Which is why so little has been done to end it.
"The ideal poverty rate in America is zero," Matt Desmond writes in his latest essay for Times Opinion. "Why settle for anything less?" |
I learned about Desmond's boldness in the fall of 2012, when another writer I work with, Tom Edsall, went to a conference on inequality at Yale. The remarkable article that resulted from Edsall's trip, "Is Poverty a Kind of Robbery?" introduced me to Desmond's sociological work, which asked a question that really pushed me and our readers: "If exploitation long has helped to create the slum and its inhabitants, if it long has been a clear, direct and systematic cause of poverty and social suffering, why, then, has this ugly word — exploitation — been erased from current theories of urban poverty?" |
In his presentation, Desmond noted that when he began his fieldwork in Milwaukee — which he eventually turned into the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Evicted" — he wondered "why middle- and upper-class landlords would buy and manage property in some of Milwaukee's roughest neighborhoods." By the end of his fieldwork, he said, "I wondered why they wouldn't." As one of the landlords he spoke with put it, "This moment right now, it's going to create a lot of millionaires. You know, if you have money right now, you can profit from other people's failures." |
This idea — that poverty in America is no accident, that it makes many of us comfortable, even rich — has driven Desmond's work ever since. It is one of the arguments that animates his new book, "Poverty, by America," an excerpt that ran in The New York Times Magazine and his guest essay. |
"This rich country has the means to abolish poverty," Desmond writes in his essay. "Now we must find the will to do so — the will not to reduce poverty but to end it." There is powerful evidence from the success of government aid (which cut child poverty almost in half) during the Covid pandemic that the poverty abolition movement, as Desmond calls it, could and must succeed in the United States. "The hard part isn't designing effective antipoverty policies or figuring out how to pay for them," he adds. "The hard part is ending our addiction to poverty." |
While we were working on the essay, I reminded Desmond that Edsall's column about the 2012 conference had brought us together. |
"I remember that gathering well," he said. "Specifically, I remember a clergyman standing up at the end of the conference and asking what the research world had to say about community members fighting poverty. This book is my late-arriving reply, in a way." |
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