Poverty, by America

by Matthew Desmond

This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. If America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela. Almost one in nine Americans—including one in eight children—live in poverty. There are more than 38 million people living in the United States who cannot afford basic necessities, and more than 108 million getting by on $55,000 a year or less, many stuck in that space between poverty and security.[1]

America’s poverty is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.

Ending poverty will require new policies and renewed political movements, to be sure. But it will also require that each of us, in our own way, become poverty abolitionists, unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation and refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.

poverty is about money, of course, but it is also a relentless piling on of problems.

Poverty measures exclude everyone in prison and jail—not to mention those housed in psych wards, halfway houses, and homeless shelters—which means there are millions more poor Americans than official statistics let on.[14]

You feel it in how effortlessly poor people are omitted from movies and television shows and popular music and children’s books, erasures reminding you of your own irrelevance to wider society.

Poverty is diminished life and personhood. It changes how you think and prevents you from realizing your full potential. It shrinks the mental energy you can dedicate to decisions, forcing you to focus on the latest stressor—an overdue gas bill, a lost job—at the expense of everything else. When someone is shot dead, the children who live on that block perform much worse on cognitive tests in the days following the murder. The violence captures their minds.

Poverty can cause anyone to make decisions that look ill-advised and even downright stupid to those of us unbothered by scarcity.

“Being poor,” they write, “reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going a full night without sleep.” When we are preoccupied by poverty, “we have less mind to give to the rest of life.” Poverty does not just deprive people of security and comfort; it siphons off their brainpower, too.[19]

There is no metropolitan area in the United States where whites experience extreme concentrations of disadvantage, living in neighborhoods with poverty rates in excess of 40 percent.

Poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain piled on incarceration piled on depression piled on addiction—on and on it goes. Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social problem we care about—crime, health, education, housing—and its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world.[24]

Part of the answer, I learned, lies in the fact that a fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them.

The best research we have on this question finds that the long-term impact of immigration on wages is quite small, and its impact on employment is even smaller. If immigrants competed with native-born workers for jobs, this finding would be head-scratching, even dubious, but immigrants mainly compete with other immigrants for jobs, which means the workers most threatened by new arrivals are older arrivals.[27]

But the poorest immigrants are undocumented, which makes them ineligible for many federal programs, including food stamps, non-emergency Medicaid, and Social Security. Over a typical lifetime, an immigrant will give more to the U.S. government in taxes than he or she will receive in federal welfare benefits.[29]

In the history of the nation, there has only been one other state-sponsored initiative more antifamily than mass incarceration, and that was slavery.

But just because desperate people accept and even seek out exploitative conditions doesn’t make those conditions any less exploitative.)[5]

Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.

There, a man trying to describe the problem of suicides on Native American reservations says, “Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping.”[36] The poverty debate has suffered from a similar kind of myopia. For the past half century, we’ve approached the poverty question by attending to the poor themselves—posing questions about their work ethic, say, or their welfare benefits—when we should have been focusing on the fire. The question that should serve as a looping incantation, the one we should ask every time we drive past a tent encampment, those tarped American slums smelling of asphalt and bodies, every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is simply: Who benefits? Not Why don’t you find a better job? or Why don’t you move? or Why don’t you stop taking out such bad loans? but Who is feeding off this?[37]

Perhaps it’s because we’ve been trained since the earliest days of capitalism to see the poor as idle and unmotivated.

but other taxes are regressive, forcing the poor to hand over a larger share of their earnings. Take sales taxes. These hit the poor hardest,

Second, we prioritize the subsidization of affluence over the alleviation of poverty.

Most states still allow restaurant and other service workers to be paid a subminimum wage, which is a meager $2.13 an hour at the federal level, forcing nearly 5 million workers to survive on tips. (Where did the concept of subminimum wage come from? It’s a vestige of slavery. After emancipation, restaurant owners hired formerly enslaved Black workers for free. They had to rely on customers’ charity.)

To live and strive in modern America is to participate in a series of morally fraught systems. If a family’s entire financial livelihood depends on the value of its home, it’s not hard to understand why that family would oppose anything that could potentially lower its property values, like a proposal to develop an affordable housing complex in the neighborhood. If an aging couple’s nest egg depends on how the stock market performs, it’s not hard to see why that couple would support legislation designed to yield higher returns, even if that means shortchanging workers. Social ills—segregation, exploitation—can be motivated by bigotry and selfishness as well as by the best of intentions, such as protecting our children. Especially protecting our children.