you look at, whether absolute or relative. The only data series where it doesn't make a difference is the official poverty measure, which literally does not consider most of this spending and acts like it does not exist. ... That's why there's also near-unanimous consensus among poverty researchers that the official poverty measure (OPM) in the United States is a disaster. ... I was frankly a little shocked to see Desmond cite it without qualification in his article.
Further reading[edit]
- Lowrey, Annie (May 14, 2023). "The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won". The Atlantic.
External links[edit]
===
Heewon's post
Heewon Kim
·
Matthew Desmond와 만난 이야기를 주말에 <문학인>에 송고했다. 요즘 너무 지옥 같은 일정이어서 황급히 써서 보낼 수밖에 없었다는 점이 아쉽다. 더 감동적인(?) 미담이 있지만 출판되는 글에는 담을 수 없었던 점도 아쉽고.
나를 포함해 약 스무 명 남짓한 학자들이 Desmond와 따로 만나는 자리가 있었다. 그와의 만남을 앞두고 아무런 사전정보 없이 급하게 <Poverty, By America>를 읽어내려갔는데, 물론 <Evicted>와 통하는 지점이 있지만 내 예상과는 다른 책이었다. 이 책은 자신의 후속 연구를 발표하는 책도 아니고, 대단히 새로운 주장을 하는 책도 아니다. 그럼에도 불구하고 (아마도 연구할 시간을 포기하면서) 열심히 써 내려간 책이다. 왜냐하면,
이 책은 활동가로 살기 위해 쓴 책이기 때문이다.
나뿐만 아니라 함께 만난 다른 학자들도 모두 그렇게 생각한 것 같았다. 여기저기 흩어져 있는 구슬을 굳이 애써서 다시 꿰어낸 책. 그리고 그는 책 출간 이후로 실제로 이 책을 그런 용도로 사용하고 있다. 전국을 돌아다니면서 강연을 하고, 정부 관료들을 만나고, 함께 일하는 사회운동 단체들을 홍보하고, 청중들에게 액션 플랜을 주며 자극하고 독촉한다. 말하자면 사람들을 선동하고 정책가들을 압박하기 위한 도구가 필요해서, 자기가 할 수 있는 방식으로 직접 만들었다는 얘기다. (그는 독자들과 사회단체를 연결하기 위한 웹사이트도 만들었다.)
굳이 애써서 대중서를 쓰는 이유다.
<Poverty, By America>는 접근성이 대단히 높고 (그 특유의 문체 탓이기도 하다), 풍부한 사례를 바탕으로 기존 연구를 설득력있게 풀어냈으며, 또한 독자들의 인식 및 행동 변화를 유도하기에 효과적으로 구성되어 있다. 책 마지막에 있는 “북클럽을 위한 토론 질문”도 아주 좋다. 모범적인 대중서.
한국에도 알려져있는지 모르겠지만, Desmond는 매우 빈곤한 가정에서 태어났다. ASU 학부생 시절부터 빈곤 철폐 운동에 뛰어들었고, 그 때 만난 “동지”가 지금의 아내이기도 하다. 따라서 그는 그때부터 지금까지 활동가로 살고 있다고 볼 수 있겠다.
물론 Desmond는 다른 진보적인 활동가/연구자들과 접점이 있기도 하고, 없기도 하다. 그는 대단히 현실적이고 실용적인 해결방안을 우선적으로 생각하기 때문이다. 그는 자본주의 성격 논쟁 같은 것도 별로 달갑지 않다고 한다. 개념을 두고 논쟁하기에는 빈곤의 문제가 너무 절박하고, 절실하기 때문이다. 여전히 빈자들의 동지로 살고 있는 그에게, 하루하루가 아깝고 두려운 그에게, 개념 논쟁은 사치 같은 것이다. 그래서 그는 그런 논쟁에 들이는 시간을 피하기 위해 급진적 노선을 타지 않으려 하는 듯하다. (책에서도 느껴진다.)
책 제목 “미국이 만든 가난”은 결국 “우리가 만든 가난”, “당신이 만든 가난”이라는 의미다. 자신들은 아무 잘못도 없다고 느끼는 미국의 “선량한 중산층”에게 지금 당장 관성을 탈피하고 할 수 있는 것을 하라고 촉구하는 책. 사실 할 수 있으면서도 하지 않는 일이 얼마나 많은지… 나 역시 답답하고 부끄러웠다. 매순간 부끄럽지 않게 살만한 자신도 없고.
그의 진정성과 한결같음에 대단히 감동받을 수밖에 없었다. 비록 매우 다른 성향의 사람이지만, 그와는 별개로 존경할 점이 많은 scholar-activist.
책을 쓰는 이유에 대해 여러가지 생각을 하게 된다.
All reactions:172You, Hyuk Bom Kwon and 170 others
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Heewon Kim
그러니까 잘하자 좀... (나에게 하는 이야기...)
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서영섭
가난의 구조에 관심을 갖고 계신 교수님께서 왜 부끄러움을요~
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Heewon Kim
서영섭 아니에요~ 많이 부족합니다. 더 예민해져야 하고, 사회적 실천도 운동도 더 많이 해야지요!!
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Park Il Hwan
잘 읽었습니다. 기회가 되면 책도 읽어야겠네요.
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Heewon Kim
Park Il Hwan 제가 안타깝게도 국역본은 읽어보지 못했는데요~ (국역본으로도 보고싶긴 한데…) 비록 직접 읽은 것은 아니지만 번역이 괜찮지 않을까 추측해봅니다.
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Park Il Hwan
김정희원 일단 서점을 가서 이 책이랑 눈으로 몇 장 대화를 나눠야겠네요. 조심 조심 페이지를 넘기면서. ㅎㅎ
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정대훈
선생님께서 이렇게 강력한 의미부여를 해 주시니 사보지 않을 수가 없네요 ㅎㅎ 알라딘에 들어가니 <쫓겨난 사람들>과 세트로 파는데, 같이 봐야 선생님의 의미부여가 더 드러날 것 같아 두 권 세트로 사야겠다는 생각이 드네요 ㅎㅎ 바쁜 일정에 건강도 잘 챙기시길 바라겠습니다~^^
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Edited
Heewon Kim
정대훈 제가 항상 이런 유형의 사람을 좋아하지는 않는데, 언제나 예외는 있나봐요.
첫번째 책은 장기간의 연구를 바탕으로 한 책이라 그 사람의 내공이 잘 드러난답니다! 제 소개글이 조금이라도 유익했다면 너무 감사한 일이네요~ 함께 열심히 공부해나가요! ㅎㅎ
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===
Heewon's post
Heewon Kim
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Matthew Desmond와 만난 이야기를 주말에 <문학인>에 송고했다. 요즘 너무 지옥 같은 일정이어서 황급히 써서 보낼 수밖에 없었다는 점이 아쉽다. 더 감동적인(?) 미담이 있지만 출판되는 글에는 담을 수 없었던 점도 아쉽고.
나를 포함해 약 스무 명 남짓한 학자들이 Desmond와 따로 만나는 자리가 있었다. 그와의 만남을 앞두고 아무런 사전정보 없이 급하게 <Poverty, By America>를 읽어내려갔는데, 물론 <Evicted>와 통하는 지점이 있지만 내 예상과는 다른 책이었다. 이 책은 자신의 후속 연구를 발표하는 책도 아니고, 대단히 새로운 주장을 하는 책도 아니다. 그럼에도 불구하고 (아마도 연구할 시간을 포기하면서) 열심히 써 내려간 책이다. 왜냐하면,
이 책은 활동가로 살기 위해 쓴 책이기 때문이다.
나뿐만 아니라 함께 만난 다른 학자들도 모두 그렇게 생각한 것 같았다. 여기저기 흩어져 있는 구슬을 굳이 애써서 다시 꿰어낸 책. 그리고 그는 책 출간 이후로 실제로 이 책을 그런 용도로 사용하고 있다. 전국을 돌아다니면서 강연을 하고, 정부 관료들을 만나고, 함께 일하는 사회운동 단체들을 홍보하고, 청중들에게 액션 플랜을 주며 자극하고 독촉한다. 말하자면 사람들을 선동하고 정책가들을 압박하기 위한 도구가 필요해서, 자기가 할 수 있는 방식으로 직접 만들었다는 얘기다. (그는 독자들과 사회단체를 연결하기 위한 웹사이트도 만들었다.)
굳이 애써서 대중서를 쓰는 이유다.
<Poverty, By America>는 접근성이 대단히 높고 (그 특유의 문체 탓이기도 하다), 풍부한 사례를 바탕으로 기존 연구를 설득력있게 풀어냈으며, 또한 독자들의 인식 및 행동 변화를 유도하기에 효과적으로 구성되어 있다. 책 마지막에 있는 “북클럽을 위한 토론 질문”도 아주 좋다. 모범적인 대중서.
한국에도 알려져있는지 모르겠지만, Desmond는 매우 빈곤한 가정에서 태어났다. ASU 학부생 시절부터 빈곤 철폐 운동에 뛰어들었고, 그 때 만난 “동지”가 지금의 아내이기도 하다. 따라서 그는 그때부터 지금까지 활동가로 살고 있다고 볼 수 있겠다.
물론 Desmond는 다른 진보적인 활동가/연구자들과 접점이 있기도 하고, 없기도 하다. 그는 대단히 현실적이고 실용적인 해결방안을 우선적으로 생각하기 때문이다. 그는 자본주의 성격 논쟁 같은 것도 별로 달갑지 않다고 한다. 개념을 두고 논쟁하기에는 빈곤의 문제가 너무 절박하고, 절실하기 때문이다. 여전히 빈자들의 동지로 살고 있는 그에게, 하루하루가 아깝고 두려운 그에게, 개념 논쟁은 사치 같은 것이다. 그래서 그는 그런 논쟁에 들이는 시간을 피하기 위해 급진적 노선을 타지 않으려 하는 듯하다. (책에서도 느껴진다.)
책 제목 “미국이 만든 가난”은 결국 “우리가 만든 가난”, “당신이 만든 가난”이라는 의미다. 자신들은 아무 잘못도 없다고 느끼는 미국의 “선량한 중산층”에게 지금 당장 관성을 탈피하고 할 수 있는 것을 하라고 촉구하는 책. 사실 할 수 있으면서도 하지 않는 일이 얼마나 많은지… 나 역시 답답하고 부끄러웠다. 매순간 부끄럽지 않게 살만한 자신도 없고.
그의 진정성과 한결같음에 대단히 감동받을 수밖에 없었다. 비록 매우 다른 성향의 사람이지만, 그와는 별개로 존경할 점이 많은 scholar-activist.
책을 쓰는 이유에 대해 여러가지 생각을 하게 된다.
All reactions:172You, Hyuk Bom Kwon and 170 others
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Heewon Kim
그러니까 잘하자 좀... (나에게 하는 이야기...)
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서영섭
가난의 구조에 관심을 갖고 계신 교수님께서 왜 부끄러움을요~
1 d
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Heewon Kim
서영섭 아니에요~ 많이 부족합니다. 더 예민해져야 하고, 사회적 실천도 운동도 더 많이 해야지요!!
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Park Il Hwan
잘 읽었습니다. 기회가 되면 책도 읽어야겠네요.
1 d
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Heewon Kim
Park Il Hwan 제가 안타깝게도 국역본은 읽어보지 못했는데요~ (국역본으로도 보고싶긴 한데…) 비록 직접 읽은 것은 아니지만 번역이 괜찮지 않을까 추측해봅니다.
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Park Il Hwan
김정희원 일단 서점을 가서 이 책이랑 눈으로 몇 장 대화를 나눠야겠네요. 조심 조심 페이지를 넘기면서. ㅎㅎ
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정대훈
선생님께서 이렇게 강력한 의미부여를 해 주시니 사보지 않을 수가 없네요 ㅎㅎ 알라딘에 들어가니 <쫓겨난 사람들>과 세트로 파는데, 같이 봐야 선생님의 의미부여가 더 드러날 것 같아 두 권 세트로 사야겠다는 생각이 드네요 ㅎㅎ 바쁜 일정에 건강도 잘 챙기시길 바라겠습니다~^^
23 h
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Heewon Kim
정대훈 제가 항상 이런 유형의 사람을 좋아하지는 않는데, 언제나 예외는 있나봐요.
첫번째 책은 장기간의 연구를 바탕으로 한 책이라 그 사람의 내공이 잘 드러난답니다! 제 소개글이 조금이라도 유익했다면 너무 감사한 일이네요~ 함께 열심히 공부해나가요! ㅎㅎ5 h
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Poverty, by America Hardcover – 21 March 2023
by Matthew Desmond (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,561 ratings
See all formats and editions
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a "provocative and compelling" (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Oprah Daily, Time, The Star Tribune, Vulture, The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Public Library, Esquire, California Review of Books, She Reads, Library Journal
"Urgent and accessible . . . Its moral force is a gut punch."--The New Yorker
Longlisted for the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award - Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.
Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.
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Review
"A searing, essential book . . .[that] solidifies Desmond's status as a remarkable chronicler of our times."--Vulture
"The passion, eloquence, and lively storytelling that made Evicted a Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller are back in force as Desmond continues to speak on behalf of America's most hard-pressed. Desmond is our national conscience."--Oprah Daily
"Desmond's new book is short, smart, and thrilling. The thrill comes from the sheer boldness of Desmond's argument and his carefully modulated but very real tone of outrage that underlies his words."--Rolling Stone
"[Desmond's] arguments have the potential to push debate about wealth in America to a new level. . . . The brilliance of Poverty, By America . . . is provided by effective storytelling, which illustrates that poverty has become a way of life."--The Guardian
"Poverty, by America is a searing moral indictment of how and why the United States tolerates such high levels of poverty and of inequality . . . [and] a hands-on call to action."--The Nation
"A fierce polemic on an enduring problem . . . [Desmond] writes movingly about the psychological scars of poverty . . . and his prose can be crisp, elegant, and elegiac."--The Economist
"Provocative and compelling . . . [Desmond] packs in a sweeping array of examples and numbers to support his thesis and . . . the accumulation has the effect of shifting one's brain ever so slightly to change the entire frame of reference."--NPR
"A data-driven manifesto that turns a critical eye on those who inflict and perpetuate unlivable conditions on others."--The Boston Globe
"Urgent and accessible . . . 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. Its moral force is a gut punch."--The New Yorker
"A compact jeremiad on the persistence of extreme want in a nation of extraordinary wealth . . . [Desmond's] purpose here is to draw attention to what's plain in front of us--damn the etiquette, and damn the grand abstractions."--The New York Times Book Review
"[T]hrough in-depth research and original reporting, the acclaimed sociologist offers solutions that would help spread America's wealth and make everyone more prosperous."--Time
"Desmond's book makes an urgent and unignorable appeal to our national conscience, one that has been quietly eroded over decades of increasing personal consumption and untiring corporate greed."--Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
"[Poverty, by America is] a book that could alter the way you see the world. . . . It reads almost like a passionate speech, urging us to dig deeper, to forget what we think we know as we try to understand the inequities upon which America was built. . . . A surprisingly hopeful work."--Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Desmond's electrifying pen cuts through the usual evasions and exposes the 'selfish, ' 'dishonest' and 'sinful' pretence that poverty is a problem that America cannot afford to fix, rather than one it chooses not to."--Prospect
"A powerful polemic, one that has expanded and deepened my understanding of American poverty. Desmond approaches the subject with a refreshing candidness and directs his ire toward all the right places."--Roxane Gay
"Passionate and empathetic."--Salon
"This book is essential and instructive, hopeful and enraging."--Ann Patchett
About the Author
Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and the founding director of the Eviction Lab. His last book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, among others. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Desmond is also a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
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Matthew Desmond
Matthew Desmond is social scientist and urban ethnographer. He is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. He is also a Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine.
Desmond is the author of over fifty academic studies and several books, including "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, National Book Critics Circle Award, Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.
"Evicted" was listed as one of the Best Books of 2016 by The New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and several other outlets. It has been named one of the Best 50 Nonfiction Books of the Last 100 Years and was included in the 100 Best Social Policy Books of All Time.
Desmond's research and reporting focuses on American poverty and public policy. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. He has been listed among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”
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Bonnie G.
1,473 reviews297 followers
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April 5, 2023
Desmond's last book, Eviction, was life changing for me. I was about to write that the book made me aware of things that revolted me about the ways we (all of us) keep the poor poor but that is a half truth. I think I knew a lot of what Desmond wrote about in that book, but by assaulting me with facts, statistical and anecdotal, Desmond forced me into a reckoning. That reckoning impacted my volunteer work, and also made me re-evaluate where and how I choose to live. Few things I have read or seen in my life have had such a profound impact. I was so excited when I saw he had a new book and I began reading it the day it hit my Kindle. Maybe this book suffered from my high expectations. It is a very different book, and though I think there is some very valuable material here, much of it kind of exasperated me. You will be disappointed if you are looking for the well-researched factually supported heft of Evicted or the several other excellent books by others that he cites here including The Warmth of Other Suns, The Sum of us, and Thick (which he does not mention by name but he credits Tressie McMillan Cottom, and I am pretty sure the material he is quoting comes from one of the essays in that excellent book.) This book is a manifesto. It is actually a pretty decent manifesto, but it is a manifesto nonetheless and I guess that is not what I came for.
The first half of this book (almost exactly to the 50% mark) just bored me. I hear what he is saying, that we talk about systemic problems but that the answer is within us, that the cure to structural problems comes from our personal choices. I get that there is a good deal of personal wealth for many and that if people were willing to part with some of that, or at least the fruits of some of that, and if rich people paid their damn taxes we could address the moral horror of true want. But that is kind of obvious and 100 pages of that being said in different ways left me unfocused and also searching for other reading material.
At about the 50% mark Desmond comes out swinging, and the book becomes 100x more compelling. Compelling and cohesive are different beasts though. The moral argument appealed to me but there were holes in his reasoning I could drive a truck through. The biggest holes came from Desmond's mistaken belief that people all share his values, especially from the belief that people care a lot about others outside their immediate community. Everything hinges on this, Desmond says basically, "yeah people with money, you will have to give up autonomy and comfort to end poverty, but when everyone is equal you will feel so much better! That sacrifice will be paid off a thousand-fold" It is a lovely sentiment, but I believe it is simply untrue of most people. In my experience people who enjoy sone degree of economic comfort do not wrestle a lot with the ethics of economic inequity. They give some money to the Title 1 school closest to them, pat themselves on the back for subscribing to a CSA and buying eggs from the farmstand instead of supporting big ag, they "simplify" with Marie Kondo, and they maybe upcycle instead of buying new things from fast fashion purveyors. And they feel largely fine after that. Desmond is advocating for them to change their entire lives to alleviate the inequities, and I am here to say that will never happen. I did mention that in my experience people only care about people in their communities (that includes virtual communities,) and Desmond addresses that by suggesting that communities should not be divided by wealth, He argues that people support subsidized housing in their neighborhoods to create more economically diverse communities. I think that is a wonderful suggestion and I support it in theory. As I type that though I am keenly aware that here in NYC where the richest among us always lived in close proximity to those in subsidized housing, housing projects are slowly being sold to private owners -- people are paying big money to live in what used to be the projects here. I used to live steps away from the Gowanus projects in Boerum Hill and they have been rezoned and sold to private developers. The Manhattanville Projects in West Harlem are being turned into luxury condos as the Williamsburg Houses recently were. In other words, the cheek-by-jowl cohabitation of NYC by rich and poor is ending -- moving away from Desmond's dream model. This makes me sad, but does not surprise me. That glow of connection and caring that Desmond thinks will happen from being part of the same communities, that did not occur here and I don't see it as being likely to happen elsewhere either. The only people I have heard speaking against the city selling these units would be the residents of the subsidized housing, nothing from their more moneyed neighbors.
One last thing I wanted to mention. I talked about how reading Eviction changed me and my choices about where and how to live, and it did, but it changed those things after my son was grown and I was the only one feeling the impact. I believe in public education, and I always thought my child would go to public school, but he had learning disabilities, and they did a terrible job of educating him in a very highly rated public elementary in the Atlanta metro. I pulled him out of public school at the start of 3rd grade and sent him to excellent private schools where he got individualized attention, and I hired tutors, organizational coaches and other professionals. He graduated with high grades, went to an excellent college where he majored in Public Policy and Media Studies, is an aspiring filmmaker, and fully supports himself in that industry. He has worked for one of the largest media companies in the world and in addition to his full-time work he has a busy freelance schedule and has even directed several music videos in the two years since graduation. His doctor said that when he saw my brilliant son's educational report when he was 7 he thought he would be lucky to go to community college. A neighbor with a slightly older child with similar issues who stayed in public school had that outcome, and he was never able to complete his AA. Would I make another decision to keep my kid in a school that was not serving him so that he would be on equal footing with kids with fewer resources? Not in a thousand years. And if I did do that and my child ended up with a life that did not allow him to share his unique skills with the world would I be happier because he shared that unsatisfying life with so many other young people? Nope. If I am going to hell, so be it, but I will have a lot of company.
Well-intentioned, peppered with interesting observations about how Americans perceive their level of wealth and with some fascinating facts about American's actual level of want, and with potentially actionable solutions to poverty this book does a lot, but ultimately for me it was a disappointment. Maybe because it made me feel defensive, I can't say, but I feel like I feel.
economic-disparity non-fiction public-policy
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Thomas
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March 28, 2023
I overall enjoyed reading this book about the issue of poverty in the United States. Matthew Desmond does a nice job of highlighting key factors that perpetuate poverty and economic disparity, including how the government gives so many benefits/subsidies to the wealthy while undermining and not doing as much as it should for the poor. I like that he makes the point that alleviating poverty would require wealthy people to give up some resources and that that sacrifice is worth it if you’re actually an empathetic person. He addresses intersections of race and poverty with an emphasis on Black Americans, and he also details how expensive poverty can get through the presence of factors such as unnecessary banking and paycheck fees.
At times I felt like the book read like a manifesto or a well-researched rant. I didn’t disagree with many of his points, however. As an Asian American person reading this, I definitely reflected on how I know certain Asian Americans who prioritize upward mobility and accumulating wealth over solidarity with low-income people of color – it’s interesting and saddening to think about how greed can motivate people.
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Meike
1,684 reviews3,602 followers
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June 16, 2023
This is more a pamphlet than a non-fiction book, an opinion piece instead of an investigative or at least well-researched text. Granted: The divide between rich and poor is exorbitant in America, the social security system is pretty much non-existent, the weak unions are a joke (all said from a Western European perspective). It's obvious, and it's shameful for such a rich industrialized nation. But if you want to change people's minds, you need concrete comparisons and well-argued perspectives regarding why changes will help the nation.
But what Desmond says is often just a distortion and misses the neuralgic points. For instance, he says that in Germany, poverty is lower although less people graduate college - he does not mention that we have a completely different educational system with different types of high schools, our B.A. is not like a B.A. in the US, plus we have a whole system for studying crafts outside of college which does not exist in the US. Desmond compares apples to oranges. He also argues that the poverty of single mothers is not a thing in many European countries, which is news to me (outside of maybe Scandinavia). He does not explain the historic roots of why unions succeed in Europe and fail in the states (red scare, Ayn Rand, McCarthy, religious beliefs etc.). And it goes on like that.
Desmond has opinions, and he is often right, but fails to deliver a good, coherent, fact-based argument that considers historic and sociological elements - but to dissect them would be the foundation for a valid case for change.
politics usa
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Tatiana
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March 27, 2023
Pretty much a manifesto rather than a well argued, comprehensive work Evicted was. A lot of generalizations, solutions that are hardly nuanced, cherry picked statistics, etc.
2023 non-fiction
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Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤
860 reviews1,525 followers
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April 13, 2023
"This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. If America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela."
'Poverty, by America' is a brief look at poverty in the US, and most importantly, what we can do about it.
I'd give it 5 stars except that it's so short. I felt cheated that, while it's 287 pages (Kindle version), only 187 are the actual book. The other 100 pages are notes, a reader's guide, etc.
economics non-fiction political
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Anita Pomerantz
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March 28, 2023
The good news for Mr. Desmond is that this book will likely divide people along political lines, and progressive people will most likely all give it 5 stars and conservative people will not. And there's nothing really wrong with that, but I did find it sorely disappointing after reading the masterpiece that was Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City was a book that opened hearts and minds. I now know that I am not really in the same vicinity as Mr. Desmond when it comes to our political views, but when I read Evicted, I was moved nonetheless. It created an empathy within me that really wasn't there before, and made me more attuned to the issue in my own community. Since I participate very actively in a Giving Circle, there were real ramifications to this viewpoint shift. I thought the book was brilliant even when read with a critical eye.
This book is the exact opposite. It's an editorial where you can't help but feel as though the facts were entirely cherry picked as if to build a legal argument. There was very little nod to other schools of thought, but more importantly there wasn't any analysis of possible unintended consequences that might arise from following Desmond's suggestions for eradicating poverty. There was also no good definition of what eradicating poverty really means. Is it just getting people above a certain minimum income? I definitely got the sense that Desmond didn't see that as adequate. There will always be a bottom 15%. But the people comprising that bottom are not always the same year in and year out.
There were some ideas that I agree with (free access to excellent birth control for those below a certain income level seems like a good idea to me, and I could get on board with eliminating the mortgage interest deduction as part of a bigger plan to simply our tax system). But you lose me when you point out that during the pandemic we made the biggest dent in poverty we ever made because we handed out so much money . . .um, did you measure that in inflation adjusted income? Everything got so much more expensive; I find it hard to take that statement seriously.
At the end of the day, there was an opportunity here. I think it was missed. If you like opinion pieces that go on for the length of an entire book, you might enjoy the writing.
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Erika
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January 16, 2023
WOW... still processing this book and will have to read it again. SO much to absorb and definitely contemplate.
I liked this more than Evicted. I couldn't put it down - except to give myself some breathers to absorb all the information Matthew Desmond gives us. Every paragraph builds off the last. He explores every "excuse" people use typically to explain how poverty is a person's bad choices. It leaves you with some changes to consider in your life and in the US's policy decisions. Absolutely devoured it.
I highly recommend for anyone interested in learning more about how our lowest income people struggle to get by paycheck-to-paycheck and how the system is set up to keep them struggling. And, uncomfortably, how those of us who don't struggle in that way benefit by keeping those who do in that position. We quite literally can be comfortable and well-off BECAUSE of the exploitation of the country's poorest people.
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Nathan Shuherk
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April 27, 2023
A really good quick but still dense book that is worth the read but that might be better used as a gift for conservative family since it is largely retreading information most liberals and the left are widely aware of
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In Matthew Desmond’s ‘Poverty, by America,’ the Culprit Is Us
The new book by the sociologist and author of “Evicted” examines the persistence of want in the wealthy United States, finding that keeping some citizens poor serves the interests of many.
Credit...Ola Jasionowska
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By Alec MacGillis
March 13, 2023
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POVERTY, BY AMERICA, by Matthew Desmond
Over the past decade or two, it has become fashionable to attribute major social ills to underlying “systemic” and “structural” causes. There seem to be several drivers of this tendency: the growing prominence of economists in public debates; the rise of the explanatory bloggers turned Substackers, who like to demonstrate their cool erudition by elevating intellectual arguments over moral ones; and the post-Ferguson racial awakening, with its emphasis on the deeply ingrained inequities that underlie present-day disparities.
The search for systemic and structural factors has much to recommend it in its attention to context and history. But it pushes to the side a crucial element: personal agency. If we can explain away so many problems as a result of larger forces — whether capitalism or racism or globalization or technology or countless others — where does that leave individual and corporate accountability? If everything is systemic, how can any of us be held to blame?
The sociologist Matthew Desmond stands in stark opposition to this prevailing trend. What made his previous book, “Evicted,” such a powerful depiction of low-income housing in American cities was, in great part, his decision to show how tenants in Milwaukee were struggling not only as a result of larger forces but as a result of specific acts of exploitation by those a rung or two up the economic ladder — the landlords, trailer park owners and payday lenders who were profiting from others’ desperation. In Desmond’s Milwaukee, there were good guys and bad guys and gradations in between, which lent “Evicted,” originally an academic dissertation, a compelling novelistic drive.
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The insistence on personal agency is even more explicit in Desmond’s new book. “Poverty, by America” is a compact jeremiad on the persistence of extreme want in a nation of extraordinary wealth, a distillation into argument form of the message embedded within the narrative of “Evicted.” And the central claim of that argument is that the endurance of poverty in the United States is the product not only of larger shifts such as deindustrialization and family dissolution, but of choices and actions by more fortunate Americans. Poverty persists partly because many of us have, with varying degrees of self-awareness, decided that we benefit from its perpetuation. “It’s a useful exercise, evaluating the merits of different explanations for poverty, like those having to do with immigration or the family,” Desmond writes. “But I’ve found that doing so always leads me back to the taproot, the central feature from which all other rootlets spring, which in our case is the simple truth that poverty is an injury, a taking. Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”
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This taking assumes many forms. There are the most obvious types of exploitation, such as employers paying undocumented workers less than minimum wage or denying them overtime; prisons charging inmates exorbitant fees to make phone calls; or banks assessing heavy overdraft fees. There is the winner-take-all nature of the tax code, under which, to cite only one notorious provision, private-equity partners are entitled to have most of their compensation for managing others’ investments taxed at the lower capital-gains rate, rather than as ordinary labor. There is the housing market, in which landlords are able to charge surprisingly high rents even in inexpensive cities to low-income tenants who feel they have few alternatives. “Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money,” Desmond writes. “It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.”
Desmond’s ideological allies on the left will nod along with many of these points. Where things get more interesting is when he considers the ways that upper-middle-class Americans, many of them proud progressives, are complicit in the taking. Affluent families benefit from tax breaks on their mortgages and college savings plans, leaving less revenue for programs that serve those in greater need. Consumers seek out convenience and low prices with little regard for the labor abuses that make them possible.
Most notably, homeowners in choice neighborhoods and suburbs defend exclusionary zoning that bars affordable housing, keeping low-income families at a safe distance from their streets and schools. This forecloses the upward mobility that comes with economic and racial integration and perpetuates the harms that accompany concentrated poverty. “Democrats are more likely than Republicans to champion public housing in the abstract, but among homeowners, they are no more likely to welcome new housing developments in their own backyards,” Desmond writes. In fact, he notes, one study found that conservative renters were more inclined to support a proposed 120-unit apartment building in their neighborhood than liberal homeowners. “Perhaps we are not so polarized after all,” he writes. “Maybe above a certain income level, we are all segregationists.”
What’s to be done? The usual left-of-center case for reducing poverty is to expand the safety net, and Desmond is on board with that, detailing how many billions could be found for that purpose if the wealthiest Americans paid their fair share in taxes. But he offers some cautionary nuance on this front. The U.S. safety net is, he argues, more generous than many on the left give it credit for: Between the earned-income tax credit, Medicaid, Pell grants, housing vouchers and a host of other programs, “there is no evidence that the United States has become stingier with time. The opposite is true.”
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The problem, Desmond concludes, is that we make it hard for many low-income Americans to access this support, and, above all, that so much of it is lost to the economic exploitation that is his chief target. And to address this exploitation, he calls for nothing less than an “abolitionist” crusade against poverty: a moral awakening that combats the scourge in ways big and small, through legislation, legal action and union organizing; through our decisions about what we buy, where we live and where we send our kids to school. “Becoming a poverty abolitionist,” he writes, “entails conducting an audit of our lives, personalizing poverty by examining all the ways we are connected to the problem — and to the solution.”
Why should Americans who benefit from the status quo be open to such a reckoning? Because, Desmond argues, we are in a broader sense all being immiserated by poverty. “It’s there in the morning paper, on our commute to work, in our public parks, dragging us down, making even those quite secure in their money feel diminished and depressed,” he writes. “Poverty infringes on American prosperity, making it a barricaded, stingy, frightened kind of affluence.” Some of us even experience an “emotional violence” from “knowing that our abundance causes others’ misery”: “It’s there in that residue of shame and malaise coating our insular lives; that loss of joy, the emptiness; our boring satiation, our guilt and nausea.”
Desmond’s case might have been strengthened by a more considered structuring and tone; at moments, the book can feel somewhat dashed off, lacking the deeply rooted heft of “Evicted.” His discussion of reduced life expectancy in struggling communities downplays the role of deadly violence, and he gives overly short shrift to programs that have tried to move low-income families to the suburbs and have demonstrated some success at boosting future income. The book would also have benefited from a direct confrontation with the claim, advanced by the New York Times reporter Jason DeParle and others, that social programs like the earned-income tax credit (which Desmond describes as “solutions to poverty but also stanchions of it”) have actually helped to significantly reduce child poverty.
But these are minor quibbles — a ragged edge is to be expected from a book that amounts to more manifesto than treatise. Desmond is well aware that his righteousness about our shared responsibility for poverty will cause discomfort: “People shift in their chairs, and some respond by trying to quiet you the way mothers try to shush small children in public when they point out something that everyone sees but pretends not to.” His purpose here is to draw attention to what’s plain in front of us — damn the etiquette, and damn the grand abstractions. As he quotes George Orwell: “We could do with a little less talk of ‘capitalist’ and ‘proletarian’ and a little more about the robbers and robbed.”
Alec MacGillis is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of “Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon.”
POVERTY, BY AMERICA | By Matthew Desmond | 284 pp. | Crown | $28
A version of this article appears in print on March 19, 2023, Page 10 of the Sunday Book Review with t
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Matthew Desmond
Matthew Desmond is social scientist and urban ethnographer. He is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. He is also a Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine.
Desmond is the author of over fifty academic studies and several books, including "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, National Book Critics Circle Award, Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.
"Evicted" was listed as one of the Best Books of 2016 by The New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and several other outlets. It has been named one of the Best 50 Nonfiction Books of the Last 100 Years and was included in the 100 Best Social Policy Books of All Time.
Desmond's research and reporting focuses on American poverty and public policy. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. He has been listed among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”
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Bonnie G.
1,473 reviews297 followers
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April 5, 2023
Desmond's last book, Eviction, was life changing for me. I was about to write that the book made me aware of things that revolted me about the ways we (all of us) keep the poor poor but that is a half truth. I think I knew a lot of what Desmond wrote about in that book, but by assaulting me with facts, statistical and anecdotal, Desmond forced me into a reckoning. That reckoning impacted my volunteer work, and also made me re-evaluate where and how I choose to live. Few things I have read or seen in my life have had such a profound impact. I was so excited when I saw he had a new book and I began reading it the day it hit my Kindle. Maybe this book suffered from my high expectations. It is a very different book, and though I think there is some very valuable material here, much of it kind of exasperated me. You will be disappointed if you are looking for the well-researched factually supported heft of Evicted or the several other excellent books by others that he cites here including The Warmth of Other Suns, The Sum of us, and Thick (which he does not mention by name but he credits Tressie McMillan Cottom, and I am pretty sure the material he is quoting comes from one of the essays in that excellent book.) This book is a manifesto. It is actually a pretty decent manifesto, but it is a manifesto nonetheless and I guess that is not what I came for.
The first half of this book (almost exactly to the 50% mark) just bored me. I hear what he is saying, that we talk about systemic problems but that the answer is within us, that the cure to structural problems comes from our personal choices. I get that there is a good deal of personal wealth for many and that if people were willing to part with some of that, or at least the fruits of some of that, and if rich people paid their damn taxes we could address the moral horror of true want. But that is kind of obvious and 100 pages of that being said in different ways left me unfocused and also searching for other reading material.
At about the 50% mark Desmond comes out swinging, and the book becomes 100x more compelling. Compelling and cohesive are different beasts though. The moral argument appealed to me but there were holes in his reasoning I could drive a truck through. The biggest holes came from Desmond's mistaken belief that people all share his values, especially from the belief that people care a lot about others outside their immediate community. Everything hinges on this, Desmond says basically, "yeah people with money, you will have to give up autonomy and comfort to end poverty, but when everyone is equal you will feel so much better! That sacrifice will be paid off a thousand-fold" It is a lovely sentiment, but I believe it is simply untrue of most people. In my experience people who enjoy sone degree of economic comfort do not wrestle a lot with the ethics of economic inequity. They give some money to the Title 1 school closest to them, pat themselves on the back for subscribing to a CSA and buying eggs from the farmstand instead of supporting big ag, they "simplify" with Marie Kondo, and they maybe upcycle instead of buying new things from fast fashion purveyors. And they feel largely fine after that. Desmond is advocating for them to change their entire lives to alleviate the inequities, and I am here to say that will never happen. I did mention that in my experience people only care about people in their communities (that includes virtual communities,) and Desmond addresses that by suggesting that communities should not be divided by wealth, He argues that people support subsidized housing in their neighborhoods to create more economically diverse communities. I think that is a wonderful suggestion and I support it in theory. As I type that though I am keenly aware that here in NYC where the richest among us always lived in close proximity to those in subsidized housing, housing projects are slowly being sold to private owners -- people are paying big money to live in what used to be the projects here. I used to live steps away from the Gowanus projects in Boerum Hill and they have been rezoned and sold to private developers. The Manhattanville Projects in West Harlem are being turned into luxury condos as the Williamsburg Houses recently were. In other words, the cheek-by-jowl cohabitation of NYC by rich and poor is ending -- moving away from Desmond's dream model. This makes me sad, but does not surprise me. That glow of connection and caring that Desmond thinks will happen from being part of the same communities, that did not occur here and I don't see it as being likely to happen elsewhere either. The only people I have heard speaking against the city selling these units would be the residents of the subsidized housing, nothing from their more moneyed neighbors.
One last thing I wanted to mention. I talked about how reading Eviction changed me and my choices about where and how to live, and it did, but it changed those things after my son was grown and I was the only one feeling the impact. I believe in public education, and I always thought my child would go to public school, but he had learning disabilities, and they did a terrible job of educating him in a very highly rated public elementary in the Atlanta metro. I pulled him out of public school at the start of 3rd grade and sent him to excellent private schools where he got individualized attention, and I hired tutors, organizational coaches and other professionals. He graduated with high grades, went to an excellent college where he majored in Public Policy and Media Studies, is an aspiring filmmaker, and fully supports himself in that industry. He has worked for one of the largest media companies in the world and in addition to his full-time work he has a busy freelance schedule and has even directed several music videos in the two years since graduation. His doctor said that when he saw my brilliant son's educational report when he was 7 he thought he would be lucky to go to community college. A neighbor with a slightly older child with similar issues who stayed in public school had that outcome, and he was never able to complete his AA. Would I make another decision to keep my kid in a school that was not serving him so that he would be on equal footing with kids with fewer resources? Not in a thousand years. And if I did do that and my child ended up with a life that did not allow him to share his unique skills with the world would I be happier because he shared that unsatisfying life with so many other young people? Nope. If I am going to hell, so be it, but I will have a lot of company.
Well-intentioned, peppered with interesting observations about how Americans perceive their level of wealth and with some fascinating facts about American's actual level of want, and with potentially actionable solutions to poverty this book does a lot, but ultimately for me it was a disappointment. Maybe because it made me feel defensive, I can't say, but I feel like I feel.
economic-disparity non-fiction public-policy
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Thomas
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March 28, 2023
I overall enjoyed reading this book about the issue of poverty in the United States. Matthew Desmond does a nice job of highlighting key factors that perpetuate poverty and economic disparity, including how the government gives so many benefits/subsidies to the wealthy while undermining and not doing as much as it should for the poor. I like that he makes the point that alleviating poverty would require wealthy people to give up some resources and that that sacrifice is worth it if you’re actually an empathetic person. He addresses intersections of race and poverty with an emphasis on Black Americans, and he also details how expensive poverty can get through the presence of factors such as unnecessary banking and paycheck fees.
At times I felt like the book read like a manifesto or a well-researched rant. I didn’t disagree with many of his points, however. As an Asian American person reading this, I definitely reflected on how I know certain Asian Americans who prioritize upward mobility and accumulating wealth over solidarity with low-income people of color – it’s interesting and saddening to think about how greed can motivate people.
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Meike
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June 16, 2023
This is more a pamphlet than a non-fiction book, an opinion piece instead of an investigative or at least well-researched text. Granted: The divide between rich and poor is exorbitant in America, the social security system is pretty much non-existent, the weak unions are a joke (all said from a Western European perspective). It's obvious, and it's shameful for such a rich industrialized nation. But if you want to change people's minds, you need concrete comparisons and well-argued perspectives regarding why changes will help the nation.
But what Desmond says is often just a distortion and misses the neuralgic points. For instance, he says that in Germany, poverty is lower although less people graduate college - he does not mention that we have a completely different educational system with different types of high schools, our B.A. is not like a B.A. in the US, plus we have a whole system for studying crafts outside of college which does not exist in the US. Desmond compares apples to oranges. He also argues that the poverty of single mothers is not a thing in many European countries, which is news to me (outside of maybe Scandinavia). He does not explain the historic roots of why unions succeed in Europe and fail in the states (red scare, Ayn Rand, McCarthy, religious beliefs etc.). And it goes on like that.
Desmond has opinions, and he is often right, but fails to deliver a good, coherent, fact-based argument that considers historic and sociological elements - but to dissect them would be the foundation for a valid case for change.
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Tatiana
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March 27, 2023
Pretty much a manifesto rather than a well argued, comprehensive work Evicted was. A lot of generalizations, solutions that are hardly nuanced, cherry picked statistics, etc.
2023 non-fiction
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Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤
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April 13, 2023
"This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. If America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela."
'Poverty, by America' is a brief look at poverty in the US, and most importantly, what we can do about it.
I'd give it 5 stars except that it's so short. I felt cheated that, while it's 287 pages (Kindle version), only 187 are the actual book. The other 100 pages are notes, a reader's guide, etc.
economics non-fiction political
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Anita Pomerantz
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March 28, 2023
The good news for Mr. Desmond is that this book will likely divide people along political lines, and progressive people will most likely all give it 5 stars and conservative people will not. And there's nothing really wrong with that, but I did find it sorely disappointing after reading the masterpiece that was Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City was a book that opened hearts and minds. I now know that I am not really in the same vicinity as Mr. Desmond when it comes to our political views, but when I read Evicted, I was moved nonetheless. It created an empathy within me that really wasn't there before, and made me more attuned to the issue in my own community. Since I participate very actively in a Giving Circle, there were real ramifications to this viewpoint shift. I thought the book was brilliant even when read with a critical eye.
This book is the exact opposite. It's an editorial where you can't help but feel as though the facts were entirely cherry picked as if to build a legal argument. There was very little nod to other schools of thought, but more importantly there wasn't any analysis of possible unintended consequences that might arise from following Desmond's suggestions for eradicating poverty. There was also no good definition of what eradicating poverty really means. Is it just getting people above a certain minimum income? I definitely got the sense that Desmond didn't see that as adequate. There will always be a bottom 15%. But the people comprising that bottom are not always the same year in and year out.
There were some ideas that I agree with (free access to excellent birth control for those below a certain income level seems like a good idea to me, and I could get on board with eliminating the mortgage interest deduction as part of a bigger plan to simply our tax system). But you lose me when you point out that during the pandemic we made the biggest dent in poverty we ever made because we handed out so much money . . .um, did you measure that in inflation adjusted income? Everything got so much more expensive; I find it hard to take that statement seriously.
At the end of the day, there was an opportunity here. I think it was missed. If you like opinion pieces that go on for the length of an entire book, you might enjoy the writing.
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Erika
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January 16, 2023
WOW... still processing this book and will have to read it again. SO much to absorb and definitely contemplate.
I liked this more than Evicted. I couldn't put it down - except to give myself some breathers to absorb all the information Matthew Desmond gives us. Every paragraph builds off the last. He explores every "excuse" people use typically to explain how poverty is a person's bad choices. It leaves you with some changes to consider in your life and in the US's policy decisions. Absolutely devoured it.
I highly recommend for anyone interested in learning more about how our lowest income people struggle to get by paycheck-to-paycheck and how the system is set up to keep them struggling. And, uncomfortably, how those of us who don't struggle in that way benefit by keeping those who do in that position. We quite literally can be comfortable and well-off BECAUSE of the exploitation of the country's poorest people.
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Nathan Shuherk
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April 27, 2023
A really good quick but still dense book that is worth the read but that might be better used as a gift for conservative family since it is largely retreading information most liberals and the left are widely aware of
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In Matthew Desmond’s ‘Poverty, by America,’ the Culprit Is Us
The new book by the sociologist and author of “Evicted” examines the persistence of want in the wealthy United States, finding that keeping some citizens poor serves the interests of many.
Credit...Ola Jasionowska
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By Alec MacGillis
March 13, 2023
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POVERTY, BY AMERICA, by Matthew Desmond
Over the past decade or two, it has become fashionable to attribute major social ills to underlying “systemic” and “structural” causes. There seem to be several drivers of this tendency: the growing prominence of economists in public debates; the rise of the explanatory bloggers turned Substackers, who like to demonstrate their cool erudition by elevating intellectual arguments over moral ones; and the post-Ferguson racial awakening, with its emphasis on the deeply ingrained inequities that underlie present-day disparities.
The search for systemic and structural factors has much to recommend it in its attention to context and history. But it pushes to the side a crucial element: personal agency. If we can explain away so many problems as a result of larger forces — whether capitalism or racism or globalization or technology or countless others — where does that leave individual and corporate accountability? If everything is systemic, how can any of us be held to blame?
The sociologist Matthew Desmond stands in stark opposition to this prevailing trend. What made his previous book, “Evicted,” such a powerful depiction of low-income housing in American cities was, in great part, his decision to show how tenants in Milwaukee were struggling not only as a result of larger forces but as a result of specific acts of exploitation by those a rung or two up the economic ladder — the landlords, trailer park owners and payday lenders who were profiting from others’ desperation. In Desmond’s Milwaukee, there were good guys and bad guys and gradations in between, which lent “Evicted,” originally an academic dissertation, a compelling novelistic drive.
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The insistence on personal agency is even more explicit in Desmond’s new book. “Poverty, by America” is a compact jeremiad on the persistence of extreme want in a nation of extraordinary wealth, a distillation into argument form of the message embedded within the narrative of “Evicted.” And the central claim of that argument is that the endurance of poverty in the United States is the product not only of larger shifts such as deindustrialization and family dissolution, but of choices and actions by more fortunate Americans. Poverty persists partly because many of us have, with varying degrees of self-awareness, decided that we benefit from its perpetuation. “It’s a useful exercise, evaluating the merits of different explanations for poverty, like those having to do with immigration or the family,” Desmond writes. “But I’ve found that doing so always leads me back to the taproot, the central feature from which all other rootlets spring, which in our case is the simple truth that poverty is an injury, a taking. Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”
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This taking assumes many forms. There are the most obvious types of exploitation, such as employers paying undocumented workers less than minimum wage or denying them overtime; prisons charging inmates exorbitant fees to make phone calls; or banks assessing heavy overdraft fees. There is the winner-take-all nature of the tax code, under which, to cite only one notorious provision, private-equity partners are entitled to have most of their compensation for managing others’ investments taxed at the lower capital-gains rate, rather than as ordinary labor. There is the housing market, in which landlords are able to charge surprisingly high rents even in inexpensive cities to low-income tenants who feel they have few alternatives. “Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money,” Desmond writes. “It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.”
Desmond’s ideological allies on the left will nod along with many of these points. Where things get more interesting is when he considers the ways that upper-middle-class Americans, many of them proud progressives, are complicit in the taking. Affluent families benefit from tax breaks on their mortgages and college savings plans, leaving less revenue for programs that serve those in greater need. Consumers seek out convenience and low prices with little regard for the labor abuses that make them possible.
Most notably, homeowners in choice neighborhoods and suburbs defend exclusionary zoning that bars affordable housing, keeping low-income families at a safe distance from their streets and schools. This forecloses the upward mobility that comes with economic and racial integration and perpetuates the harms that accompany concentrated poverty. “Democrats are more likely than Republicans to champion public housing in the abstract, but among homeowners, they are no more likely to welcome new housing developments in their own backyards,” Desmond writes. In fact, he notes, one study found that conservative renters were more inclined to support a proposed 120-unit apartment building in their neighborhood than liberal homeowners. “Perhaps we are not so polarized after all,” he writes. “Maybe above a certain income level, we are all segregationists.”
What’s to be done? The usual left-of-center case for reducing poverty is to expand the safety net, and Desmond is on board with that, detailing how many billions could be found for that purpose if the wealthiest Americans paid their fair share in taxes. But he offers some cautionary nuance on this front. The U.S. safety net is, he argues, more generous than many on the left give it credit for: Between the earned-income tax credit, Medicaid, Pell grants, housing vouchers and a host of other programs, “there is no evidence that the United States has become stingier with time. The opposite is true.”
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The problem, Desmond concludes, is that we make it hard for many low-income Americans to access this support, and, above all, that so much of it is lost to the economic exploitation that is his chief target. And to address this exploitation, he calls for nothing less than an “abolitionist” crusade against poverty: a moral awakening that combats the scourge in ways big and small, through legislation, legal action and union organizing; through our decisions about what we buy, where we live and where we send our kids to school. “Becoming a poverty abolitionist,” he writes, “entails conducting an audit of our lives, personalizing poverty by examining all the ways we are connected to the problem — and to the solution.”
Why should Americans who benefit from the status quo be open to such a reckoning? Because, Desmond argues, we are in a broader sense all being immiserated by poverty. “It’s there in the morning paper, on our commute to work, in our public parks, dragging us down, making even those quite secure in their money feel diminished and depressed,” he writes. “Poverty infringes on American prosperity, making it a barricaded, stingy, frightened kind of affluence.” Some of us even experience an “emotional violence” from “knowing that our abundance causes others’ misery”: “It’s there in that residue of shame and malaise coating our insular lives; that loss of joy, the emptiness; our boring satiation, our guilt and nausea.”
Desmond’s case might have been strengthened by a more considered structuring and tone; at moments, the book can feel somewhat dashed off, lacking the deeply rooted heft of “Evicted.” His discussion of reduced life expectancy in struggling communities downplays the role of deadly violence, and he gives overly short shrift to programs that have tried to move low-income families to the suburbs and have demonstrated some success at boosting future income. The book would also have benefited from a direct confrontation with the claim, advanced by the New York Times reporter Jason DeParle and others, that social programs like the earned-income tax credit (which Desmond describes as “solutions to poverty but also stanchions of it”) have actually helped to significantly reduce child poverty.
But these are minor quibbles — a ragged edge is to be expected from a book that amounts to more manifesto than treatise. Desmond is well aware that his righteousness about our shared responsibility for poverty will cause discomfort: “People shift in their chairs, and some respond by trying to quiet you the way mothers try to shush small children in public when they point out something that everyone sees but pretends not to.” His purpose here is to draw attention to what’s plain in front of us — damn the etiquette, and damn the grand abstractions. As he quotes George Orwell: “We could do with a little less talk of ‘capitalist’ and ‘proletarian’ and a little more about the robbers and robbed.”
Alec MacGillis is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of “Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon.”
POVERTY, BY AMERICA | By Matthew Desmond | 284 pp. | Crown | $28
A version of this article appears in print on March 19, 2023, Page 10 of the Sunday Book Review with t
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