Poverty, by America

"If you are homeless or unemployed, a person with disabilities on a fixed income, if you have been exploited and excluded, incarcerated or evicted, this is your fight. If you are an undocumented immigrant, giving this country your sweat, your very body, but receiving few rights in return, or a worker shortchanged and kicked around by your company, this is your fight.

If you are one of the tens of millions of Americans scraping, pinching, living paycheck to paycheck, floating somewhere between poverty and security, this is your fight. If you are a young person fed up not only with impossibly expensive cities and $100,000 college degrees but also with polite excuses and insipid justifications for why things are the way they are, this is your fight.

If you have found security and prosperity and wish the same for your neighbors, if you demand a dignified life for all people in America, if you love fairness and justice and want no part in exploitation for personal gain, if all the hardship in your country violates your sense of decency, this is your fight, too."

I thought this was going to be a lot longer than it actually was based on my Kindles reading percentage, but more than half the pages in the Kindle version are endnotes.

The book is a little bit depressing cos it's talking about the obvious of how America has such a big divide between rich and poor, mostly due to politics and the optics of people determining welfare as unfair - even though really the middle and upper classes get tax cuts which isn't seen as welfare but is sort of the same thing.

I am kind of two ways with this book. On the one hand, it is a very important topic that needs to be discussed; on the other, it felt very half-baked.

This is the kind of book that you finish and feel everyone needs to read. Desmond shows that poverty in America is not some unfortunate happenstance, but the result of deliberate policy choices. These choices have led to the richest nation in history having significantly higher poverty rates than any other comparable country. I particularly loved that the author highlighted the fact that the people who seem (to me) to be most likely to read this book - the affluent, the upper middle class, the highly educated - are benefactors from the same policies and systems that create a cycle of poverty in the U.S. So, if we want to eradicate poverty, we must work to tear down these systems that often unfairly benefit ourselves while further hurting the poor.

The author says they've been researching poverty and its causes and then proposes the solution of poverty abolition through efficient government/“ethical” capitalism. It's a very shallow attempt to look at poverty in America and does almost know analysis beyond that of a frat bro proselytizing to drunken friends about how ethical and advanced their start up will be.

This should be assigned homework for ever single person living in the United States.

This book will require some thought. It was a deep and painful read.

Essential read

This is powerful. A friend and colleague I respect and love said that this is perhaps the most important book that she has read in many years. I can see why. I put off reading it a bit because I thought it would be depressing. It is, of course, but Desmond is impressive in his ability to marshal countless studies and personal anecdotes to make his compelling and accessible argument. I often stress to students that it is easy to sit in judgement of those in the past, but there are many ways that we are making choices that will make future students sit in judgement of us. Desmond suggests that we become “poverty abolitionists,” and I'm reminded of how I tell my students how “out there” abolitionists seemed to most 19th century Americans. Desmond's discussion of corporate practices and government policy is damning, but he asks us (those of us likely to buy, borrow, or read this book) to consider and cease our complicity. The last chapter does offer recommendations. I'll be eager to see the reviews and responses to this book.

Lots of important information and well-reasoned arguments here. The personal narrative style of Evicted worked much better for me, and I wish Desmond had used it here as well. That human element makes large numbers and remote policies easier to grasp.

“The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy.”

Who can read that sentence and not feel horrified, shocked, ashamed?

Poverty, as we know from hundreds of studies that have been done over the years, is the root of many problems in society—hunger, evictions, homelessness, crime, low achievement in education, and more.

This book looks at the ways affluent Americans keep the poor poor. Some of these are doing with the full knowledge of the affluent and some of these are done unknowingly.

The epilogue is a call to action: As the president of One Fair Wage said, “‘We are not polarized from each other. We are polarized from our electeds.'” The author goes on to say, “The majority of Americans believe the rich aren't paying their fair share in taxes. The majority support a $15 federal minimum wage. Why, then, aren't our elected officials representing the will of the people? This we must demand of them.”

And then, and for me most importantly, this book shares strategies for ending poverty.

My book club read Desmon's EVICTED a few years ago and we follow it up this month with this new book. The previous book was extraordinarily powerful and for different reasons I feel the same about this one. A critical review of the book called it a Manifesto as if that were a bad thing. It IS a manifesto, one with a compelling argument backed up by statistics. We CAN end poverty. Desmond tells us how.

What he said.

Buy this book, read it, keep it handy. Attend local meetings. Talk to representatives. And, little by little, keep doing more.

(I was surprised he never mentioned the role of churches in keeping people poor; nor universities. Then I realized the need for the book to be finite.)

This one shook me. Some things I was already aware of, but his explanations brought some topics into a whole new light. I wish everyone would read this book. Desmond is just so eminently REASONABLE in the way he discusses the systems that keep Americans in poverty and the steps we could take to effectively end it. It's really given me a lot to think about. And in case you think he's just speculating and being utopian, trust me that he brings receipts.

A stunning critique of our systems and how we allow, and benefit from, their designed system of taking from the poor to prop up the rich. Those with experience growing up in poverty and working with the impoverished will find much to be furious about, and just as much to be inspired by.

I wrote a longer review / reflection with my thoughts on the book from the perspective of someone who has worked on homelessness for some years here: https://www.thomasbates.info/field-notes/book-review-poverty-by-america

A look at the systems that perpetuate American poverty, and how nice middle-class liberals like yours truly perpetuate the problem. Desmond focuses less on the stories of individuals than he did in the Pulitzer Prize-winning [b:Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City 25852784 Evicted Poverty and Profit in the American City Matthew Desmond https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442840968l/25852784.SX50.jpg 45720714], which makes this book feel less personal and relatable. The proposed solutions assume that we keep our current form of government and capitalist economy. Dream on, dude.