Book Review: "Poverty By America," by Matthew Desmond

Jon Stewart promoted this book that calls for abolishing poverty, so I figured I'd check it out.

Matthew Desmond has written a book calling for ending poverty in America. Curiously, the book is getting all sorts of establishment praise. Does this mean the establishment wants to end poverty in America? No! Of course not.¹ What, then, is going on here? I think I know the answer and I discuss it below.

Jon Stewart calls the book fabulous:

What’s the answer? Why is the establishment supporting Desmond’s call, which really is quite eloquent and full of interesting and important facts, for ending poverty in America?

Well, the big clue is contained in the first blurb praising the book above:

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a “provocative and compelling” (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.

Desmond really does argue that the reason poverty persists in America is because “the rest of us benefit from it.”

Desmond’s book is written for an audience that is “the rest of us.” Desmond tells us that “Technically, a person is considered ‘poor’ when they can’t afford life’s necessities, like food and housing.” And he very eloquently describes how being poor means suffering in many different ways. Desmond says to his readers:

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?

A major theme of Desmond’s book is that the answer to this question is a resounding ‘Yes.” He argues that “we” (his intended audience) are connected to this needless suffering because of myriad ways that “we” benefit from it and are complicit in it. Here is one of the key passages in the book:

“Those who have amassed the most power and capital bear the most responsibility for America’s vast poverty: political elites who have utterly failed low-income Americans over the past half century; corporate bosses who have spent and schemed to prioritize profits over people; lobbyists blocking the will of the American people with their self-serving interests; property owners who have exiled the poor from entire cities and fueled the affordable housing crisis. Acknowledging this is both crucial and deliciously absolving, directing our attention upward and distracting us from all the ways (many unintentional) we also contribute to the problem. Just as global warming is not only caused by large industrial polluters and multinational logging companies but also by the cars we choose to drive and the energy we choose to buy, poverty in America is not simply the result of actions taken by Congress and corporate boards but the millions of decisions we make each day when going about our business.”

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

https://a.co/6Qv4gkR

Desmond elaborates on how “we” are to blame for poverty with these words (just a small sample of the many more words that fill up the pages of this book):

“To live and strive in modern America is to participate in a series of morally fraught systems. If a family’s entire financial livelihood depends on the value of its home, it’s not hard to understand why that family would oppose anything that could potentially lower its property values, like a proposal to develop an affordable housing complex in the neighborhood. If an aging couple’s nest egg depends on how the stock market performs, it’s not hard to see why that couple would support legislation designed to yield higher returns, even if that means shortchanging workers.”

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

https://a.co/ff2CwCY

Desmond devotes a great deal of the book towards making the argument that “we,” who benefit quantitatively (i.e., in terms of how much money we have) from the poverty of others, would nonetheless enjoy a qualitatively better life if poverty were abolished. Thus: “We’d also be giving up the loneliness and empty materialism that have come to characterize much of upper class life.” In writing about this Desmond essentially discusses the many ways that an egalitarian society is one in which people are happier and enjoy greater freedom—all true. But Desmond doesn’t advocate an egalitarian society. Oh no!

Desmond is very careful to declare that he wants to keep our capitalist society, including its very non-egalitarian nature. Thus he writes about what ending poverty would mean with these words:

“You could still strike it rich. Ending poverty wouldn’t lead to social collapse, nor would it erase income inequality. There is so much of that in America today that we could make meaningful gains in equality, certainly enough to abolish poverty, and still have miles and miles of separation between the top and bottom.”

…

“There would still be markets and private property rights.”

Desmond tells his readers to work to abolish poverty, by “voting with our wallets” this way:

“We can vote with our wallets, reevaluating where we shop and what we buy. To the greatest extent possible, we should withdraw our support from corporations that exploit their workers. This requires doing our homework, looking into a company’s track record. Trying to mail a package? UPS drivers are unionized, but FedEx drivers are not. Need a drink? Rolling Rock and Miller are union-made. Want some candy? The people who make Jolly Ranchers are unionized.[ 28] Increasingly, American consumers are considering the environmental impact of their purchases. We should consider their poverty impact, too.”

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

https://a.co/cAqKKL1

But Desmond frames this as the activism of the guilty, the complicit, the beneficiaries of poverty. Here are his words on this:

“Banking and shopping in ways that express solidarity with the poor could mean we pay more. And by acknowledging those costs, we acknowledge our complicity. When we cheat and rob one another, we lose part of ourselves, too. Doing the right thing is often a highly inconvenient, time-consuming, even costly process, I know. I try, fail, and try again. But that’s the price of our restored humanity.[ 35]”

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

https://a.co/47hvqxB

Well, there you have it. The establishment is very happy when those who want to abolish poverty:

• Want ONLY to abolish poverty but otherwise wish to leave our society one that is based on class inequality, markets and private property (in the means of production, of course, not just one’s personal items) rights and all the rest that makes a world of class inequality go round.

• Adopt an identity of “We who are complicit in poverty, are guilty of maintaining poverty, and wrongly benefit from poverty.”

• Intend to abolish poverty by “voting with their wallets” and not by doing anything that challenges the property rights and power of the billionaire class.

Desmond has not written a book for the vast majority of Americans, a book that would encourage them—based on the actual fact of the matter—to think of themselves as part of the VAST MAJORITY of the population who want to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.

Desmond has not written a book that makes it clear that the vast majority of Americans are HARMED by, indeed treated like dirt by, the small minority of the population that owns the wealth of the nation and holds the real power. (Desmond’s book is based on the wrongheaded notion that except for the people at the very bottom of a society based on class inequality everybody benefits from the unjust inequality just because they live in the society.)

Desmond has not written a book that champions the positive egalitarian values that the vast majority of people share and on the basis of which—against enormous obstacles created by the ruling billionaire class—they try to shape the little corner of the world over which they have any real control.

Desmond has not written a book that validates the righteous ANGER most people have at the billionaires who make our society so unjust, so unfair and so unequal.

Below are the kind of people for whom Desmond has NOT written a book. See 500 such people online here (all from my single postal zip code), all proudly holding the sign, which you can read clearly by zooming on any online photo, that says, “We the People want affordable housing for ALL. To get it we aim to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.”

The rulers of our nation understand perfectly that the kind of thinking promoted by Desmond’s book poses no actual threat to the power of the rich. The rulers understand that people who have no intention of removing the rich from power, people who have no inspiring vision and goal of an egalitarian society, people who have no concept of removing from power the rich—billionaire rich!—who actually cause and maintain poverty, people who feel GUILTY rather than righteously ANGRY about this poverty—such people will NEVER remove the rich from power. Guilt-ridden people do not a strong movement make. Never have and never will!

Now you know why this book got promoted by the mass media (via the Jon Stewart show) while any mere HINT of people wanting to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor is 100% censored in ALL of the media, both the mainstream and so-called ‘alternative’ media. Think about it. Have you EVER seen this egalitarian revolutionary aspiration expressed ANYWHERE in the mass or ‘alternative’ media? Never, even though this is what most people would LOVE. The best you’ve seen expressed is the desire to “tax the rich a bit more,” which means making the rich pay a modest fee for the right to keep treating the have-nots like dirt.

The mass media make sure (as I discuss here) that the have-nots don’t know that anybody else besides maybe a personal friend or two would love an egalitarian revolution. This is how the ruling class has kept the have-nots—us—feeling too hopeless to seriously build an egalitarian revolutionary movement. Making the have-nots feel guilty on top of feeling hopeless helps even more to keep the ruling class in power.

In fairness to Desmond, he makes a good point about artificial scarcity.

In one part of his book, Desmond makes the point that the establishment discourse never calls into question the fact that the great bulk of our nation’s wealth is hoarded by the very few who are very rich, and instead accepts this as given—as if it were a fact of nature—and only allows discourse about how the crumbs should be distributed to the masses. He writes:

“Why do we continue to accept scarcity as given, treating it as the central organizing principle of our economics, policymaking, city planning, and personal ethics? Why do we continue to act like the farmer who, upon learning that his dog is lying on a pile of hay meant for cattle to eat and baring his teeth when the cows come near, chooses to drop their [the cows’] rations, feeding them with what scraps he can snatch from the edge of the pile? Why don’t we just move the dog?”

Yes, I agree: “WHY DON’T WE JUST MOVE THE DOG?”

Excellent question! I wish Desmond had taken this question seriously and talked about ‘moving the dog’—i.e., removing the rich from power. But alas, except for this short passage in his 287 page book, Desmond seems content to leave the dog alone.

I can’t know this for sure, obviously, but I suspect that Desmond knows perfectly well that it is necessary to “move the dog,” (which is why he mentions it briefly), but he also knows that in order to have one’s book reach a large audience via things like the Jon Stewart show and get favorable blurbs and awards from The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Oprah Daily, Time, The Star Tribune, Vulture, The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Public Library, Esquire, California Review of Books, She Reads, Library Journal, and thereby make a decent living from one’s writing, one must not speak in a manner that threatens the very rich.

If we want to have a public discourse about truly ending poverty and the class inequality that causes it, we’ll have to make it happen ourselves. Here is how you can do that.

1. The establishment has had centuries during which time it could have ended poverty in America and it clearly has chosen not to do so. The Founding Fathers—the Jeff Bezoses and Elon Musks of their day—schemed to drive people even further into abject poverty as I wrote about in “The Founding Fathers Were Enemies of ‘We the People.’” When our rulers did things to make it appear as if they were trying to abolish poverty it was because they feared what increasingly revolutionary mass movements would do to them—remove them from power!—if they did not; read here about how this was the case with FDR’s New Deal, and read here how it was the case with LBJ’s working to abolish Jim Crow.