Poverty, by America

by Matthew Desmond

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]

At least since the early twentieth century, commentators have observed that Karl Marx’s “law of increasing misery”—the idea that workers’ suffering would steadily rise as capitalism expanded and exploitation intensified—was forestalled in the West thanks to technological advances that transformed yesterday’s luxuries into today’s necessities.

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.

Yet even the most ambitious antipoverty proposals in wide circulation today, such as a universal basic income, often leave segregation untouched. It’s disappointing, like we’ve given up on the problem, as if the best we can do is to create a nation that is separate but a little less unequal.

As Nietzsche wrote, “One must want to experience the great problems with one’s body and one’s soul.”

Franklin Roosevelt was right: “True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men,”

The researchers attributed this gap to environmental factors, not to differences in innate abilities, by showing that young children from low-income families who scored high in math, which turns out to be very predictive of inventing something later in life, were still much less likely to become inventors than wealthier children with similar math scores. What conclusion did the researchers draw from this? That “there are many ‘lost Einsteins’ ” who would have made enormous contributions had they been allowed to reach their full potential. Poverty reduces people born for better things.[26]