Tiber Worth
Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond, Crown Publishing, 304 pages, $28
Credit cards seem too good to be true. Not so long ago, people needed to work out their purchases with spare change stuffed in their pockets or bills withdrawn from an ATM. Now even the plastic card itself is becoming obsolete. But card benefits go far beyond ever-increasing convenience. The more you spend, the more “rewards” you get. Through some sort of alchemy, gas and grocery purchases become free vacation packages.
Who pays for all this? The answer is poor people—those who are liable to fall behind on their credit card debt, and may only qualify for cards which charge exploitative fees, as well as those who don’t have a credit card, who pay prices inflated by the transaction fees that businesses build into their pricing schemes. In other words: the poor subsidize the frequent flier programs of the wealthy.
Matthew Desmond doesn’t discuss credit cards in his new book, Poverty, By America. But he might have, if there weren’t so many similar and more substantial mechanisms by which America’s well-off extract wealth and opportunity from those with less, from the poverty wages which enable our consumption habits to the regressive nature of the American welfare state. In his first book since Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Desmond attempts to break with a long tradition of poverty-writing (Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Michael Harrington’s The Other America) by turning his analytic lens back upon all those who perpetuate poverty: "Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves. Are we—we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky—connected to all this needless suffering? This book is my attempt to answer that question, addressed to that 'we.'"
Desmond's answer is an emphatic yes. Poverty, By America is straightforward and earnest, composed with penetrating moral clarity, and effectively substantiates his core argument—that American poverty ultimately persists because it materially benefits the American wealthy and middle classes. It’s clear that a tremendous amount of research has gone into it: ninety pages of endnotes constitute a third of the total page count, and Desmond writes in the introduction that he has spent most of his adult life researching and reporting on the subject. Still, he is aware that, when discussing poverty, “a retreat into complexity is more often a reflection of our social standing than evidence of critical intelligence,” and the work reflects this. Desmond draws a clear narrative: only the choicest examples and studies are presented, counter-arguments—for example, the ideas that immigration or the breakdown of the nuclear family constitute the root cause of contemporary poverty—are considered and dispatched with ease.
Poverty is divided into three parts. Two preliminary chapters, which draw heavily on material from Evicted, Desmond's magisterial study of that process through the stories of eight Milwaukee families, lay out how poverty works, what it does to people, and why it hasn’t substantially improved for the past seventy years. The following four chapters substantiate the book’s main claim, analyzing the myriad ways in which we (the guilty, shameless majority) self-interestedly exploit those in poverty. And the final three propose solutions of various forms and scope. Desmond is strongest in the book’s middle chapters. In his quest to convert readers into “poverty abolitionists,” his first step is to convince us that poverty is made (that the poor need not always be with us), and can therefore be unmade, fixed, abolished; his second is to show us how we make it. How do we do so?
Desmond’s primary conceptual tools in Poverty are “exploitation” (the Marxist overtones of which he desperately wants to avoid) and “choice.” On his account, we exploit the poor by constraining their choice and power in the labor, housing, and financial markets, forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. Much of this, as Desmond lays out, is the result of the everyday behaviors of ordinary individuals, from the Amazon packages we purchase because of same-day shipping, to the institutions we inhabit and the investment accounts which align a majority of Americans' financial self-interest with the corporate imperative to maximize shareholder value.
We enact poverty on a national level by prioritizing tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthy and middle class over support for those who need it most: Desmond explains that “the United States could effectively end poverty in America tomorrow without increasing the deficit if it cracked down on corporations and families who cheat on their taxes.” As it is, the federal government spends almost four times more on homeowner subsidies ($193 billion in 2020) than on direct housing assistance for low-income families ($53 billion). And we perpetuate poverty locally through de facto residential housing segregation, more colloquially known as NIMBYism. Beyond its direct effects— geographically concentrated poverty is far more oppressive; "moving poor families to high-opportunity neighborhood improves their quality of life tremendously"—segregation enables our self-exculpating fiction, as Tolstoy puts it in Desmond’s epigraph, “that their sufferings are one thing and our lives another.”
Desmond's concluding chapters are thorough, sometimes bracing, and most importantly, deeply right. And yet, I couldn’t help feeling that these chapters in particular, and the book as a whole, left something to be desired. The basic readerly disappointment is that Poverty, By America is no Evicted—instead it’s something like an expanded “reader’s guide” that Desmond has appended to that masterpiece, in which his ethnographic, journalistic, and humanistic gifts shine far more brightly. That's fine: if Poverty is less dazzlingly heart-wrenching, it may be more strictly useful. But there is a related and more substantial problem with the book. While Desmond seems often to be working from the assumptions of the contemporary political left—he writes that “structural explanations are in fashion these days,” he feels justified in rejecting out of hand the notion that those in poverty are there due to personal failures, and uses the pronoun “we” to refer to “liberals”—he is continually trying to depoliticize poverty. He writes in the epilogue that “poverty abolitionism transcends partisan divides”; he insistently refuses the “Marxist” label, despite echoing Marx uncannily in some of his discussions of exploitation, instead pushing “a capitalism that serves the people”; and he ends the book with an anecdote about Trump supporters joining a rally to raise the New York State minimum wage.
To criticize the Democratic party, as Desmond does––"poor and working-class people deserve more than either party has delivered for them over the past fifty years"––is all well and good, though far too easy. And he is surely right that mass movements must be capacious enough to contain healthy dissent. But Desmond rightly links poverty abolition to broader visions of transformative social change—to the possibility of "a new society" truly based in freedom and mutuality, and these projects only emanate from one end of the political spectrum. The abolition of poverty, insofar as it is part of Desmond’s (leftist) commitment to a vision of “human liberation” in which “all flourishing is mutual” (a phrase he borrows from Robin Wall Kimmerer) is tied up with police and prison abolitionism from the start. And, despite Desmond’s protestations, with the abolition of capitalism. He writes as much: he recognizes that capitalism is fundamentally class-warfare, “inherently about workers trying to get as much, and owners trying to give as little, as possible,” and that aid to the poor is an “existential threat” to capitalist ideology.
And yet one of the principle courses of action that Desmond exhorts us to follow is that of consumer activism—“every purchase is an ethical choice.” He wants consumers to push companies to institute antipoverty and pro-labor policies, just as they promote environmental commitments. Yes, shifting those corporate incentives would be great, but the reason that consumer activism and concomitant corporate social justice campaigns have taken off in recent years is because they’re easy—because they have a symbiotic, not antagonistic, relation to capital. To raise wages across the board cuts a lot more into a firm’s bottom line than hiring a marketing consultant well versed in social justice vernacular. As Desmond points out, when companies do raise wages, investors punish them for it. When Walmart in 2015 announced a plan to increase starting wages to $9 an hour, their stock price immediately fell by 10 percent—one of their biggest single-day losses ever. And Desmond's core argument, that poverty persists because so many benefit from it, shows why mass anti-poverty consumer activism is so unlikely on the other end: it cuts deeply against consumer self-interest. This is a partial stop-gap improvement at best.
Poverty is a powerful book, and the complicities it reveals will make many readers feel deep guilt and shame. Perhaps those emotions will convince some to spend money differently, or to conduct, as Desmond prescribes, a "poverty audit"—to examine the material ways their personal choices perpetuate poverty and reevaluate their behaviors accordingly. At scale, maybe they can be channeled into political actions that will reallocate American resources to those who need them most. But poverty abolitionism, to use a distinction from James Baldwin, who Desmond quotes a number of times, could happen in two ways: as a "concession" or as "gift." Baldwin writes in The Fire Next Time that
white Americans are in nothing more deluded than in supposing that Negroes could ever have imagined that white people would "give" them anything. It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself--that is to say, risking oneself…[The Civil Rights victories of the 1950s were an] immense concession that would never have been made if it had not been for the competition of the Cold War, and the fact that Africa was clearly liberating herself and therefore had, for political reasons, to be wooed by the descendants of her former masters. Had it been a matter of love or justice, [these victories] would surely have occurred sooner; were it not for the realities of power in this difficult era, they might very well not have occurred yet.
Poverty abolitionism as concession might be a centrist movement for (Desmond's phrase) “change from a moral perspective.” If everyone who purchased White Fragility in the summer of 2020 allocates their campaign contributions towards political candidates who center poverty abolition in order to assuage their guilt, that might indeed cause some significant improvement in poverty. Poverty abolitionism as gift, as risk, as the giving up of our petty individual self-interests, however, would demand transformative change on the part of individuals and the nation. It would be poverty abolitionism as the first step on a revolutionary path toward collective liberation.
My problem with Poverty is that Desmond sometimes conflates these, and he tends, at crucial moments, towards the former. When he tries to depoliticize poverty, he is obfuscating the necessary connections between poverty abolitionism and anti-racism, other abolitionisms, and leftist politics more generally. When Desmond talks about American patriotism, casting poverty abolitionists as "the true heirs of 1776," and making claims, even if critical, about "our greatness," or when, castigating those on the left for having a "despondency problem," he says that, in contrast, poverty abolitionists are "doers, prioritizing plan over critique, usefulness over purity," he is playing into a white liberal (and/or conservative) system of reality, rather than showing us reality in light of the kind of fundamental ethicopolitical principles which would demonstrate its poverty and demand the wholescale personal and political change that, starting with the abolition of poverty, would make it less hellish.
But perhaps all this means is that readers should read Desmond's book in the kind of critical spirit with which he rightly encourages us to examine our own lives. We can be complicit in thought, as in actions or passivity. Even so, Poverty, By America, like poverty abolitionism, is a good start.