Poverty, by America

Review by Choice Review

Desmond (sociology, Princeton Univ.), who won the Pulitzer Prize for his earlier work Evicted (CH, Aug'10, 47-7150), masterfully explains why the US, a country among the most developed nations, has such protracted and embedded poverty. Pulling no punches, Desmond indicts the nation, Americans' indifference to penury, a tax code that advantages the affluent, zoning that discriminates against the poor, and a widely accepted ideology of individual responsibility. Clearly, the US has ample resources, so the nation's poverty effort could parallel that of other developed countries, but a scheme of "resource diversion" impedes anti-poverty progress. Demond's anti-poverty agenda includes community organizing, more scattered-site public housing, stronger unions, and progressive tax reform. Poverty, by America is short and accessible, a must read for anyone concerned about racism, inequality, and social justice. Desmond's case is pessimistic, leaving little room for progress; Mark Rank's The Poverty Paradox (CH, Dec'23, 61-1069) is a partial corrective. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; general readers; professionals. --David Stoesz, independent scholar

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

---

Review by Booklist Review

Sociologist and MacArthur fellow Desmond follows up his Carnegie Medal--winning Evicted (2016) with a brilliantly researched and artfully written study of how the U.S. has failed to effectively address the issue of poverty. Grounding his thesis in statistics that defy easy analysis and show that the ebb and flow of the problem continues regardless of political leadership, recession, or economic boom, he provides readers with unforgettable images--"if America's poor founded a country . . . [it] would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela"--and pointed truths about how individual states failed to allocate funds to assist their poor. For example, Oklahoma spent tens of millions in federal poverty funds on the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative. Arizona used millions on abstinence-only education. Maine supported a Christian summer camp, and Mississippi officials committed fraud on a scale that has led to multiple indictments. Thankfully, as Desmond reveals the frustrating ways in which private and public systems designed to help the poor have fallen short, he also uses his knowledge of the subject to explore what works and identify potential solutions that merit further consideration. This thoughtful investigation of a critically important subject, a piercing title by an astute writer who is both passionate and fearless, is valuable reading for all concerned with affecting positive change.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Pulitzer winner Desmond follows up Evicted with a powerful inquiry into why the U.S. is "the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy." Noting that 38 million Americans cannot afford basic necessities, Desmond argues that poverty persists because others benefit from it: workers are paid non-living wages and unions are discouraged in order to boost the pay of corporate executives; poor consumers are overcharged for rental housing and financial services so that landlords and banks can prosper; and affluent families benefit from tax breaks, student loans, and other forms of federal aid while welfare programs are publicly belittled and made difficult to access. Poverty is further entrenched by the underfunding of education, mass transit, and healthcare, Desmond argues, creating a world of private opulence and public squalor. His solutions include eliminating the residential segregation that blocks poor families from well-funded public services and employment and housing opportunities. More broadly, he calls for better-off Americans to acknowledge their complicity in perpetuating poverty and to pressure the government to undertake "an aggressive, uncompromising antipoverty agenda." Though the path to achieving these reforms isn't always clear, Desmond enriches his detailed and trenchant analysis with poignant reflections on America's "unblushing inequality" and the "anomie of wealth." It's a gut-wrenching call for change. Agent: Katherine Flynn, Kneerim & Williams. (Mar.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Pulitzer Prize--winning sociologist Desmond (Evicted) argues that poverty exists in the United States because wealthy people benefit from it. While the United States ranks among the richest countries in the world, it has the largest amount of poverty; the author expects that to expand. Presently, every one in three Americans work in low-paying jobs, one in eight live in severe poverty, and the wealth gap between Black and white families remains large. For example, in the average white family, the head of household with a high school diploma is better paid than the head of a Black household with a college degree. The author also points to when most white women did not have to work outside their home; whereas Black women, to survive, had to work any job available. The author suggests solutions by advocating for what he calls "poverty abolitionists," people he hopes will insist on collective bargaining and producing true economic rewards for workers. He also urges the government to end hunger and create laws that ensure all Americans make a livable wage. VERDICT This book will likely interest scholars. Add it to social and behavioral sciences collections.--Claude Ury

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize--winning author of Evicted. "America's poverty is not for lack of resources," writes Desmond. "We lack something else." That something else is compassion, in part, but it's also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight--and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor--among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one's job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the "three rules" (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, "not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers." By Desmond's reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and "make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair." These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become "poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor." Fortune 500 CEOs won't like Desmond's message for rewriting the social contract--which is precisely the point. A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

Chapter 1 The Kind of Problem Poverty Is I recently spent a day on the tenth floor of Newark's courthouse, the floor where the state decides child welfare cases. There I met a fifty-five-year-old father who had stayed up all night working at his warehouse job by the port. He told me his body felt heavy. Sometimes when pulling a double shift, he would snort a speedball--cocaine mixed with benzodiazepine and morphine, sometimes heroin--to stay awake or dull his pain. Its ugly recipe was laid bare in the authorities' toxicology reports, making him look like a career junkie and not what he was: an exhausted member of America's working poor. The authorities didn't think the father could care for his three children alone, and their mother, who had a serious mental illness and was using PCP, wasn't an option either. So the father gambled, surrendering his two older children to his stepmother and hoping the authorities would allow him to raise the youngest. They did. Outside the courtroom, he hugged his public defender, who considered what had happened a real victory. This is what winning looks like on the tenth floor of Newark's courthouse: giving up two of your children so you have a chance to raise the third alone and in poverty. Technically, a person is considered "poor" when they can't afford life's necessities, like food and housing. The architect of the Official Poverty Measure--the poverty line--was a bureaucrat working at the Social Security Administration named Mollie Orshansky. Orshansky figured that if poverty was fundamentally about a lack of income that could cover the basics, and if nothing was more basic than food, then you could calculate poverty with two pieces of information: the cost of food in a given year and the share of a family's budget dedicated to it. Orshansky determined that bare-bones food expenditures accounted for roughly a third of an American family's budget. If a family of four needed, say, $1,000 a year in 1965 to feed themselves, then any family making less than $3,000 a year (or around $27,000 at the beginning of 2022) would be considered poor because they would be devoting more than a third of their income to food, forgoing other necessities. Orshansky published her findings in January of that year, writing, "There is thus a total of 50 million persons--of whom 22 million are young children--who live within the bleak circle of poverty or at least hover around its edge." It was a number that shocked affluent Americans. Today's Official Poverty Measure is still based on Orshansky's calculation, annually updated for inflation. In 2022, the poverty line was drawn at $13,590 a year for a single person and $27,750 a year for a family of four. As I've said, we can't hope to understand why there is so much poverty in America solely by considering the lives of the poor. But we need to start there, to better understand the kind of problem poverty is--and grasp the stakes--because poverty is not simply a matter of small incomes. In the words of the poet Layli Long Soldier, that's just "the oil at the surface." I met Crystal Mayberry when I was living in Milwaukee and researching my last book, on eviction and the American housing crisis. Crystal was born prematurely on a spring day in 1990, shortly after her pregnant mother was stabbed eleven times in the back while being robbed. The attack induced labor. Both mother and daughter survived. It was not the first time Crystal's mother had been stabbed. For as far back as Crystal can remember, her father beat her mother. He smoked crack cocaine, and so did her mother; so did her mother's mother. Crystal's mother found a way to leave her father, and soon after, he began a lengthy prison stint. Crystal and her mother moved in with another man and his parents. That man's father began molesting Crystal. She told her mother, and her mother called her a liar. Not long after Crystal began kindergarten, Child Protective Services, the branch of government tasked with safeguarding children from maltreatment, stepped in. At five, Crystal was placed in foster care. Crystal bounced around between dozens of group homes and sets of foster parents. She lived with her aunt for five years. Then her aunt returned her. After that, the longest Crystal lived anywhere was eight months. When she reached adolescence, Crystal fought with the other girls in the group homes. She picked up assault charges and a scar across her right cheekbone. People and their houses, pets, furniture, dishes--these came and went. Food was more stable, and Crystal began taking refuge in it. She put on weight. Because of her weight, she developed sleep apnea. When Crystal was sixteen, she stopped going to high school. At seventeen, she was examined by a clinical psychologist, who diagnosed her with, among other things, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, reactive attachment disorder, and borderline intellectual functioning. When she turned eighteen, she aged out of foster care. By that time Crystal had passed through more than twenty-five foster placements. Because of her mental illness, she had been approved for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a government income subsidy for low-income people who are old, blind, or who have a disability. She would receive $754 a month, or a little over $9,000 a year. Crystal was barred from low-income housing for two years because of an assault charge she received for fighting in the group home. Even if she had not been barred, she would still have found herself at the bottom of a waiting list that was six years long. Crystal secured her first apartment in the private market: a run-down two-bedroom unit. The apartment was located in a majority-Black neighborhood that ranked among the city's poorest, but Crystal herself was Black and had been turned down for apartments in the Hispanic and white areas of town. Crystal's rent took 73 percent of her income, and it wasn't long before she fell behind. A few months after moving in, she experienced her first official eviction, which went on her record, making it likely that her application for housing assistance would be denied. After her eviction, Crystal met a woman at a homeless shelter and secured another apartment with her new friend. Then Crystal put that new friend's friend through a window, and the landlord told Crystal to leave. Crystal spent nights in shelters, with friends, and with members of her church. She learned how to live on the streets, walking them at night and sleeping on the bus or in hospital waiting rooms during the day. She learned to survive by relying on strangers. She met a woman at a bus stop and ended up living with her for a month. People were attracted to Crystal. She was gregarious and funny, with an endearing habit of slapping her hands together and laughing at herself. She sang in public, gospel mostly. Crystal had always believed that her SSI was secure. You couldn't get fired from SSI, and your hours couldn't get cut. "SSI always come," she said. Until one day it didn't. Crystal had been approved for SSI as a minor, but her adult reevaluation found her ineligible. Now her only source of income was food stamps. She tried donating plasma, but her veins were too small. She burned through the remaining ties she had from church and her foster families. When her SSI was not reinstated after several months, she descended into street homelessness and prostitution. Crystal had never been an early riser, but she learned that mornings were the best time to turn tricks, catching men on their way to work. For Crystal and people in similar situations, poverty is about money, of course, but it is also a relentless piling on of problems. Poverty is pain, physical pain. It is in the backaches of home health aides and certified nursing assistants, who bend their bodies to hoist the old and sick out of beds and off toilets; it is in the feet and knees of cashiers made to stand while taking our orders and ringing up our items; it is in the skin rashes and migraines of maids who clean our office buildings, homes, and hotel rooms with products containing ammonia and triclosan. In America's meatpacking plants, two amputations occur each week: A band saw lops off someone's finger or hand. Pickers in Amazon warehouses have access to vending machines dispensing free Advil and Tylenol. Slum housing spreads asthma, its mold and cockroach allergens seeping into young lungs and airways, and it poisons children with lead, causing irreversible damage to their tiny central nervous systems and brains. Poverty is the cancer that forms in the cells of those who live near petrochemical plants and waste incinerators. Roughly one in four children living in poverty have untreated cavities, which can morph into tooth decay, causing sharp pain and spreading infection to their faces and even brains. With public insurance reimbursing only a fraction of dental care costs, many families simply cannot afford regular trips to the dentist. Thirty million Americans remain completely uninsured a decade after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Excerpted from Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---