One of the ugliest aspects of life in America today is the appalling level of poverty—and the failure of our government to do anything meaningful about it. As sociologist Matthew Desmond makes clear in Poverty, By America, a single action by Congress and the President could easily generate the $175 billion per year needed to raise most people in the country above the poverty level. Without increasing taxes. But by simply collecting the more than $1 trillion in taxes owed but unpaid by wealthy people and large corporations. And that’s just one of the startling facts that emerge from Desmond’s eye-opening book.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
A holistic approach is needed
Of course, to end poverty in America isn’t a matter of simply throwing money at the problem. An effective program must be holistic, addressing income and wealth inequality, housing and job discrimination, self-defeating immigration policies, and, above all, racism. But government policies alone won’t solve the problem. As Desmond insists, “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.” And we are all complicit.
“Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money,” Desmond explains. “It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.” And through our actions—or inactions—we circumscribe those choices when, for example, we protest downzoning our middle-class neighborhoods or vote for politicians who give tax breaks to the ultra-rich. Desmond adds, “There is so much poverty in this land not in spite of our wealth but because of it. Which is to say, it’s not about them. It’s about us.”
Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond (2023) 304 pages ★★★★★
Myths about poverty in America
Persistent myths obscure our understanding of poverty in America. “Welfare dependency,” for example. “If you dig into the data,” Desmond writes, “you quickly realize that the problem isn’t welfare dependency but welfare avoidance. Simply put, many poor families don’t take advantage of aid that’s available to them. . . There are no official estimates of the total amount of government aid that goes unclaimed by low-income Americans, but the number is in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year.”
But there’s a more fundamental misconception underlying our view of poverty in our country. Many, probably most, Americans seem to be convinced that the problem of poverty is so big that it’s not possible to do more than make a dent in it. But that’s wrong. Twice in the last half-century government policies have halved the poverty level. First, as a result of the Great Society legislation passed when Lyndon Johnson was President. “Nearly two hundred pieces of legislation were signed into law in Johnson’s first five years in office,” Demond recalls, “a breathtaking level of activity. And the result? Ten years after the first of these programs were rolled out in 1964, the share of Americans living in poverty was half what it was in 1960.” And the trillion-dollar pandemic relief programs of recent years achieved the same result, if only temporarily.
Racism is central to the problem
Nearly half of people living below the poverty level are White, despite the widespread belief that most are Black or Brown. However, it is abundantly clear that poverty disproportionately affects non-White people. And that, sadly, is no accident. “Since the nation’s founding,” Desmond observes, “the story of class politics in America has been a story of white worker against Black, native against newcomer. Racism thwarted the rise of a multiracial mass labor movement, which could have brought about sweeping economic reforms—including the establishment of a Labor Party—like the kind adopted in nineteenth-century France and Britain. And racism spoiled the creation of integrated communities and schools, ghettoizing poverty, and urban Black poverty in particular, aggravating and intensifying its miseries.” We will never end poverty in America unless we finally come to grips with the pervasive and persistent racism in our society.
In the final analysis
“Ending poverty wouldn’t lead to social collapse, nor would it erase income inequality. There is so much of that in America today that we could make meaningful gains in equality, certainly enough to abolish poverty, and still have miles and miles of separation between the top and the bottom.”
About the author
Matthew Desmond‘s biography at Princeton University reads as follows: “Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He is the author of [five] books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond’s research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography.
“He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A Contributing Writer for the New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of ‘fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.'”
Wikipedia adds that Desmond was born in 1979 or 1980 and graduated summa cum laude from Arizona State University with a BS degree in communications and justice studies.
For related reading
I’ve also reviewed Matthew Desmond’s first, Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Does the profit motive cause homelessness?)
You’ll find more information about poverty here:
- 13 enlightening books about poverty in America
- Good books about economic inequality
- Top 20 popular books for understanding American history
- Top 10 nonfiction books about politics
- Third World poverty and economic development: a reading list
And you can always find my most popular reviews, and the most recent ones, on the Home Page.
