There is an old, self-congratulating idea, still taught in our universities and modeled daily on our television screens and Twitter feeds, that the best way to understand poverty is by looking down on it from above; that objectivity is found at a vantage point sufficiently “lofty and remote” from people struggling to make ends meet.1 The professional talking class is plenty lofty and plenty remote from the lives of the poor. What we need is not more distance but the opposite: more intimacy, more proximity to the problem, as Bryan Stevenson has put it.
