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.

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

As a lived reality, there is plenty of poverty above the poverty line.[9]

There is growing evidence that America harbors a hard bottom layer of deprivation, a kind of extreme poverty once thought to exist only in faraway places of bare feet and swollen bellies.

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]

“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 isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies.

If we have more than doubled government spending on poverty and achieved so little, one reason is because the American welfare state is a leaky bucket.[21]

We typically don’t talk about poverty as a condition that benefits some of us. It seems we prefer more absolving theories of the problem. There is, of course, the old habit of blaming the poor for their own miseries, as if Americans were made of lesser stuff than people in countries with far less poverty.

Lousy, underpaid work is not an indispensable, if regrettable, by-product of capitalism, as some pro-business defenders claim today. (This notion would have scandalized capitalism’s earliest defenders. John Stuart Mill, arch advocate of free people and free markets, once said that if widespread scarcity was a hallmark of capitalism, he would become a communist.)[26]

But capitalism is inherently about workers trying to get as much, and owners trying to give as little, as possible. With unions largely out of the picture, corporations have chipped away at the conventional mid-century work arrangement, which involved steady employment, opportunities for advancement and raises, and decent pay with some benefits. As the sociologist Gerald Davis has put it: Our grandparents had careers. Our parents had jobs. We complete tasks. That’s been the story of the American working class and working poor, anyway.[27]

Rising rents are not simply a reflection of rising operating costs.[7] There’s another dynamic at work, one that has to do with the fact that poor people—and particularly poor Black families—don’t have much choice when it comes to where they can live. Because of that, landlords can overcharge them, and they do.

If millions of poor renters accept exploitative housing conditions, it’s not because they can’t afford better alternatives; it’s because they often aren’t offered any.[16]

The exclusion of poor people from traditional banking and credit systems has forced them to find alternative ways to cash checks and secure loans, which has led to a normalization of their exploitation.

There is not one banking sector. There are two—one for the poor and one for the rest of us—just as there are two housing markets and two labor markets.

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.

Why, I wonder, did we so readily embrace a narrative that blamed high unemployment on government aid when so many other explanations were available to us? Why didn’t we figure people weren’t returning to work because they didn’t want to get sick and die? Or because their jobs were lousy to begin with? Or because they were tired of sexual harassment and mistreatment? Or because their children’s schools had closed, and they lacked reliable childcare?

(An irony of capitalism is that work, which early Americans rejected as a barrier to independence—“wage slavery,” they called it—is now seen as our only means of acquiring it.)

Virtually all Americans benefit from some form of public aid. Republicans and Democrats rely on government programs at equivalent rates, as do white, Hispanic, and Black families.[23] We’re all on the dole.

Today, the biggest beneficiaries of federal aid are affluent families.

It’s just as tempting to blame rising housing costs on anything other than the fact that more than a few of us have a god-awful amount of money and are driving prices higher and higher through bidding wars.

Many came to view taxes as something like compulsory donations to Black people. White families felt that they were not only being ordered to integrate; they were being made to pay for it, too.

The best way to ensure that opportunity is unequal and unfair is to charge for it.[17]

Today, we fashion our walls out of something much more durable and dispiriting: money and laws.

Perhaps we are not so polarized after all. Maybe above a certain income level, we are all segregationists.

This kind of circumscribed liberalism, which ends at your property line, not only denied low-income Americans access to some of the nation’s best public schools and safest streets: It also meant that working-class white families were asked to bear the costs of integration in a way that white professionals never were. This bred among blue-collar whites a festering resentment toward elites and their institutions—the university and its science, professional journalism and its standards, government and its decorum—which gave rise to a new political alignment and a new politicized anger still very much with us today.

There is so much poverty in this land not in spite of our wealth but because of it.

How can we afford it? What a sinful question. What a selfish, dishonest question, one asked as if the answer wasn’t staring us straight in the face. We could afford it if we allowed the IRS to do its job. We could afford it if the well-off among us took less from the government. We could afford it if we designed our welfare state to expand opportunity and not guard fortunes.

There are countless ways to deepen our investments in economic opportunity and security without increasing the deficit. We just have to stop spending so much on the rich. This, to me, is what it truly means to be fiscally responsible.

When we refuse to recognize what works, we risk swallowing the lie that nothing does.

(Orwell once said that “we could do with a little less talk of ‘capitalist’ and ‘proletarian’ and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.”)[9]

If we want to get rid of rent gouging and neglected properties, we need to expand housing opportunity for low-income families. There isn’t a single right way to do this, but there is clearly a wrong way: the way we’re doing it now.

We hold many ethical beliefs, but we tend to act on them only when we receive a social push.

When the affluent and poor live disparate lives, any institution or program on which only the poor rely becomes vulnerable.

Integration means we all have skin in the game. It not only disrupts poverty; on a spiritual level, over time it can foster empathy and solidarity.[3]

What are we teaching our children when they plainly see us barring the doors of opportunity for other children—and doing it in their name?

Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” because “we are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”[23]

Poverty infringes on American prosperity, making it a barricaded, stingy, frightened kind of affluence.

Every person, every company, every institution that has a role in perpetuating poverty also has a role in ameliorating it.