One cause is a labour market that forces workers to help companies achieve profits while underpaying them, simply because they can. Living paycheck to paycheck means a precarious existence and “feverish present-mindedness” for people near the margin of daily survival. Its texture is provided by effective storytelling, which illustrates that poverty has become a way of life, “a relentless piling on of problems”. The brilliance of Poverty, By America lies in Desmond’s account of how government and social policy act in ways commensurate with his class-war thesis. Politicians and well-meaning observers have wrung their hands without facing the “uncomfortable” possibility that the poor remain so because the wealthier want it that way.

Sociologists, Desmond charges, have shied away from “empirical studies of power and exploitation”. But Desmond thinks this thesis, while accurate, misses the various ways in which “the rich keep the poor down for their own benefit”. Another sociologist, the great William Julius Wilson, argued more than three decades ago that deindustrialisation was to blame for African American impoverishment, by depriving men of good manufacturing jobs. Having written the entry on racial capitalism for the New York Times 1619 project, Desmond is sensitive to the way poverty intersects other forms of subordination. The Democrats ended much emergency relief last autumn and cut new entitlements for the worst-off from an Inflation Reduction Act that privileged green capitalism.ĭesmond shows that poverty blights rural white areas but that its hardest core is African American and urban. The only exception was the brief period of pandemic relief, which drove poverty down “tremendously” – for children, by more than 50%. The number of Americans below it has hovered between 10% and 15% for decades, with calls and plans for reform amounting to “50 years of nothing”. The current poverty line is represented by an income of $13,590 a year for an individual and $27,750 for a family of four.

He starts his ambitious new study by demonstrating how enduring American poverty is. Having won a coveted MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2015, Desmond is known for his absorbing previous book on eviction practices in housing, which netted him a Pulitzer prize in 2017.

Matthew desmond poverty by america