Desmond is a MacArthur award-winning professor of sociology at Princeton whose previous book, ‘Evicted’ won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as other honors.  This book is likely to garner similar attention.

Desmond is angry and frustrated by our nation’s unwillingness to eliminate the poverty in our midst, a situation that has persisted for decades through Democratic and Republican administrations, through recessions and booms, through pandemics and through the rare periods of peace and quiet.  From LBJ’s War on Poverty to the extra-ordinary injections of dollars and regulations to prevent evictions and crises during COVID, the rate of poverty in America has remained relatively unchanged between 10-15%.  Desmond avoids the usual trap of drowning the reader in data and statistics though he cites numbers such as the 1.3 million homeless children in 2018 to good effect.

The take-home message of this well-written and powerful book is that poverty in America is not inevitable.  Rather, Americans have chosen to keep more than 40 million of our citizens in poverty by manipulating the labor market, the tax policies, and zoning and other NIMBY exclusionary regulations.  He makes the point that poverty is not just a lack of money but it’s a physical pain, trauma, instability, fear, the feeling that your government is against you, an embarrassment, a loss of liberty, and ultimately a diminished life and personhood.  Worsened by racism at every level, the poverty in the richest country in the world is a disgrace.

After describing the problem, Desmond goes on to identify the causes which include exploitation of workers (union busting, refusal to raise the minimum wage to a subsistence level, rising corporate profits built upon keeping wages low, the refusal of banks to offer credit while pay day loan businesses charge outrageous rates and banks support their profits via overdraft fees) and the refusal to invest in public housing, parks, transportation, etc.  He urges us to invest in ending poverty by empowering workers.  A movement to end the governmental support of the well to do would enable most of Desmond’s suggestions to be realized and poverty ended without ballooning the deficit.  Just in 2021, tax breaks for the well off amounted to $1.8 trillion far less than needed to lift the poor out of poverty.

Desmond is not pollyanna. He realizes the political difficulties of making these changes, but he urges each of us to become a ‘poverty abolitionist’ in both our personal and political behavior.  He cites UPS as being unionized while Fed Ex is not and urges us to make personal choices based on this kind of information. He  closes his book by making the case that this is every American’s fight by writing “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 hardship in your country violates your sense of decency, this is your fight, too.  There are a good many challenges facing this big, wide country, but near the top of the list must be concerns about basic needs….Every person, every company, every institution that has a role in perpetuating poverty also has a role in ameliorating it.  The end of poverty is something to stand for, to march for, to sacrifice for.  Because 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.  The citizens of the richest nation in the world can and should finally put an end to it.”  

Desmond hasn’t identified a new problem or a magic bullet to solve it, but he has stated with frankness and clarity what its dimensions and impact are and what each of us can do about it.  It’s a book worth reading, pondering, and acting upon.