Poverty, by America is a non-fiction book by Matthew Desmond published in 2023. The relatively slim volume offers an overview of the state of poverty in America not just through statistics and facts, but a wealth of personal stories from across the country. The author systematically lays out a comprehensive outline of the social issue that begins by explaining the fundamental economic definition of the poverty line and ends with a series of potential policies that if implemented could successfully address the situation. The meat of the book lies in its four “How We” chapters in the middle. These chapters ask, respectively, how we undercut workers, how we force the poor to pay more, how we rely on welfare, and how we buy opportunity.
Stated baldly like that, it would be easy to make some misassumptions. For instance, “How We Rely on Welfare” is not the standard screed against welfare programs for the poor that one might expect but is rather an eye-opening illumination of how most government assistance and subsidies received by Americans go not to the poorest citizens but to those occupying the middle class and upwards. In the prologue, Desmond observes that “Books about poverty tend to be books about the poor.” It is clear from this assertion that he either set for himself the goal of writing about poverty that focuses on the privileged or else learned that the privileged is a much greater force behind the continuation of poverty in America. “How We Buy Opportunity” is a chapter devoted primarily to how more Americans are enjoying the opulent wealthy than ever before. This has been accomplished in large part due not to working harder or innovation, but a nearly unbroken line of tax cuts for the wealthy since the early 1980s. The correlation, of course, is that with less revenue coming in from the rich, the only way to balance budgets is to cut spending elsewhere, and that spending has been inequitably directed toward programs benefiting the poor which could lower the number of people living in poverty.
Poverty, by America, is a pointed title that is appropriate for the book’s theme. Desmond sums up his analysis of the existence of poverty with several suggestions on how to address the problem. These suggestions are not the simplistic ones offered by conservative politicians that if there was no welfare then people would have to work. Poverty has been created by all of America, not just the poor. The solutions will require communal cooperation that disregards personal distaste for looking at the visible signs of poor living. The author hints that perhaps if more wealthy Americans had to come face to face with the reality of poverty regularly, empathetic concern would enter into a discussion from which it is all too often utterly absent.
