Book Review Corner: Poverty by America

Brendan Murphy on June 1, 2023

June Book Review by Kay Dougherty

(A summary of five different reviews, available upon request)

Poverty, by America

by Matthew Desmond

Over the past decade or two, it has become fashionable to attribute major social ills to underlying “systemic” and “structural” causes. The search for these systemic and structural factors has much to recommend 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 globalization or technology or countless others – where does that leave individual accountability? In the book, Poverty, by America, sociologist Matthew Desmond, stands in opposition to this prevailing trend as he argues that ending poverty will require change, not only at the policy level, but at the individual level too. All of us, he urges, “must become poverty abolitionists, refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” He encourages all of us to conduct an “audit” of our lives, personalizing poverty by examining all the ways we are connected to the problem – and to the solution.

Throughout the book Desmond presents various factors that contribute to economic inequality in the U.S., including housing segregation, predatory lending, the decline of unions, and tax policies that favor the wealthy. But what he adds to the discussion of poverty is the assertion that affluent Americans benefit from corporate and government policies that keep people poor. If that’s the case, he asks, “Why then would those Americans who profit from the status quo even want to approach poverty as a problem that needs solving.” Desmond answers. “In a broader sense, we are all being immiserated by poverty. It’s there in the morning paper, on our commute to work, in our public parks, dragging us down, making even those quite secure in their money feel diminished and depressed. It’s there in that residue of shame and malaise coating our insular lives.”

One review went so far as to say, “Desmond is well aware that his righteousness about our shared responsibility for poverty will cause discomfort, but his purpose is to draw our attention to what is plainly in front of us.”