![]() ![]() They also reflect a willingness by those in power to look down on workers. The low wages American workers make are, Desmond contends, not simply a consequence of weak minimum wage laws. As Desmond puts it, his book is about “how some lives are made small so that others may grow.” There are, he argues, three principal ways in which the poor in America are made poorer.įirst, we limit their choices and power, particularly in the labor market. It is primarily the result of government policies and laws that worsen the lives of the poor. His answer is that American poverty is not the result of limited resources or impersonal economic forces. “Why all this American poverty?” Desmond asks at the start of Poverty, by America. Poverty, by America rests on thorough and serious analysis rather than analysis likely to surprise readers in the case Desmond makes for what he calls “poverty abolitionism.” Whether Desmond’s new book will have the impact The Other America did is the question. The remedies he calls for fall in the realm of the practical and recognize how politically divided a country we are. ![]() Like Harrington in The Other America, Desmond does not offer radical solutions for ending poverty. In a book that became a bestseller and influenced Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, Harrington made the case for increased spending on poverty programs by describing how widespread poverty was in the United States and how the poor had become invisible for all too many affluent Americans. In this ambitious project, he has followed in the footsteps of Michael Harrington in his 1962 study, The Other America. ![]() In his new book Poverty, by America, Desmond, currently a professor of sociology at Princeton, has sought to further his reach by taking on the subject of poverty throughout the United States. Jacob Riis’ 1890 How the Other Half Lives, Jane Addams’ 1910 Twenty Years at Hull House, and James Agee and Walker Evans’ 1941 book about tenant farmers during the Great Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, are Evicted’s American predecessors. With Evicted, Desmond joined a select group of writers who have written about poverty with the skill of observant novelists. ![]() In 2016 Matthew Desmond became one of the leading voices on poverty in America with the publication of Evicted, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of eight Milwaukee families dealing with the trauma of being removed from their homes. ![]()
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