Evicted and poverty reporting: where has the muckraking gone?

Matthew Desmond’s new book is the latest in a long and illustrious tradition of writing about America’s poor – but where’s the anger, and why does nothing ever seem to get done?

The new hit in American nonfiction is Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. The book follows eight families as they navigate perilous housing situations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And it arrived with a strong pedigree: Desmond is a professor of sociology at Harvard, a winner of the MacArthur Genius grant in 2015 for “revealing the impact of eviction on the lives of the urban poor and its role in perpetuating racial and economic inequality”.

Published last week, Evicted debuted at No 6 on the New York Times bestseller list. The reviews were all raves. Ours liked it. The New York Times deemed it a “regal hybrid of ethnography and policy reporting”. The Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada began his review in an attitude of prostration: “Thank you for writing about destitution in America with astonishing specificity yet without voyeurism or judgment.”

Related: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond – review

Long ago it was said that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives”. That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when the discomfort and crowding below were so great, and the consequent upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance.

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