Down and out in paradise

The book examines the persistence of want in the wealthy United States, finding that keeping some citizens poor serves the interests of many

POVERTY, BY AMERICA 

Author: Matthew Desmond

Publisher: Crown

Pages: 284

Price: $28
 

Over the past decade or two, it has become fashionable to attribute major social ills to underlying “systemic” and “structural” causes. There seem to be several drivers of this tendency: The growing prominence of economists in public debates; the rise of the explanatory bloggers turned Substackers, who like to demonstrate their cool erudition by elevating intellectual arguments over moral ones; and the post-Ferguson racial awakening, with its emphasis on the deeply ingrained inequities that underlie present-day disparities.
 

The search for systemic and structural factors has much to recommend it in its attention to context and history. But it pushes to the side a crucial element: Personal agency. If we can explain away so many problems as a result of larger forces — whether capitalism or racism or globalisation or technology or countless others — where does that leave individual and corporate accountability?
 

The sociologist Matthew Desmond stands in stark opposition to this prevailing trend. His new book, Poverty, by America is a compact jeremiad on the persistence of extreme want in a nation of extraordinary wealth, a distillation into argument form. And the central claim of that argument is that the endurance of poverty in the US is the product not only of larger shifts such as deindustrialisation and family dissolution, but of choices and actions by more fortunate Americans.
 

“It’s a useful exercise, evaluating the merits of different explanations for poverty, like those having to do with immigration or the family,” Desmond writes. “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.”
 

This taking assumes many forms. There are the most obvious types of exploitation, such as employers paying undocumented workers less than minimum wage or denying them overtime; prisons charging inmates exorbitant fees to make phone calls; or banks assessing heavy overdraft fees. There is the winner-take-all nature of the tax code, under which, to cite only one notorious provision, private-equity partners are entitled to have most of their compensation for managing others’ investments taxed at the lower capital-gains rate, rather than as ordinary labour. There is the housing market, in which landlords are able to charge surprisingly high rents even in inexpensive cities to low-income tenants who feel they have few alternatives. “Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money,” Desmond writes. “It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.”
 

Where things get more interesting is when he considers the ways that upper-middle-class Americans, many of them proud progressives, are complicit in the taking. Affluent families benefit from tax breaks on their mortgages and college savings plans, leaving less revenue for programmes that serve those in greater need. Consumers seek out convenience and low prices with little regard for the labour abuses that make them possible.
 

Most notably, homeowners in choice neighbourhoods and suburbs defend exclusionary zoning that bars affordable housing, keeping low-income families at a safe distance from their streets and schools. This forecloses the upward mobility that comes with economic and racial integration and perpetuates the harms that accompany concentrated poverty.
 

What’s to be done? The usual left-of-centre case for reducing poverty is to expand the safety net, and Desmond is on board with that, detailing how many billions could be found for that purpose if the wealthiest Americans paid their fair share in taxes. But he offers some cautionary nuance on this front. The US safety net is, he argues, more generous than many on the left give it credit for: Between the earned-income tax credit, Medicaid, Pell grants, housing vouchers and a host of other programmes, “there is no evidence that the United States has become stingier with time. The opposite is true.”
 

The problem, Desmond concludes, is that we make it hard for many low-income Americans to access this support, and, above all, that so much of it is lost to the economic exploitation that is his chief target. And to address this exploitation, he calls for nothing less than an “abolitionist” crusade against poverty: A moral awakening that combats the scourge in ways big and small, through legislation, legal action and union organising; through our decisions about what we buy, where we live and where we send our kids to school.
 

Desmond’s case might have been strengthened by a more considered structuring and tone; at moments, the book can feel somewhat dashed off.  His discussion of reduced life expectancy in struggling communities downplays the role of deadly violence, and he gives overly short shrift to programmes that have tried to move low-income families to the suburbs and have demonstrated some success at boosting future income.
 

Desmond is well aware that his righteousness about our shared responsibility for poverty will cause discomfort: “People shift in their chairs, and some respond by trying to quiet you the way mothers try to shush small children in public when they point out something that everyone sees but pretends not to.” His purpose here is to draw attention to what’s plain in front of us — damn the etiquette and the grand abstractions. As he quotes George Orwell: “We could do with a little less talk of ‘capitalist’ and ‘proletarian’ and a little more about the robbers and robbed.”
 

The reviewer is a reporter at ProPublica