“Poverty, by America,” written by Matthew Desmond, explores the structural factors that keep poor people poor in the United States. Desmond examines a range of influences—government policies, the impact of technology and digitalization, consumer exploitation, and entrenched mindsets—that together create the “plaza of the poor.”
As I read, I sometimes find his views a bit idealistic, but I also realize that the value of this book might lie in its idealism. As we grow older, we tend to lose our ability to imagine different possibilities before putting ideas into practice. Moreover, I don’t intend to stir up resentment between social classes (there’s already enough of that online). Instead, I suggest we approach each decision with a bit of empathy—it might just make a difference for someone.
0.0 Introduction
Trees ramify a welter of gnarled, twisting roots, and there is something to be said for tracing each one that stretches and curls through the earth. It’s a useful exercise, evaluating the merits of different explanations for poverty, like those having to do with immigration or the family. But I’ve found that doing so always leads me back to the taproot, the central feature from which all other rootlets spring, which in our case is the simple truth that poverty is an injury, a taking. 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.
1.0 Tech, consumers who benefit from the exploitation
Platforms such as Uber, DoorDash, and TaskRabbit force their employees (sorry, their “independent contractors”) to assume more responsibility on the job—they must supply their own car, buy their own gas, cover their own insurance—while simultaneously subjecting those workers to heightened supervision. Some countries, including the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, have classified Uber drivers as full-time employees, which entitles them to basic protections like minimum wage and holiday pay, while other countries, such as Hungary and Thailand, have banned Uber altogether. But in America, Uber drivers and other gig workers usually don’t get sick days, overtime, vacation time, or worker compensation.
Consumers benefit from worker exploitation, too. We can now, with a few clicks, summon rides and groceries and Chinese takeout and a handyman, all at cut rates. We have become masters in this new servant economy, where an anonymized and underpaid workforce does the bidding of the affluent. “Uber” is now a verb. Americans rank Amazon as one of the most trusted institutions in the country, second only to the military. These companies have become ascendant because we love them. I still find myself, after all these years, mystified that I’m able to have just about anything I can think of arrive on my doorstep in twenty-four hours. This is the closest thing to magic that we have.
Even as more and more of us are shopping according to our values, economic justice does not seem to be among our top priorities. We know if our vegetables are local and organic, but we don’t ask what the farmworkers made picking them. When we purchase a plane ticket, we are shown the carbon emissions for the flight, but we aren’t told if the flight attendants are unionized. We reward companies that run antiracist marketing campaigns without recognizing how these campaigns can distract from those companies’ abysmal labor practices, as if shortchanging workers isn’t often itself a kind of racism. (The economists Valerie Wilson and William Darity, Jr., have shown that the Black-white pay gap has increased since 2000, and today, the average Black worker makes roughly 74 cents for every dollar the average white worker does.) We recognize the kind of coffee we should drink or the kind of shoes we should wear to signal our political affiliations, but we are often unaware of what difference that makes for the workers themselves, if it makes a difference at all. My family stopped shopping at Home Depot after learning about the company’s hefty donations to Republican lawmakers who refused to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. We have yet to inquire about the pay and benefits offered at Ace Hardware.
I wish they were better at it, just as I wish that we as a nation devoted the same amount of thoughtfulness, creativity, and tenacity to connecting poor families with programs that would alleviate their hunger and ease their hardships as multinational corporations devote to convincing us to buy their potato chips and car tires.
What do we deny workers when we deny them living wages so that we may enjoy more wealth and cheap goods? Happiness, health—life itself. Is this the capitalism we want, the capitalism we deserve?
2.0 The public space
We spend an enormous amount of time stuck in traffic because we’ve neglected to invest in public transportation projects like high-speed trains. We step from our Manhattan condo, nod to the doorman, and walk streets piled with trash, perhaps hopping on a derelict subway car to meet friends for sushi. We avoid public parks, some of which we’ve allowed to become dangerous and unsettling, but have memberships to private clubs and golf courses. We finish our basements and remodel our kitchens, while public housing is allowed to fester and fall to pieces. When we find ourselves in legal entanglements, we hire a team of lawyers from white-shoe firms but defund legal services for the indigent. This somehow feels normal to us: that those most in need of aggressive, committed legal defense get assigned attorneys with massive caseloads who sometimes can’t remember their names. When legislators in Michigan accommodated their affluent political base by refusing to raise taxes, the state balanced its books by canceling infrastructure upgrades and firing safety inspectors, factors that directly contributed to the Flint water crisis, which exposed upward of twelve thousand children—most of them poor and Black—to lead poisoning.
Most Americans want the country to build more public housing for low-income families, but they do not want that public housing (or any sort of multifamily housing) in their neighborhood. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to champion public housing in the abstract, but among homeowners, they are no more likely to welcome new housing developments in their own backyards. One study found that conservative renters were in fact more likely to support a proposal for a 120-unit apartment building in their community than liberal homeowners. Perhaps we are not so polarized after all. Maybe above a certain income level, we are all segregationists.
If you design a public school system such that it primarily serves students of professional parents, who have the time and know-how to invest in their children’s schooling, and who can afford to pay for extra tutoring and college prep coaches and out-of-state field trips and therapy, you can create an enriching educational environment and pipeline to college. Economically integrating schools would challenge this design, this social status preservation machine, requiring rich students to share classrooms with poor students who might carry some of the traumas of poverty, speak English as a second language, and spend their summers watching a lot of television because going outside is dangerous. One study found that growing up in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood is equivalent to missing a year of school when it comes to verbal ability. Another found that achievement gaps between rich and poor children form and harden before kindergarten.
These arrangements create what the postwar sociologist C. Wright Mills called “structural immorality” and what the political scientist Jamila Michener more recently labeled exploitation “on a societal level.” We are connected, members of a shared nation and a shared economy, where the advantages of the rich often come at the expense of the poor. But that arrangement is not inevitable or permanent. It was made by human hands and can be unmade by them. We can fashion a new society, starting with our own lives. Where we decide to work and live, what we buy, how we vote, and where we put our energies as citizens all have consequences for poor families. Becoming a poverty abolitionist, then, entails conducting an audit of our lives, personalizing poverty by examining all the ways we are connected to the problem—and to the solution.
Besides, let’s admit it: Segregation poisons our minds and souls. When affluents live, work, play, and worship mainly alongside fellow affluents, they can grow insular, quite literally forgetting the poor. It brings out the worst in us, feeding our prejudices and spreading moral decay. Engaging with one another in integrated communities allows us to recognize our blind spots, de-siloing our lives and causing families well above the poverty line to become bothered by problems that affect those below it. As Nietzsche wrote, “One must want to experience the great problems with one’s body and one’s soul.” And I’d count poverty among the great problems. Integration means we all have skin in the game. It not only disrupts poverty; on a spiritual level, over time it can foster empathy and solidarity. This is why opposing segregation is vital to poverty abolitionism.
The American aristocracy of today seem to prefer complaining to one another and working nonstop. Has there ever been another time, in the full sweep of human history, when so many people had so much and yet felt so deprived and anxious?
3.0 Mindsets
Poverty might consume your life, but it’s rarely embraced as an identity. It’s more socially acceptable today to disclose a mental illness than to tell someone you’re broke. When politicians propose antipoverty legislation, they say it will help “the middle class.” When social movement organizers mobilize for higher wages or housing justice, they announce that they are fighting on behalf of “working people” or “families” or “tenants” or “the many.” When the poor take to the streets, it’s usually not under the banner of poverty. There is no flag for poor rights, after all.
Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled on incarceration piled on depression piled on addiction—on and on it goes. Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social problem we care about—crime, health, education, housing—and its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world.
Marriage works the same way. It tends to lock in the security of the already secure.
4.0 Policies
The United States doesn’t just tuck its poor under overpasses and into mobile home parks far removed from central business districts. It disappears them into jails and prisons, effectively erasing them: The incarcerated are simply not counted in most national surveys, resulting in a falsely rosy statistical picture of American progress. Poverty measures exclude everyone in prison and jail—not to mention those housed in psych wards, halfway houses, and homeless shelters—which means there are millions more poor Americans than official statistics let on.
If we have more than doubled government spending on poverty and achieved so little, one reason is because the American welfare state is a leaky bucket. A dollar allocated to an antipoverty program does not mean a dollar will ultimately reach a needy family.
Help from the government is a zero-sum affair. The biggest government subsidies are not directed at families trying to climb out of poverty but instead go to ensure that well-off families stay well-off. This leaves fewer resources for the poor. If this is our design, our social contract, then we should at least own up to it. We should at least stand up and profess, Yes, this is the kind of nation we want. What we cannot do is look the American poor in the face and say, We’d love to help you, but we just can’t afford to, because that is a lie.
Instead, we let the rich slide and give the most to those who have plenty already, creating a welfare state that heavily favors the upper class. And then our elected officials have the audacity—the shamelessness, really—to fabricate stories about poor people’s dependency on government aid and shoot down proposals to reduce poverty because they would cost too much. Glancing at the price tag of some program that would cut child poverty in half or give all Americans access to a doctor, they suck their teeth and ask, “But how can we afford it?” How can we afford it? What a sinful question. What a selfish, dishonest question, one asked as if the answer wasn’t staring us straight in the face. We could afford it if we allowed the IRS to do its job. We could afford it if the well-off among us took less from the government. We could afford it if we designed our welfare state to expand opportunity and not guard fortunes.
Scarcity pits issue against issue, and neighbor against neighbor. Since the nation’s founding, 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. Manufactured scarcity empowers and justifies racism, so much so that the historical sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox once speculated that without capitalism “the world might never have experienced race prejudice.”
Let’s call it the scarcity diversion. Here’s the playbook. First, allow elites to hoard a resource like money or land. Second, pretend that arrangement is natural, unavoidable—or better yet, ignore it altogether. Third, attempt to address social problems caused by the resource hoarding only with the scarce resources left over. So instead of making the rich pay all their taxes, for instance, design a welfare state around the paltry budget you are left with when they don’t. Fourth, fail. Fail to drive down the poverty rate. Fail to build more affordable housing. Fifth, claim this is the best we can do. Preface your comments by saying, “In a world of scarce resources…” Blame government programs. Blame capitalism. Blame the other political party. Blame immigrants. Blame anyone you can except those who most deserve it. “Gaslighting” is not too strong a phrase to describe such pretense.
5.0 Utopia
“We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable,” wrote Brueggemann. “We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted” by the established order “that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.”
We don’t just need deeper antipoverty investments. We need different ones, policies that refuse to partner with poverty, policies that threaten its very survival. We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets, instead of being captured by companies whose low wages are subsidized by government benefits, or by landlords who raise the rents as their tenants’ wages rise, or by banks and payday loan outlets that issue exorbitant fines and fees. If we fail to address the many forms of exploitation at the bottom of the market, we risk increasing government spending only to experience another fifty years of sclerosis in the fight against poverty. We need to empower the poor.
“Any real change,” writes James Baldwin, “implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed.” Ending segregation, at last, would require affluent families to give up some things, but what we’d gain in return would be more valuable. We would have to give up the ways we hoard opportunity and public safety, but in doing so we’d also give up the shame that haunts us when we participate in the evil business of exclusion and poverty creation. We’d have to give up some comforts and familiarities of life behind the wall and give up the stories we’ve told ourselves about that place and our role in it, but we’d also be giving up the loneliness and empty materialism that have come to characterize much of upper-class life, allowing ourselves, in Baldwin’s words, to reach “for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”
An America without poverty would be neither a utopia nor a land of gray uniformity. Look around: There are plenty of capitalist countries with far less poverty than us. Walt Disney World would still exist in a poverty-free America. There would still be markets and private property rights. Hermès handbags, Tesla cars, Levi’s jeans, and Nike shoes would still be allowed. You could still strike it rich. 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 bottom. Conservatives like to say they are not for equality of conditions (everyone gets the same thing) but equality of opportunity (everyone gets the same shot). Fine by me—but only if we actually work to make equality of opportunity a reality.
In the end, it will work.
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