Poverty, by America

by Matthew Desmond

Poverty isn't an accident. Someone is making money from it.

For you if

you want to understand American poverty as something done to people rather than something that happens to them — and to know who is doing it

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Desmond spent years living in Milwaukee's poorest neighborhoods documenting eviction as a system of extraction — how landlords profit from poverty, how the housing market is structured to keep poor people poor, how the institutions supposedly designed to help the poor instead help those who profit from them. He won the Pulitzer Prize for that work. This book is the argument that follows: that poverty in America is not an accident, a natural condition, or a failure of individual will. It is made. Specific policy choices, made by specific people, for specific economic benefits, produce and maintain poverty in the richest country in human history. He names the landlords, the financial institutions, the corporations paying poverty wages, and — most uncomfortably — the consumers who benefit from the cheap goods and services that poverty wages produce. The most important American poverty book on the shelf and the one that most completely refuses the charitable framing: this is not about helping the poor, it is about identifying who is making them poor, how, and why the mechanisms persist. The structural companion to Nickel and Dimed and Working — Ehrenreich documents the experience, Terkel gives the workers their voices, Desmond names who is extracting the value they produce.

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