Poverty, by America

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#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.

ONE OF THE CALIFORNIA REVIEW OF BOOKS’ TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • 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, 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.“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 PatchettMatthew 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.1. What was your experience reading Poverty, by America? What three words describe that experience, and why?
2. Desmond defines poverty as “a tight knot of social problems,” breaking with conventional definitions that focusonly on low incomes. What are the implications of this view? How would you define poverty?
3. “We’ve been trained to see the poor as idle and unmotivated since the earliest days of capitalism,” says Desmond.He also writes that “these old tropes and stereotypes are dying.” When have you experienced these tropes andstereotypes? Do you think their power is in fact waning?
4. “To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor,” notes Desmond from the outset, “whichmakes this a book about poverty that is not just about the poor. Instead, it’s a book about how the other half lives,about how some lives are made small so that others may grow.” How does this focus deepen the author’s argumentsand proposed solutions?
5. Reflect on the statement: “some lives are made small so that others may grow.” What does that mean to you, andhow does it relate to poverty in America?
6. What did you learn from Poverty, by America that surprised you?
7. In 1961, James Baldwin remarked how “extremely expensive it is to be poor.” What might that mean in 2023?
8. “America’s poverty is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.” What do we, as a country, and as a citizenry,lack in this context?
9. Poverty in America is often invisible, but it can also be very public. When you see a tent encampment, or homelesspeople sleeping on the sidewalk, what goes through your mind? What questions do you ask yourself?
10. Through his research, Desmond discovered that billions of dollars set aside for assistance to the poor remainsunclaimed. Why do you think this is?
11. Race and racism are pressing issues in America’s poverty crisis. Desmond writes: “Anti-Black racism hardensAmericans’ antagonism toward social benefits.” Do you see this antagonism in your family, in your social circle,in your community? How might you address it?
12. Desmond writes: “Those who benefit most from government largesse—generally white families with accountants—harbor the strongest anti-government views.” Explain this disconnect.
13. “As people accumulate more money,” Desmond writes, “they become less dependent on public goods and, in turn,less interested in supporting them.” What does this mean for public schools and public transportation? How doesthis translate toward feelings for government workers? What are the consequences of advancing privatization?
14. Discuss the disconnect between our rising incomes and the deterioration of public investment. What does ittruly mean to expand opportunity?
15. Desmond found that “every year, the richest American families receive almost 40 percent more in governmentsubsidies than the poorest American families.” Did this fact surprise you? Can you think of ways that you oryour family benefit from government assistance that you’ve never thought of as “welfare”? Do you thinkdifferently about it now?
16. Regarding public housing, Desmond writes: “Two things are true. First, most Americans want the country tobuild more public housing for low-income families. Second, most Americans do not want that public housing(or any sort of multi-family housing) in their neighborhood.” How do you think you and your neighborswould respond if your town considered building an affordable housing development in your community?Have you witnessed NIMBYism in your neighborhood or your town? What are ways we can counter theNIMBY position?
17. “The I.R.S. now estimates that the United States loses over $1 trillion a year in unpaid taxes,” Desmond writes,“most of it owing to multinational corporations and wealthy families.” As part of the recently passed InflationReduction Act, Congress has appropriated $80 billion to go after tax cheats and evaders. Do you support theseefforts? Why do you think our country has such a high tolerance for tax avoidance?
18. Desmond urges us all to become poverty abolitionists. How does he suggest we do that? Which of these effortsdo you think will make the biggest difference in reducing, if not abolishing, poverty?
19. “Poverty abolitionism is a personal and political project,” Desmond writes. What are some ways you haveconsidering making it a “personal project”? What sort of choices are you reimagining? How might you conducta “poverty audit” in your own family, school, workplace, or community? Chapter 1

The Kind of Problem Poverty Is

I recently spent a day on the tenth floor of Newark’s courthouse, the floor where the state decides child welfare cases. There I met a fifty-five-year-old father who had stayed up all night working at his warehouse job by the port. He told me his body felt heavy. Sometimes when pulling a double shift, he would snort a speedball—cocaine mixed with benzodiazepine and morphine, sometimes heroin—to stay awake or dull his pain. Its ugly recipe was laid bare in the authorities’ toxicology reports, making him look like a career junkie and not what he was: an exhausted member of America’s working poor. The authorities didn’t think the father could care for his three children alone, and their mother, who had a serious mental illness and was using PCP, wasn’t an option either. So the father gambled, surrendering his two older children to his stepmother and hoping the authorities would allow him to raise the youngest. They did. Outside the courtroom, he hugged his public defender, who considered what had happened a real victory. This is what winning looks like on the tenth floor of Newark’s courthouse: giving up two of your children so you have a chance to raise the third alone and in poverty.

Technically, a person is considered “poor” when they can’t afford life’s necessities, like food and housing. The architect of the Official Poverty Measure—the poverty line—was a bureaucrat working at the Social Security Administration named Mollie Orshansky. Orshansky figured that if poverty was fundamentally about a lack of income that could cover the basics, and if nothing was more basic than food, then you could calculate poverty with two pieces of information: the cost of food in a given year and the share of a family’s budget dedicated to it. Orshansky determined that bare-bones food expenditures accounted for roughly a third of an American family’s budget. If a family of four needed, say, $1,000 a year in 1965 to feed themselves, then any family making less than $3,000 a year (or around $27,000 at the beginning of 2022) would be considered poor because they would be devoting more than a third of their income to food, forgoing other necessities. Orshansky published her findings in January of that year, writing, “There is thus a total of 50 million persons—of whom 22 million are young children—who live within the bleak circle of poverty or at least hover around its edge.” It was a number that shocked affluent Americans.

Today’s Official Poverty Measure is still based on Orshansky’s calculation, annually updated for inflation. In 2022, the poverty line was drawn at $13,590 a year for a single person and $27,750 a year for a family of four.

As I’ve said, we can’t hope to understand why there is so much poverty in America solely by considering the lives of the poor. But we need to start there, to better understand the kind of problem poverty is—and grasp the stakes—because poverty is not simply a matter of small incomes. In the words of the poet Layli Long Soldier, that’s just “the oil at the surface.”

I met Crystal Mayberry when I was living in Milwaukee and researching my last book, on eviction and the American housing crisis. Crystal was born prematurely on a spring day in 1990, shortly after her pregnant mother was stabbed eleven times in the back while being robbed. The attack induced labor. Both mother and daughter survived. It was not the first time Crystal’s mother had been stabbed. For as far back as Crystal can remember, her father beat her mother. He smoked crack cocaine, and so did her mother; so did her mother’s mother.

Crystal’s mother found a way to leave her father, and soon after, he began a lengthy prison stint. Crystal and her mother moved in with another man and his parents. That man’s father began molesting Crystal. She told her mother, and her mother called her a liar. Not long after Crystal began kindergarten, Child Protective Services, the branch of government tasked with safeguarding children from maltreatment, stepped in. At five, Crystal was placed in foster care.

Crystal bounced around between dozens of group homes and sets of foster parents. She lived with her aunt for five years. Then her aunt returned her. After that, the longest Crystal lived anywhere was eight months. When she reached adolescence, Crystal fought with the other girls in the group homes. She picked up assault charges and a scar across her right cheekbone. People and their houses, pets, furniture, dishes—these came and went. Food was more stable, and Crystal began taking refuge in it. She put on weight. Because of her weight, she developed sleep apnea.

When Crystal was sixteen, she stopped going to high school. At seventeen, she was examined by a clinical psychologist, who diagnosed her with, among other things, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, reactive attachment disorder, and borderline intellectual functioning. When she turned eighteen, she aged out of foster care. By that time Crystal had passed through more than twenty-five foster placements. Because of her mental illness, she had been approved for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a government income subsidy for low-income people who are old, blind, or who have a disability. She would receive $754 a month, or a little over $9,000 a year.

Crystal was barred from low-income housing for two years because of an assault charge she received for fighting in the group home. Even if she had not been barred, she would still have found herself at the bottom of a waiting list that was six years long. Crystal secured her first apartment in the private market: a run-down two-bedroom unit. The apartment was located in a majority-Black neighborhood that ranked among the city’s poorest, but Crystal herself was Black and had been turned down for apartments in the Hispanic and white areas of town. Crystal’s rent took 73 percent of her income, and it wasn’t long before she fell behind. A few months after moving in, she experienced her first official eviction, which went on her record, making it likely that her application for housing assistance would be denied. After her eviction, Crystal met a woman at a homeless shelter and secured another apartment with her new friend. Then Crystal put that new friend’s friend through a window, and the landlord told Crystal to leave.

Crystal spent nights in shelters, with friends, and with members of her church. She learned how to live on the streets, walking them at night and sleeping on the bus or in hospital waiting rooms during the day. She learned to survive by relying on strangers. She met a woman at a bus stop and ended up living with her for a month. People were attracted to Crystal. She was gregarious and funny, with an endearing habit of slapping her hands together and laughing at herself. She sang in public, gospel mostly.

Crystal had always believed that her SSI was secure. You couldn’t get fired from SSI, and your hours couldn’t get cut. “SSI always come,” she said. Until one day it didn’t. Crystal had been approved for SSI as a minor, but her adult reevaluation found her ineligible. Now her only source of income was food stamps. She tried donating plasma, but her veins were too small. She burned through the remaining ties she had from church and her foster families. When her SSI was not reinstated after several months, she descended into street homelessness and prostitution. Crystal had never been an early riser, but she learned that mornings were the best time to turn tricks, catching men on their way to work.

For Crystal and people in similar situations, poverty is about money, of course, but it is also a relentless piling on of problems.

Poverty is pain, physical pain. It is in the backaches of home health aides and certified nursing assistants, who bend their bodies to hoist the old and sick out of beds and off toilets; it is in the feet and knees of cashiers made to stand while taking our orders and ringing up our items; it is in the skin rashes and migraines of maids who clean our office buildings, homes, and hotel rooms with products containing ammonia and triclosan.

In America’s meatpacking plants, two amputations occur each week: A band saw lops off someone’s finger or hand. Pickers in Amazon warehouses have access to vending machines dispensing free Advil and Tylenol. Slum housing spreads asthma, its mold and cockroach allergens seeping into young lungs and airways, and it poisons children with lead, causing irreversible damage to their tiny central nervous systems and brains. Poverty is the cancer that forms in the cells of those who live near petrochemical plants and waste incinerators. Roughly one in four children living in poverty have untreated cavities, which can morph into tooth decay, causing sharp pain and spreading infection to their faces and even brains. With public insurance reimbursing only a fraction of dental care costs, many families simply cannot afford regular trips to the dentist. Thirty million Americans remain completely uninsured a decade after the passage of the Affordable Care Act.US

Additional information

Weight	13.8 oz
Dimensions	1.0000 × 5.6000 × 8.5000 in
Imprint	Crown
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780593239919
ISBN-10	0593239911
Author	Matthew Desmond
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	SOC045000, POL029000
Subjects	POL029000, equity, homelessness, geopolitics, values, homeless, US history, gentrification, SOC045000, disparity, political books, welfare, government, sociology books, united states history, philosophy books, public policy, evicted, social class, Food stamps, evicted matthew desmond, poor people, poverty books, economics, politics, america, culture, american history, social justice, society, human behavior, Sociology, wealth, race, class, history, political science, Human nature, capitalism, policy, poor, public health, democracy, poverty, ethics, morals