A bold, sensible look at poverty from the author of ‘Evicted’
Desmond’s follow-up to Pulitzer Prize-winning novel calls out the systems benefiting from inequality
Matthew Desmond wants all of us to become “poverty abolitionists.”
It’s a brilliant term because of the associations it carries throughout Desmond’s lively “Poverty, By America”: There’s the connection to slavery, another institution designed to oppress our own. There’s the acknowledgment that, although poverty seems like something everyone would oppose (like slavery), it actually helps many of us, even if we don’t realize it. And there’s the insistence that, if we want to get rid of poverty, we need to actively fight it.
Desmond’s follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Evicted” continues to get at the roots of inequality in America. “Evicted” was powered by portraits of people he met while embedded with Milwaukee residents whose housing was precarious for a variety of reasons.
“Poverty,” though, is a book-length, unapologetically wonky essay (76 pages of footnotes, many citing his own work) that argues passionately that the only reason so many Americans live below the poverty line is that people above it benefit from keeping others down. We can call ourselves compassionate when we worry about someone sleeping outdoors, for instance, but Desmond believes we should worry about the systems that keep that person there and us in our comfortable homes.
“Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you, that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed, roughed up and handcuffed,” he writes. In 2020, 18 million Americans lived in “deep poverty,” which he attributes to high incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, housing inequity, poor health care, shifts in employment and more.
The chapters have clear, uncluttered titles such as “Why Haven’t We Made More Progress.” In that one, Desmond insists poverty is not a partisan or blue state/red state issue but one that practically everyone has contributed to, even encouraged — because most of us enjoy products created by poor people who can’t get better jobs and from the stock market that rides high when our poor are at their poorest.
Desmond spends the bulk of “Poverty” talking about society’s ills but also points out what poor people could contribute if we thought of them differently (for instance, if we recognized that rich Americans are given larger “government handouts”). He figures it would cost $177 billion to solve poverty in the U.S., money that could come from the wealthy and corporations paying their fair share of taxes.
The book argues persuasively that there is lots to be done globally and that it should start locally, on city councils and zoning boards. Desmond points to organizations working to diminish poverty or democratize housing, such as Minneapolis’ Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia, a movement started by working class folks who bought their apartment building and turned it into a tenantowned co-op.
Examples like those help make “Poverty” a hopeful book, one that reframes its problem sensibly and helps us see how we could be part of solving it.