The United States of the Few

Poverty, by America By Matthew Desmond (Crown, 2023) There can be no doubt that Matthew Desmond, an endowed Professor at Princeton, is one of the most respected and influential contemporary sociologists. His previous book, Evicted (Desmond 2016), supported by a 2015 McArthur Fellowship, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and I have yet to meet anyone who does not admire this brilliant public ethnography. Desmond's many accolades have set high expectations for his new work Poverty, by America which has spent many weeks on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Unlike Evicted, Poverty is not an ethnography, even though its narrative is often punctuated by real-life anecdotes. Instead, I would characterize it as a compassionate policy essay though, here and there, it adopts the tone of a motivational speech. The various “we” to whom Desmond frequently appeals are not academic peers but alternate between “us” as a nation that has created and legitimated a shamefully high poverty rate, and “us” as middle to upper class professionals who personally benefit from the existence of “so much hardship in this land of abundance” (p. 3). The essay's easily readable 190 pages are followed by 75 pages of notes in smaller print offering plenty of context and backing for claims made—however, an alphabetical list of references is missing. Again, this work was not written for colleagues but aims at a much larger audience; it would therefore be unfair to hold it to scholarly standards it is not seeking to meet. Still, my questions here are: What can interactionist sociologists, beginning or advanced, take away from reading Poverty? And, for starters, what is the book about? Desmond's sincere arguments are propped on statistics and illustrated by vignettes, making for a realist, almost positivist, tale. I do not think that the analysis quite amounts to a “fundamental theory of the problem” (p. 3), at least I did not detect much theorizing that tapped into the rich interactionist history of examining social problems. Following introductory remarks, Desmond spends the first two (of nine) chapters on diagnosing the issue. By any sensible measure, a high and persistent share of people in the United States live in or near poverty—which, of course, is a major dimension of disparity on its own, yet also one that compounds with other inequalities, such as those related to race, ethnicity, gender, education, health, and so on. Moreover, poverty is tightly knotted to social problems that particularly afflict U.S. residents, like addiction, violence, or incarceration. Being a qualitative scholar, I refrain from assessing the appropriateness of Desmond's measures or the accuracy of his numbers (e.g. Matthews 2023). To me, the overall picture, especially when calculated in terms of relative rather than absolute deprivation, looks convincing; so do Desmond's refusal to blame poverty on the poor and his search for causes elsewhere. In his words: “Poverty persists because some wish and will it to do” (p. 40), and it only makes sense that these “some” are not the poor. In Chapters 3–6, Desmond turns to the institutional pillars for persistent economic deprivation: webs of exploitation that trap low-income workers, impoverished consumers, and welfare recipients at the bottom; the nation's staggering wealth gap; and massive residential segregation. For most workers, wages have long been stagnant and, for many, have fallen below livability. Movements and organizations that strengthen workers, such as unions, continue to face powerful blowback. Lacking better choices, destitute consumers are preyed upon in housing and financial markets. And perhaps most frustrating: It is not the total amount of government aid that is the problem—Desmond claims that only France surpasses the United States in overall public subsidies measured as share of the GDP (p. 91)—however, the “lopsided” (p. 91) distribution and cultural confusion of what counts as “welfare” strongly favor the middle and upper classes. The author argues that the American tax system is intentionally murky to cover up the fact that, when all is tallied up, tax breaks deliver around 40% more public aid to the richest 20% of families than the government spends on supporting the poorest 20% (p. 99). Another imbalance is that many poor folks who qualify for public subsidies do not claim them, while tax breaks for the wealthy are nearly automatic. In Chapter Six, Desmond examines the American condition of extreme inequality by, first, exposing the immense amounts of wealth and power that are controlled by the richest one to 10% of Americans who, economically speaking, have zero incentive to support public goods—and, in fact, often lobby against government spending on affordable housing, public education, and the like. “More for me. Less for we.” (p. 112). While largely familiar, I found Desmond's points on the wealth gap persuasive. Likewise, his second argument, on the nation's enormous residential segregation (by race and class) and its amplification of poverty resonated with me, though with a small caveat. I doubt that segregation, like poverty, is as much a matter of immoral individual action as it is another cultural and institutional problem. Nonetheless, I entirely agree that segregation “poisons our minds and souls” (p. 162), and that place and space continue to be understudied dimensions of inequality in our discipline, perhaps only on par with class. Finally, Chapters 7 to 9 are dedicated to solutions for breaking “our addiction to poverty and segregation” (p. 176). We need “more poor aid and less rich aid” (p. 132), Desmond maintains, while making policy suggestions, ranging from “low hanging fruit” (p. 122), such as increasing enrollment in existing benefits programs, to more challenging tasks, such as finding and spending $177 billion to close the poverty gap for good. How, one might ask, should the government pay for that? Desmond proposes that it could be “utterly easy” (p. 128): by enforcing current tax rules and closing “nonsensical” loopholes that deliver unfair advantages to the rich and to corporations. “We could just about fill the entire poverty gap in America if the richest among us simply paid all the taxes they owed” (p. 137). Is that so? I take Desmond's word for it. Also on the to-do list are reducing residential segregation through affordable housing programs and fairer zoning, next to implementing living wages, union protections, more equitable banking, and easier access to birth control. These are all great ideas, I just wonder how our elected officials are going to get any of this done if they cannot even agree on allowing people to choose their own restrooms. Only at the end of the last chapter and in the epilogue does Desmond touch upon solutions to poverty from below rather than above, through policy. Here, I'm skeptical that brief calls for individual “consumer activism” and a couple of nods to the power of voting and social movements are sufficient. We already know from grappling with the global disaster of climate change that progress is minimal, even though the science is solid, solutions are obvious, and economics are favorable. What remains lacking is cultural and political, meaning domains interpretive researchers have long examined, producing insights into perceptions, identities, emotions, knowledge, interaction, narratives, discourse, and the like, at all social levels. Why should the rich support government programs that benefit the poor if not for cultural reasons? And aren't there many on both sides of the poverty divide who already act, vote, pray, and so on against their own economic interests, in pursuit of more deeply felt beliefs (Hochschild 2016)? How have we not yet learned, despite daily evidence, that rational appeals to facts and moral appeals to rules have severe limits? I'm not saying that I have answers, only that solutions are likely to be more complicated than Poverty may imply. Overall, I would have liked to see a bit less rhetoric, more ethnographic nuance, and a fuller consideration of cultural and political factors in Desmond's brave tackle of American poverty. I'm confident the book's many readers could have handled a more complex account without losing sight of the atrocious big picture. Based on my own and my students' love of Evicted, and out of admiration for Desmond's devotion to public sociology, I have assigned Poverty in an upcoming graduate course that touches on policy issues. I count on the book's readability and integrity to galvanize thoughtful discussions on inequality but I do not expect it to make theoretical or methodological contributions, reminding myself that these were never the author's goals to begin with. Inequality scholars short on time might go directly to Desmond's (2023) New York Times Magazine article which gets the major points across and is just as engaging to read. I sincerely hope Poverty will invigorate public debate on this critical American issue and—somehow—move the needle on implementing solutions, yet I doubt it can manage as much for academic discourse. Margarethe Kusenbach is a Professor of Sociology at the University of South Florida. Her research areas include cities, emotions, disasters, and qualitative methods

Citation · Political science · Poverty · Sociology · Employment and Welfare Studies · History · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction

• Evicted. Poverty and profit in the American city

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