#poverty by America

[urlocalhovel]

i see a lot of posts about poverty on this site and they always pertain to injustices, stats, laws and like... i always catch myself wondering, are the people posting these just good people wanting change, or have they been through it themselves?

then i wonder where all the personal stories are apart from the mix of statistics... are people who have truly suffered poverty just not on here...???

i want to swap horror stories/heartwarming ones, see other people's experiences that are similar to my own-

i wanna connect on the feeling of hunger, talk about how that first taste of food zaps your tongue after days of not being able to eat...

wanna hear the warm memories amongst the struggle- for example, my mother wrapping me & my baby siblings in thick blankets on our living room floor so all she could see was our eyes peeking out above our tall, cone-shaped nests and treating it as a game, though she was just making sure we survived another night without heat while going through yet another brutal winter atop our barren mountain...

though i wanna connect on all the battle stories of what it was like to grow up/be in poverty, i really wanna see people talk about what strength, happiness and morals can come out of such despair:

you get used to having nothing and are able to get by, when normal people would have a literal mental breakdown over such things

you take joy in the littlest of things, appreciate so many things people take for granted

you gain a concrete kindness, a deep type of empathy for others you see even having a flicker of the struggle you did/are

you end up informing people of the stats and information that the posts i mentioned above include, advocate for the people less fortunate

i moved away into a wealthy Canadian city where you don't easily see poverty/interact with people going through it unless you venture into very specific pockets of the city and i kinda miss interacting with others that are of my kind- i'll never forget someone sheepishly telling me about how a bottle depot works and realizing that im assumed to be part of the people who have never experienced what its like to rely on such a thing to make the rent and get a day's meal...

[thatwritererinoriordan]

"I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means, except by getting off his back." - Count Leo Tolstoy, rich guy who knew he was the problem, quoted in Poverty by America by Matthew Desmond

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 64 – Poverty, by America by Mathew Desmond

I read Desmond’s Evicted a while back and found it a really excellent bit of sociology/journalism about the specifics and mechanisms of housing inequality and how modern slumlords exploit the poor. So this has been vaguely on my list for a decent while. Sadly, I found it a bit of a disappointment – more listing of facts and statistics that I already basically knew to support a manifesto than anything new or enlightening to me. Not that it’s bad, but if it was 20 pages instead of 200 I’m not sure much of value would really have been lost. Many such cases, I suppose.

The book is about exactly what it says is, a polemic decrying and investigation into why the United State’s poverty rates, and why extremes of material want are so much more common there than in comparable (poorer, even) western democracies. Refreshingly, Desmond has a clear thesis he doesn’t beat around the bush before saying – self-interest, essentially. The affluent benefit from having an underclass to extract resources from, and from excluding its members from the amenities they share, so they do. The book spends most of its wordcount enumerating and describing what Desmond considers the main problems: direct exploitation (underpayment, predatory financiers, slums, etc), an underresourced and misdirected wellfare state (compare the cost of middle/upper-class targeted programs like the mortgage interest deduction or tax-exempt savings accounts to the cost of adequately ending hunger or providing healthcare) and segregation (both spatial/residential and in terms of access to public or semi-public services).

It’s pretty traditional for a book like this to spend 90% of its wordcount diagnosing problems and then end with some publisher-mandated optimism and a chapter of solutions with a fraction of the care put into them as in the diagnosis. Desmond, to his credit, avoids this – each chapter includes both the problems and he considers the most feasible solutions to them to be. He actually makes a point of it, arguing that having practical, winnable goals that will actually improve things when achieved (and then celebrating them when they are) is a key part of any political organizing with a chance of actually working. Now, what I think of those solutions varies quite wildly, but they’re there and exactly what you’d expect for his politics – and speaking as someone whose been renting my entire life I wholly endorse fucking all the tax benefits you get essentially for having the cash on hand to make a down payment. (Relatedly, the book has a great deal of scorn for comfortable, affluent people whose progressive politics amount to lots of critiquing and zero actual positive action.)

Desmond is clearly writing this from the point of view of a(n inspirational) public intellectual; that is, by writing this he’s trying to call an audience and movement based around it into being. He likes the label Poverty Abolitionist and the central project of the book is basically trying to make it happen as an umbrella term people identify with – especially the affluent well-heeled people who read books like this, and might be persuaded to start boycotting companies for underpaying their employees or union-busting, or campaigning against government subsidies that benefit them instead of the poor. I did appreciate the relative hopeful tone, given the usual coverage of American politics – or, well, is ‘Washington was at least this fucked when it passed the Civil Rights Act or the New Deal” optimistic? Whatever the right word is.

Now, I’m summarized all this in ~500 words, obviously actually making the argument needs more space than that. But it really did not need to be as long as it was – a huge fraction of the wordcount is spent either restating arguments or just throwing around numbers and statistics without really contextualization (anyone who spends so much time comparing expenses and budgets across the decade should be legally required to adjust for inflation imo). There’s a good, well-cited (excessively cited, if anything. The footnotoes are like a fifth of the book) persuasive essay in here, but there is so much fat to cut around it.

Anyway yes, disappointing reading experience, given I was hoping for more sociology and less polemic. But as far as American political polemic goes, it’s pretty decent.

[aquotecollection]

This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. If America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela. Almost one in nine Americans—including one in eight children—live in poverty. There are more than 38 million people living in the United States who cannot afford basic necessities, and more than 108 million getting by on $55,000 a year or less, many stuck in that space between poverty and security.

Poverty, By America, Matthew Desmond

[outstanding-quotes]

Poverty is pain, physical pain. It is in the backaches of home health aides and certified nursing assistants, who bend their bodies to hoist the old and sick out of beds and off toilets; it is in the feet and knees of cashiers made to stand while taking our orders and ringing up our items; it is in the skin rashes and migraines of maids who clean our office buildings, homes, and hotel rooms with products containing ammonia and triclosan.

Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America

[sabilewsounds]

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In March of 2024, we were evicted, we have been fighting poverty fordecades. In Jan 2023 I was laid off due to my CPTSDleading to this situation

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[dayisfading]

more hits from matt desmond!

[iirulancorrino]

Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

[wellconstructedsentences]

When my family moved to East Arlington, a suburb of Boston, after taking new jobs, we landed in a neighborhood with far fewer issues and far less joy. When the snow fell there, the neighbors cleared only their own walks, stopping abruptly at the property line.

Poverty by America by Matthew Desmond

[hoorayiread]

Evicted, A Book Review

Has a book ever made you so uncomfortable that you wound up reading faster? Because I read this book in about a week (last year I read 14 books. I'm not one of those Booktok people that reads 5 thousand-page novels a month).

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond is a non-fiction book published in 2016 about the affordable housing crisis. More specifically, it examines the lives of several poor families living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and tells their stories. This book examines how and why people become trapped in cycles of poverty and what constant eviction does to people physically, financially, and psychologically. It also suggests ways our wellfare system could be overhauled to alleviate this.

Time, care, and empathy was put into this research. Desmond made an effort to look at both white and Black families during his project, analyzing the racial discrimination and segregation that is still very much a part of everyday American life. The families in these stories had problems such as drug addictions, criminal records, and a history of poor choices (you know, the kinds of things Fox News likes to rant about), but still portrays them in a sympathetic light. There is one person in this book, Crystal, who was prone to erupting into fits of violence when under exreme stress due to a history of severe childhood trauma. She hurt people, but I still came away from this book firmly believing that she deserved a roof over her head.

One of the chapters that really sticks out in my mind is titled "Lobster on Food Stamps." It tells the story of a poor woman in a trailer park who spent her entire monthly allotment of food stamps on a single, indulgent seafood dinner for one. Stories like this are a very common talking point for political pundits that like to demonize poor people. But Evicted uses this woman's story to explain why this happens: when you are extremely poor, it is next to impossible to dig yourself out no matter how much you save and what choices you make. There is no way out. Genuinely. Indulging will make the pain go away, at least for today. It is, ultimately, a very human choice.

Evicted is a difficult read, emotionally. Every time I sat down to read this thing it was always "Oh, great, Arleen's getting kicked out of another place for some bullshit reason." This isn't a fun book, but it's important. I've also heard good things about Desmond's followup Poverty, by America.

Now, nonfiction can't be spoiled, so let me end this review with the last line of the book:

"No moral code or ethical principal, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become."

[morgan--reads]

Poverty, By America - Matthew Desmond

Summary: Sociologist Matthew Desmond examines how the poor are kept poor in the United States. 

Quote: “Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.” 

My rating: 4.5/5.0   Goodreads: 4.32/5.0 

Review: A short but targeted attack on policies and social behaviors that keep poverty such an issue in the United States. Desmond makes his points with searing language backed by clear data and personal anecdotes of those affected by poverty. He doesn’t coddle, but nor does he despair. Alongside the clearly identified problems, he offers actionable solutions. 

To-read: Desmond’s book Evicted is also excellent.

[theeboyracer]

Some of my favourite quotes from Matthew Desmond’s newest book:

“‘It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed, or doctored.’”

“As the sociologist Gerald Davis has put it: Our grandparents had careers. Our parents had jobs. We complete tasks.”

“Many features of our society are not broken, just bifurcated. For some, a home creates wealth; for others, a home drains it. For some, access to credit extends financial power; for others, it destroys it.”

“The question that should serve as a looping incantation, the one we should ask every time we drive past a tent encampment, those tarped American slums smelling of asphalt and bodies, every time we see someone asleep on the bus, slumped over in work clothes, is simply: Who benefits? Not Why don’t you find a better job? Or Why don’t you move? Or Why don’t you stop taking out such bad loans? But Who is feeding this?”

“Things collectively shared, especially if they are shared across class and racial divides, come to be seen as lesser. In America, a clear marker of poverty is one’s reliance on public services, and a clear marker of affluence is one’s degree of distance from them…There was a time when Americans wished to be free of bosses. Now we wish to be free of bus drivers. We wish for the freedom to withdraw from the wider community and sequester ourselves in a more exclusive one, pulling further and further away from the poor until the world they inhabit becomes utterly unrecognizable to us.”

[whatcha-reading-today]

Poverty, By America | Matthew Desmond

I have read both Poverty and Evicted and recommend both. I personally found that Poverty was more of the quantitative side of poverty (lots of stats, data...) while Evicted is an ethnographic case study of impoverished folks where Desmond lived.

Both are good and can be read as companion pieces to each other. But if you're more data-driven, or more people driven, that may determine which book you gel with more.

Read both books in: 2023

Format: Physical copies

[aquotecollection]

A higher minimum wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A stress reliever. Vocal segments of the American public, those with brain space to spare, seem to believe the poor should change their behavior to escape poverty. Get a better job. Stop having children. Make smarter financial decisions. In truth, it’s the other way around: Economic security leads to better choices.

Poverty, By America, Matthew Desmond

[outstanding-quotes]

Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you; that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed, roughed up and handcuffed.

Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America

[theadmiringbog]

Poverty is pain, physical pain. It is in the backaches of home health aides and certified nursing assistants, who bend their bodies to hoist the old and sick out of beds and off toilets; it is in the feet and knees of cashiers made to stand while taking our orders and ringing up our items; it is in the skin rashes and migraines of maids who clean our office buildings, homes, and hotel rooms with products containing ammonia and triclosan.

--

Many are not officially counted among the “poor,” but what then is the term for trying to raise two kids on $50,000 a year in Miami or Portland? What do you call it when you don’t qualify for a housing voucher but can’t get a mortgage either? When the rent takes half your paycheck, and your student loan debt takes another quarter? When you dip below the poverty line one month then rise a bit above it the next without ever feeling a sense of stability? As a lived reality, there is plenty of poverty above the poverty line.

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which is more primary, race or class? Which is the root of social inequity and which the branches? Which organ is more important to you, your heart or your brain?)

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Most social problems are complicated, of course, but a retreat into complexity is more often a reflection of our social standing than evidence of critical intelligence.

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Hungry people want bread. The rich convene a panel of experts. Complexity is the refuge of the powerful.

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Median rent rose from $483 in 2000 to $1,216 in 2021.

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Today, the biggest beneficiaries of federal aid are affluent families. To benefit from employer-sponsored health insurance, you need a good job, usually one that requires a college degree. To benefit from the mortgage interest deduction, you need to be able to afford a home, and those who can afford the biggest mortgages reap the biggest deductions. To benefit from a 529 plan, you need to be able to squirrel away cash for your children’s college costs, and the more you save, the bigger your tax break, which is why this subsidy is almost exclusively used by the well-off.

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You could fit three newly built English homes into the average new American home.

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We are much richer than citizens of other countries, including other wealthy ones, and we’re much richer than our forebearers. And yet, the dominant mood among the American middle and upper classes is one of fret and worry. In past eras, the rich used to flaunt their wealth, including by showing their indifference to work. The American aristocracy of today seem to prefer complaining to one another and working nonstop. Has there ever been another time, in the full sweep of human history, when so many people had so much and yet felt so deprived and anxious?

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These feelings have proven incredibly effective at preventing us from seeing ourselves as authors of inequality. We like healthy returns. We like smart products. We like low prices and raise a fuss when they creep up. Fast and cheap—that’s how we prefer to consume in America. But somebody has to pay for it, and that somebody is the rag-and-bone American worker. Poverty wages allow rock-bottom prices. Relentless supervision and control facilitate fast service. The working class and working poor—and, now, even the working homeless—bear the costs of our appetites and amusements.

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Follow the money, all of it, and you can see how a trend toward private opulence and public squalor has come to define not simply a handful of communities, but the whole nation.

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The problem, Tolstoy ultimately decided, was himself and his fellow affluents, who lived idle lives.

“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means—except by getting off his back.”

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Choice is the antidote for exploitation.

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a crucial step toward ending poverty is giving more Americans the power to decide where to work, live, and bank, and when to start a family.

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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.

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poverty is the dream killer, the capability destroyer, the great waster of human potential. It is a misery and a national disgrace, one that belies any claim to our greatness.