Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond
(2023, Random House)
How often have we heard that we are the richest country on earth, but have the largest proportion of poor people of any advanced society? True, but why? We’re told that poor people here are lazy, that we’ve let them become dependent on welfare, that the loss of well-paying industrial jobs has impoverished them, that waves of immigration have lowered wages for bluecollar jobs, that family values and the work ethic have been lost to lax sexual standards and drugs.
According to Matthew Desmond, most of these statements are false as explanations of poverty, and the true one, about the loss of jobs, wrongly assumes that the movement of industries to lower-wage countries is inevitable in
a free, capitalist society.
Building on mountains of evidence and documentation, Desmond destroys many myths about poverty, traces the real forces keeping people poor, and proposes remedies, all in a book only 189 pages long. The fact of the matter, he argues, is that the rich exploit the poor to enrich themselves and help those who are comfortably off. This exploitation takes the form not only of low wages, but also of predatory lending practices by banks and payday loaners, of de facto segregated housing and schools, of laws that make it hard to unionize, of unaffordable child and health care, of rapacious landlords, of regressive systems of taxation, and of discriminatory practices in the way we deal with crime.
Meanwhile, he argues, we subsidize the rich and the relatively rich through lax enforcement of tax laws, through tax exclusions for mortgage interest, charitable donations, and special savings accounts, and especially through subsidies for industries and industrial-scale agriculture. Jobs fled abroad as a result of trade agreements that benefited the wealthy, with no thought for working people. Through lobbyists, media ownership, and donations to candidates’ campaigns, the wealthy in America have it mostly their way in every sphere.
We could pay for free childcare and universal healthcare, Desmond says, and we could build affordable housing, if we stopped subsidizing the rich and used the money to provide equal opportunity across our economy. We could enact a livable minimum wage and enable unionization across industries or businesses, as opposed to confining it to one Starbucks at a time. We could reduce bail and prison time for nonviolent crimes.
Europe and even this country in the past offer examples of capitalist economies that have thrived without gross exploitation of the poor. Desmond is not a socialist and he is not proposing a utopia; he believes wealth gaps will always exist. In clear, non-technical language, he simply maintains that our society could in fact eliminate desperate poverty to the benefit of everyone, and that we could demand the laws and practices to make that happen.
Don’t hold your breath (but read the book!).