Poverty, by America

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.

A HIGHLY ADVERTISED BOOK FOR 2023: Kirkus Reviews, The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Elle, Salon, Lit Hub

More people live in poverty in the wealthiest nation on earth—the United States—than in any other sophisticated democracy. How come? Why does this nation of abundance tolerate dozens of its residents to live and die on the streets, why does it allow one in eight of its children to go without basic essentials, and why does it allow its companies to pay poverty wages?

Acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond demonstrates in this seminal work how wealthy Americans, both intentionally and unintentionally, perpetuate poverty via history, research, and first-hand reporting. The wealthy and well-off among us take advantage of the impoverished by lowering their earnings and making them pay excessive amounts for housing, credit, and cash. We create a welfare state that provides the greatest amount of assistance to the least amount of need, prioritizing the subsidization of our riches above the reduction of poverty. Additionally, we hoard opportunity in gated communities, creating concentrated wealth areas next to concentrated desperation areas. Some lives are cut short to provide room for others to flourish.

This kind book, well written and passionately argued, opens our minds to fresh perspectives on a pressing moral issue. It helps in problem-solving as well. Desmond makes an incredibly bold and inventive argument for eradicating poverty. In order to usher in a new era of shared wealth and, at last, real freedom, he exhorts us all to become poverty abolitionists and to participate in a politics of common belonging.