Or think about the housing crisis: Many times, it’s not just corporate landowners who are benefiting from high rents. Many times, we see our savings going up and up and up when someone’s pay is going down and down and down. Half of us are invested in the stock market. I mean a lot of us, those who have found security and comfort in America consuming the cheap goods and services that the working class produces for us. I don’t just mean the guy that’s a little richer than you or a lot richer than you. Lowrey: Who benefits from that exploitation? Who benefits from a person being homeless?ĭesmond: A lot of us benefit from it. Read: The one cause of poverty that’s never examined They’re not eliminating poverty at the root. We have all these anti-poverty programs that accommodate poverty without disrupting it. We have massive amounts of evidence about the benefits of government spending on anti-poverty programs. I’ve been with people when they receive a housing voucher. You see a homeless person in Los Angeles an American says, What did that person do? You see a homeless person in France a French person says, What did the state do? How did the state fail them? I don’t know if it’s a belief, a cliché, or a myth. Our tolerance for poverty is very high, much higher than it is in other parts of the developed world. It’s different because it’s so unnecessary. We collect a much smaller share of our GDP in taxes every year. We have a lot less to go around with, in terms of fighting poverty. We have double the child-poverty rate of Germany and South Korea. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.Īnnie Lowrey: How is poverty different in America than in its peer countries? We discussed how the rich came to win the War on Poverty and what’s necessary to end poverty. His previous book- Evicted, about the low-income rental market in Milwaukee-won a Pulitzer Prize. He also demonstrates how America’s safety-net programs are not just too stingy but poorly designed.ĭesmond is a professor at Princeton. Desmond shows how the country’s employers, financial institutions, and landlords extract money from low-income families while rich families hoard opportunity for themselves. The best seller is at once a careful exploration of poverty statistics a deeply reported depiction of the lived experiences of the poor an examination of the ways America’s wealthy exploit the masses and a case for ending poverty. This is the thesis of the lauded sociologist Matthew Desmond’s new book, Poverty, by America. Why do so many Americans live in poverty? Because so many rich people benefit from it.

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