Poured Over: Matthew Desmond on Poverty, By America

“Look at all the advances we’ve made in the last 50 years, look at the way that culture and medicine and technology and science have advanced since the Beatles broke up, since we were involved in Vietnam, but the poverty rate has been incredibly stubbornly persistent and I think it’s rather shameful for the richest country in the history of the world.” Matthew Desmond on Poured Over

Reading Matthew Desmond’s books will make you smarter­, break your heart, make you mad, and push you to think differently about poverty — all in the same moment. Poverty, by America is his follow-up to his landmark book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Desmond joins us on the show to talk about going where the data takes him, the human cost of poverty, the gig economy, writing in community, what a post-poverty would could look like, and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.

Featured Books:
Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Transcript

Miwa Messer 
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Matthew Desmond is someone that we have been yelling about for a very long time. You might remember Evicted was a Discover Award winner for us back in the day, 2016. I was looking this up. I was like, wasn’t it— It felt much more recent than that, but no 2016. And that is the book that Matt won the Pulitzer for. He also is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. So, there’s a lot happening here, the new book, which is spectacular, it is tiny, and it is fierce. And it is everything we need right now in this moment in America. It’s called Poverty by America. And I am delighted to see you. 

Matthew Desmond 
So good to be here. It’s such an honor to be in conversation with you and in conversation with folks that love and live by books and ideas. Barnes and Noble was such an ally to Evicted and helped get that book and so many, so many hands. And so, it’s just great to see you again, great to be in conversation with you as always. 

MM 
Well, I’m always smarter to after I talk to you. It’s like, you know, these fast publisher lunches that sometimes happen. I’m like, uh huh, I’m officially smarter after talking to this dude. And that was even before Evicted came out. You also run the eviction lab at Princeton University, as well as teaching and everything else. So how did you even have the time to write Poverty by America? I know you’re always thinking about this stuff. But thinking about it and putting it on paper? are two different things. 

MD 
Yeah, I mean, it was I was convicted, you know, I was convicted, I felt that for my whole life. I’ve been studying poverty. And I’ve, you know, lived in poor neighborhoods. I’ve spent time with Union reps and organizers and pored over statistical reports. But I was convicted, you know, that this looming question like, why is there so much poverty in America that I just didn’t have a firm grasp on. So, this book was a challenge to myself. And kind of, you know, a challenge to say, okay, what’s your answer to that question? And what’s your answer to how could we finally abolish it? No, not cut the poverty rate by 10%. And nudge it a little bit, but really cut the cancer out. I have the honor of working with incredible team here at Princeton at the eviction lab. And so we were able to do a lot of policy work during the pandemic, with respect to the eviction moratorium with emergency rental assistance. We’re proud of that work. But it was also a time where I felt the writing had a hold of me, and I had to kind of answer it. 

MM 
There’s a lot of what feels slightly counterintuitive in this book, and you can tell that you’re sorting through it as we go through and some of this material feels like it might have popped in the stuff that you’ve done for the New York Times Magazine. Yeah. Am I right? 

MD 
There’s a little bit that’s in there. Yeah, there’s some reporting that that I’ve done with a magazine in there. But there’s a lot of new material in this book. 

MM 
At one point, you’re talking about how we can’t assume that people are dependent on something like welfare that, in fact, there’s much more avoidance of being part of that particular system. And I think there are still a lot of folks out in the world who think oh, well, I mean, because they’ve been told this, they’ve been told this for years and years and years, that people somehow aspire to be on assistance, when in fact, the reality is completely the opposite.  

MD 
Yeah, let’s break it down. And so, I think that, you know, we still hear a lot about welfare dependence today. And, you know, when welfare dependency was huge in the public debate in the 80s and 90s, a lot of researchers dug into the data to see if they could find evidence for it and they just really didn’t, you know, there were there were some folks that stayed on welfare for years and years, but most people used it when they were between jobs, after they got a divorce. So, it wasn’t a trap, as much as something to get folks through a really hard time. But we continue to hear about it today. I mean, during the pandemic, you know, everyone— well, not everyone, I’m going to say, you know, a lot of people in Congress, and especially on the Republican side, are harping that, you know, the external unemployment benefits were keeping people home. And, you know, frankly, it kind of made sense, we’re paying folks to not go to work, but it just wasn’t true. You know, when in the summer of 2021, 25, states ended some or all of the emergency benefits, did those states suddenly see their job numbers fly up? They didn’t, actually. So by the end of the summer, employment rates in those states, the states that had ended the benefits for the same as the employment numbers in the states that hadn’t. So, this really raises the question, why is this such a cliche that we hear over and over because I don’t think we believe it in our heart of hearts? I do think it’s a way that we have been taught, like you said, a cliche or something that organizes our thoughts, but you’re right, to dig into the data, the bigger problem is welfare avoidance. The fact that so many low-income families are not taking advantage of aid that’s available to them. So let’s talk numbers just real quick. Most elderly folks that could receive food stamps do not claim them, about one in five workers that could receive the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is a big bump once a year for low-income workers, especially parents, one out of five of those workers just pass on the earned income tax credit. And if you add that up with folks that pass on Social Security income and food stamps, unemployment insurance, when they’re between jobs, you’re learning that every year, you know, low-income folks are passing on over 140 billion with a B, dollars every year. This is not a picture of welfare dependence; this is a picture of something else. 

MM 
Part of why I wanted to open with the whole avoidance versus dependence schism, because that’s essentially what it is, is the fact that we have made so much progress, material progress, as you refer to it early in the book, houses, cars, cell phones. I mean, cell phones are the best example possible. I mean, quite a number of us walk around with supercomputers in our pockets. And now, we’re in a place though, where we’re making huge advances as a society and a culture in many ways. And yet, poverty is not dropping. 

MD 
That’s right. So that I think there’s a few things we can jump off from that that point. You know, one is some people say, well, gosh, look at all these poor folks that have cell phones, look at all these poor folks that have televisions, does that mean they’re not poor, but you can’t eat a cell phone, you can’t trade a television in for a living wage or health insurance. And in fact, like as the price of things like toasters and blenders and cell phones have decreased, the price of life’s most necessary necessities like fuel and rent have increased. And so it isn’t the case that just because folks can be well clothed, or have access to a cell phone, which today is just like essential to find like jobs, housing and romantic partners. That doesn’t mean those folks aren’t really struggling. So I think that that’s one point. And then another point that you raised, right, it’s like, look at all the advances we’ve made in the last 50 years, look at the way that culture and medicine and technology and science have advanced since the Beatles broke up, since we were involved in Vietnam, but the poverty rate has been incredibly stubbornly persistent and I think it’s rather shameful for the richest country in the history of the world. 

MM 
One of the things I was thinking about as I read the new book was a lot of what I learned in Evicted. And it’s simple things like it’s really hard to keep your kitchen sink clean when you’re broke, and your landlord’s not fixing something like standing water in your kitchen, that’s not anything I’ve ever had to experience. It goes back to this idea that there are two Americas, right? Like, at any given moment, any of us is living in— there are two banking systems, there are two housing systems, there are two educational… they are not equal, right in any way, shape, or form. And I think one of the biggest points that you make in this new book is that the system is broken as it is as terrible as it is, does benefit some of us. 

MD 
Yeah, it benefits quite a lot of us. And I think that many of us now are familiar with a tale of two cities or the inequality debate has really permeated the American consciousness. But it’s not just that some of us have more than others, it’s having more than others, gives us the impression that the society is working, because it’s working really well for us. Now, if you’re a homeowner in America, that’s usually a really good deal. You know, you get a big tax break, your mortgage doesn’t go up every year, that can increase your wealth. But for a third of the country who are renters, it’s incredibly unstable, and their life is full of uncertainty and eviction and homelessness, often, and I think that the book really tries to make this move, which is, you know, there is so much poverty in America, not in spite of our wealth, but because of that. It really tries to make the argument that inequality isn’t just about me having more than you, it’s about my gains actually coming at your losses, and what does that mean for solving poverty in America? And then it really tries to lay out the ways that we rely and benefit, on exploitation, exploitation in the labor market and the housing market and the financial market. I mean, the financial market is insane. I mean, every day, there’s like $61 million pulled out of the pockets of low-income families in terms of overdraft fees or payday loan fees. And like, you know, when James Baldwin remarked that it’s so expensive to be poor, there’s no it’s like, how can he even imagine what we’ve become on that score. So how do I benefit from that? Well, I get a free checking account, right? And maybe if I’m invested in one of these big banks, you know, my investment portfolio looks good. So, one of the things that the book is trying to do, and there’s many other examples, right, it’s just trying to get us to kind of see and realize how our lives are, are intimately connected with the lives of the poor, and then make a case for how we can unwind it, how we can divest from poverty in our lives. 

MM 
What was the biggest surprise for you? I mean, was there something in your daily life where you’re like, I can’t even believe I was doing that.  

MD 
That stuff comes up a lot, I think. And I think that it does raise questions about are we doing enough with respect to how we shop? Our savings account— should we turn to that? And so, I think that those are, are wonderfully motivating questions for me. I also think I just learned a ton researching this book. I mean, one of the things that blew me away was studying the American welfare state, right. And so for me, the American welfare state means things like food stamps, like housing assistance, but it also means things like a 529 plan and it means things like a mortgage interest deduction, you know, every year, we spent about $150 billion on homeowner subsidies, and about $50 billion on direct housing assistance to the needy. Our welfare state is lopsided. Now, many of us kind of don’t see tax breaks as something that’s akin to a government check, but both a tax break and a check, increases the deficit cost the country something, and both of them put money in your pocket. So, if you’re a homeowner, and you get the mortgage interest deduction, we can deliver that through a tax break, or we can just mail you a check every month. And then instead of mailing the poor checks, we can reduce their taxes, for example, it’s the same difference. So, if you really look at the full nature of the welfare state, you learn just how utterly lopsided it is and how we’ve chosen the subsidization of affluence over the alleviation of poverty. So here’s the stat that really killed me. Every year in America, the top 20% of income earners, they take home about $35,000 in government benefits. The bottom 20% of income earners, our poorest neighbors, they take home about $25,000, that’s 40% less. So we really are giving more to families that really need it the least.  

MM 
Going back to what you said about Baldwin, right, and that it’s so expensive to be poor. I think one of the points that you make that really surprised me, not in what you said, but because I needed to see it in print in front of me is the fact that poverty is more about a lack of choices, than it is about people making not great— like you just don’t have options. And again, it goes back to the things you were talking about financial, educational, social, housing, all of it. But how do we start to address this? I mean, you’ve laid it out a little bit up to this point in this conversation, but how do we even start to give people more choice, because choice is a word that folks love to latch on to. And it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.  

MD 
I think just adapting that perspective is fundamental to how we get out of this mess. So that does mean that we don’t just want more policies or deeper investments, we want different policies, we want policies that stop accommodating poverty, we need moves that disrupt poverty that really cut it at its root. And so, exploitation is a pretty charged word. But it just basically means, when you’re over a barrel, people have you at their mercy. And so the antidote for exploitation is choice. We expand the choice for all Americans, I think that really thwarts the exploitative way. So let’s just take housing, for example. So, if you’re a local family, you basically have one choice when it comes to housing, you have to live in the private rental market and if you’re below the poverty line, chances are you’re spending at least 50% of your income on housing cost. You know, the lines for public housing today are not counted in years they are counted in decades. We just don’t have enough of that investment to go around. And then low-income families are also shut out of the mortgage market, not because they can’t afford mortgages. And so one of the folks I write about in the book is Lakia Higsby, who was you know, living in a four bedroom home in Cleveland, she was paying $950 a month in rent. But if Lakia bought that home under conventional mortgage standards, she’d be paying like 570 dollars a month in rent, that’s like $4,500 a year more in her pocket, significant. I can’t, why isn’t that option available? It’s because banks and lending institutions really aren’t interested in funding the kinds of homes that Lakia and low-income families could afford. And it’s because you could just make a lot more money, you know, with a mortgage for a million bucks than a mortgage for $75,000. For example, there’s plenty of those homes that go around, you know, last year 27% of homes in America that were sold, were first sold for less than $100,000. But only 23% of those were financed with a mortgage. This is one way we can increase the choice for families like Lakia, we could say, let’s make it attractive for banks to finance small dollar mortgages. So more and more working families can actually have a home that they own. So this is just one of like several ideas that can come out of this choice framework. Choice framework in the labor market, doesn’t mean we just need to kind of start adding on like these wage bonuses like we do now with earned tax credit. It also means we need to invest in worker power, we need to make labor organizing easy, we need to establish a minimum wage that is automatic and doesn’t just happen when Congress kind of gets around to it every decade or so, which is just unthinkable. And so I think that, you know, empowering the poor and expanding their choices, a fundamental requirement for ending poverty in America. 

MM 
Because we spend quite a lot of time and I say we as a culture and a society. Because I think people slip into this very easily, we spend a lot of time policing the poor, and decisions that get made simply because you don’t have a lot of options. And it’s one of those things where disruption was an interesting word choice I thought when I came across it in in Poverty by America. Disruption, you know, is a word that’s been so co-opted by Silicon Valley and not necessarily always for things that need to be disrupted. Driving a taxi in New York used to be a really great way to make a living for new arrivals to the city and longtime New Yorkers and whatnot. And now, the industry is just completely in shambles, because it was, quote, unquote, disrupted. And maybe I shouldn’t be kicking on services. But it does, this transition to a gig economy doesn’t seem to be helping a majority of folks move in a way that other policies in the past have been able to help them move, say, into the middle class, or into the upper middle class, for instance, we’ve automated so much, instead of investing in people. 

MD 
Right, and the way we often talk about the rise of the gig economy is in this kind of inevitability, language, right? Like, oh, it’s you know, the technology came and then golly gee, you know, we see this hurting the poor, that the gig economy in America is not like the gig economy in other places, right. So, you could have heavier regulations on ride sharing apps, you can make sure that people in the gig economy are protected under labor laws or minimum wage laws, which they currently aren’t in the United States. So, this language of inevitability, and automation and the forward march of capitalism or progress— these are policy decisions. One of my favorite historical examples is the tractor, you know, and we have this kind of vision in our head that the tractor was disruptive technology, the tractor of The Grapes of Wrath was the thing that put all these sharecroppers out of business. But it wasn’t— it was like the tractor came along during a time where we closed our borders to immigration flows. So there was this massive labor shortage in the fields. And that’s when the tractor started putting folks out of business. So it wasn’t just the technology was disruptive, there was a policy decision, the United States closed its borders, and that’s where the pain really came. So things that we talk about that are often talked about like innocently or like a byproduct of history, like deindustrialization, or automation, these are things that we decided to do, moral decisions we’ve decided as a country. 

MM 
Yeah, you talk about our morally fraught systems. I mean, one of the things I appreciate about reading you is that even though I know that brain is working 24/7 to parse every word, you know how to write, and you know how to tell a story, and I’m not a policy wonk, I’m a bookseller. And yet, I cannot put your books down because you know how to structure sentences. You know how to tell a story. I want to slip away from policy for just a second though, and talk about Matt Desmond as a writer because clearly, you put a lot of thought into all of this. So when you’re sitting down to draft, where are you starting with a book like this. 

MD
Well, I really believe in and have the privilege of writing in community. I have an incredible editor Amanda Cook at Crown and she said, we want this book to feel like you and I are talking at a bar, and that was kind of the idea to try to convey all this information, but in a way that’s accessible, in a way that’s not defensive, in a way that’s ambitious, but it is trying to speak to a lot of folks. And so I think that, you know, writing with her and community with her is important and then the book went through a few big workshops, where I invited my colleagues in social sciences, but also writers that I admire and that have taught me things to read early drafts of the book, and just give it to me. folks like Keeanga YamahttaTaylor, were there, my colleague, Kathy Edin, from Princeton was there, Luke Shaefer, they they wrote $2.00 a Day, Jason and Paul from the Time, Sarah Stillman, Tressie Cottom. So just incredible minds that gave me so much to think about so much great hard feedback, hard words. And so there was a part of me that wrote this book in conversation with them and conversation with folks that I’ve met along the way, too. I write, for example, about my friend who, in Milwaukee, who was my roommate, when I lived in Milwaukee, and I write about his struggles with diabetes, and a leg amputation and what I’m writing about, who I’m writing about my friend, someone that I want to be proud of this book and proud of his story in it. So I think writing for all those different audiences was important to me, I think, for me, just as a writing process, I outline the heck out of my books. The outline for me, takes about 75% of the time and the writing 25%. And I just want to allow myself to flow once I have it. So there was just a lot of there was a lot of reading a lot of research, and then a lot of like, that discernment process where you’re trying to figure out what the of all this stuff, what is the kernel that you want to convey in this, this little paragraph, I also have to say, since we’re talking about writing a little bit like, the part where I struggle with is this kind of more essayistic part where you’re kind of outside of the facts, you go beyond that, and I think that’s a part of, I wanted the book to have a moral force. I’m a preacher’s kid and I wanted you know, there’s some parts of the book where it’s me as a social scientist, but there’s other parts where it’s me as a preacher, I guess, are some of this that’s trying to make an argument on moral grounds. And I think for me, that’s, I’m much more comfortable in the train of I saw this, here’s what I saw, or this is what the data show than it’s terrain of, should we do this, but I think the book really pushed me to exercise that muscle. 

MM 
Yeah, I’ve seen you do events onstage in our stores and I’m just thinking back to a moment there was an event in New York, and you were asked a very pointed question by someone who clearly owns property and rents it out in New York, and you just closed your eyes and this wall of statistics, very politely, but you did that thing. And I was watching the person’s response because I can do these things and it was fascinating. It was really fascinating to see the exchange, and it was just simply, it was data. And that is exactly what that person had asked you for— was show us the proof and all of a sudden, that supercomputer went, it was great. 

MD 
I remember that. I remember that exchange. And I love those exchanges. You know, I learned so much from those exchanges. I really learn when audience members pushed me and challenged me and criticize me. But I do think part of my job is to be an ambassador for the social sciences to really say, you know, we don’t need to do guesswork on this kind of thing. You know, the last two lines the book, are like, we don’t need to outsmart this problem, we need to out hate it. And I think that part of that, I hope I earn those sentences by saying, this is what we really know works and what we know doesn’t work. And so things like welfare dependency, that’s actually an empirical question we can get to the bottom of that. We can get to the bottom of, if you increase the minimum wage, do people lose their jobs, we get to the bottom of that. And so I think that there is at the end of the day, there is a part of me that just loves and feels part of the tribe of social scientists trying to bring data to bear on the morally urgent questions of our day. 

MM 
And I love the idea that we’re framing this as morally urgent, I think so much of the conversation has been co-opted by folks who have decided that they’re the only arbiters of morality. And I think all of this is urgent, all of this is pressing. Time is speeding up. And change has sped up quite a lot too. And we’ve got to figure this out. I mean, climate change is also a form of economic injustice for a lot of communities and we’re not connecting the dots as quickly as perhaps we could be especially when you think about how fast information flows now in a way that it didn’t, previously. So the idea that we can lean into this data, I think, is hugely important. But you always have the human piece. 

MD 
I think that’s so crucial. I also think like, you know, you spoke about a moment, and I feel like we are as a country in a moment that is really pregnant with potential when it comes to economic justice. I feel like that old Gramsci line where the old is dying, and the new hasn’t yet been born. It’s just so relevant to this moment. Right now, most Democrats and most Republicans believe that poverty is a result of unfair circumstances. So, a lot of the old, tired cliches about poverty, they are dying, they’re alive at Washington, a lot of our electeds keep repeating them, but the American people have moved past them. And I think that we are searching for and striving for a better way. And we can feel it, we can feel this emotional violence we do to each other because we tolerate so much poverty in this line of dollars, I think that the country is is eager and hungry to have this debate. And I hope this book contributes to that a little bit. 

MM 
You know, there are a couple of different points, though, where you say, in slightly different ways— we can’t just spend our way out of this, but we have to consider and you’re not, we aren’t actually arguing that we should just throw money at the problem. We have to be smarter about where we use resources. And also, some of the lowest hanging fruit is just getting people to use what is legitimately theirs. I mean, I think there was a moment for Social Security and an elderly community, where just suddenly the instructions were explained to them and enrollment went up 30% and the community was much more, I think this was Milwaukee. 

MD 
If folks aren’t accessing the resources they need and deserve. Why is that? Right? And for a while, we thought it might be stigma, maybe folks are embarrassed. And I don’t know if you remember this, but like food stamp used to be stamps, right? And you’d have to like do this degradation ritual at the grocery store and like hand your stamps. And so we changed that now food stamp comes at an EBT card, it looks like a visa or anything else. It’s very slide when we switched from stamps, EBT card to did we, take up rates for food stamps, just jump up. oh, no, we didn’t know. It turns out there weren’t a lot of families saying okay, I’ll you know, now I’ll use this benefit. So, you know, stigma is there stigma support in part of the story, but it seems like that the thing that’s, that’s really driving it is we’ve made it hard and confusing to access these benefits. And so a little does go a long way here, changing the font, making things easy, connecting folks with a, you know, a coach that can walk them through how to connect— these things actually really matter for getting family say they need, I do think this is the low hanging fruit. And you know what, this is the United States of America, we are the global leaders at marketing, advertising, convincing you that you need this brand of potato chips, not that brand of potato chips. And we should apply that same level of ingenuity and creativity and, like tirelessness, to making sure local families get connected with resources that ease their hardships. 

MM 
So we’re talking about reaching out to people. We’re talking about the human connection. I mean, all of this argument for so long, has been framed in these black and white terms of X amount of dollars. And then in some cases that we just send these block grants to states and states obviously choose how to use them in some do interesting things, and some do things that made my head explode. But folks can see all of that. They can experience all of that in the book. But then, honestly, it seems like we just keep repeating ourselves. 

MD 
One of the arguments that the book is making, right is like the end of poverty isn’t something out there. You know, it’s not just something that Congress should address. It’s something that you, I and everyone should address by really searching ourselves and figuring out how we’re connected to the problem and how we’re connected to the solution. So one of the arguments that the book makes is, one of the reasons that poverty persists is because we’ve created these exclusive, wealthy communities you know, on most American land you can only build a single family home and there are these pockets of incredible affluence and public safety in America but those pockets create poverty traps, you know, and force low income families to live in areas of concentrated despair and misery. So what can we do personally, to address that? You know, we can make sure that we are building inclusive communities we can show up to those Tuesday night zoning board meeting and say no, no, you’re gonna build it, I want you to build it. I want to live in a community that’s inclusive. What are we teaching our kids when we bar other kids from the opportunities our children benefit from? And then do it in their name? You know, what are we doing? And so I think that I think one of the things that we need to do to move forward is to start taking responsibility for this problem in our own lives. 

MM 
I mean, New Jersey, has actually passed some of the most progressive housing legislation in the country, not always without a fight. But I didn’t realize New Jersey was sort of spearheading this moment.  

MD 
Yeah, New Jersey, the best state also has, you know, the most aggressive laws when it comes to inclusionary zoning. So exclusionary zoning is really kind of the normal law of the land. You know, it says it is illegal in this community to build multifamily housing, affordable housing. Inclusionary zoning is the opposite, it says it’s illegal not to. New Jersey has a statute called the Mount Laurel statute, it goes back to a Supreme Court case in the state, where it requires every jurisdiction to do its fair share of affordable housing and that fair share being like a, you know, a calculation based on how many people live here, how many jobs are here. And as a result, you know, most suburban jurisdictions in New Jersey have some form of affordable housing in them. And you’re right, it is a fight. If you’ve ever seen footage on Twitter or on the news about zoning board meetings, they can be violent and aggressive. And they’re violent, aggressive in blue states and red states, too. But New Jersey has made this incredible step forward. And what it means is, it’s one of the most economically inclusive states in their country, what’s its property values, that’s one of the highest in the country, has its public school system doing number one in the country. So we can do this, without having a hit on our property values. We can do this without having a hit on our public education. But we do need to stop embracing segregationist tendencies and the excuses that a lot of us make to uphold segregationist communities, they’re the same that, you know, folks made in the 60s, in the 50s, in the 40s. So, I do think we need to stand up and say, this ends with us.  

MM 
It’s a point that you make, where you’re asking if we’re accepting broken systems, and we’re accepting how we live now, simply because it’s easy. Because some of us are still comfortable. I mean, you are asking very hard questions, I think that some people are not going to want to answer others might be surprised by their own answers. And other people might just be nodding along going. ah, yeah, of course, of course. Did you walk in with those questions? Did you walk in saying, are we just accepting this? Because it’s easy, or, you know, we believe we deserve an upper class, welfare state? Or are these the questions that hit you, as you were working? 

MD 
On the new book? I was open to a lot of possibilities and I kind of went where the data, where the argument led me and now on the one hand, I feel like this is a true story that had to be told, No, and some people wrestle with the story, some people will debate it, pick at it, some people will just sit with the implications of it. Whatever your reaction to it, I feel like we had to have a story about the reason we are so poor, as a rich country, the reason that a third of us live under $50,000 a year, the reason that like one in nine of us can’t afford basic necessities, like if the poor, founded a country in America, that country would be like Australia, you know, like, we have so much more poverty than other rich nations. And the reason is, because some lives are made small so others may grow. What people do with that fact, I think it’s up to them. And I think some people will sit with it, struggle with it. I think some people might be motivated to join all these amazing, incredible energetic anti poverty movements. And some folks might take other steps forward. But I think that it is true that like, getting a fat tax break is it’s frankly, great, right? It’s nice to have if you can get it, if you can afford to squirrel away money. So you’re like in a 529 plan so your kid can go to college? That’s frankly, nice. Right. And I think that we just have to confront that and look at that. And I think the book is at once asking us to consider scaling back a little bit so that more of us can enjoy the bounty and the abundance in this country. But it also makes a case that that inclusion of the poor into the union is to the benefit of the union as a whole. And I think that clearly ending poverty would be a life altering. It’s hard to put into words what this would mean for the 1000s and millions of parents and workers and children below the poverty line. But all of us are dragged down by poverty in our midst, all of us have to confront poverty on our way to work, in our worries about our children, in our threats, am I one divorce or one car accident away from falling all the way down. And so I think an America that is prosperous without poverty would just carry a different kind of freedom a lot of us don’t have access to because the freedom that we kind of enjoy if we were privileged enough to it is kind of a rich person’s freedom, the freedom to barricade ourselves. And I think of freedom of shared prosperity and abundance. I want to live in that country, you know. And so I do think that there’s an argument about sacrifice, but that sacrifice isn’t coming with just that. Look, I mean, this is the price of our restored humanity in a way. 

MM 
Yeah, you have a really great line. Our vulnerability to exploitation grows as our liberty shrinks. And it’s true, I think, we all sort of end up in a corner, in a lot of ways the way the system is designed. Now, what is an investment in ending poverty look like? I mean, we’ve talked about the low hanging fruit, we’ve talked about the human element. And I’m not asking for, you know, a pure policy statement or anything like that. But where do we start? Because that seems to be a big sticking point for a lot of us is, oh, the problem is so overwhelming. It’s so massive, we just where do we even begin? And I don’t think that’s necessarily the way to approach it. 

MD 
I think the problem is enormous and hard and completely within our power. One of the things that I didn’t have the book and is just to calculate really roughly, just a rough calculus of if you lifted everyone below the poverty line to the poverty line. I know some people are $100 below the poverty line, some people are 1000s and 1000s of dollars below the poverty line. If you just added all that up, and you lifted everyone to the line, how much would that cost us? So that would cost us $177 billion a year, on top of what we’re just getting rough calculation, super rough, but it’s a good place to start because that number, although sounds enormous, and in a way is enormous. That’s less than 1% of our GDP. Now, by some estimates, we throw away more than food every year than that amount. So how would we get that money? How would we get that money? And the book suggests that we should start with the cheaters. You know, a study published recently suggested that at the top 1% of our taxpayers, just pay the taxes they owed, not paid more taxes, not had an increased rate, just under the current regime pay what they owed, that would raise about $175 billion a year, we could just about fill the poverty gap. If the richest among us just paid what they owed. So on the one hand, yeah, there are challenges. But on the other hand, when I when I do a calculation like that, I feel that it’s just completely within our grasp. 

MM 
Yeah. And just to give people a little bit of context, what’s the current line that denotes poverty? What’s the financial number? 

MD 
Yeah, so officially, the thresholds are about $13,500, for a family of one, single person, right. And for a family of four, it’s about $27,000. It’s about one in nine of us struggle under those conditions every year in America. 

MM 
One of the examples, one of the folks we meet in the new book, too. And I feel like maybe I’ve been sitting with a lot of your work for the last couple of weeks. He might also be in one of the Times Magazine pieces, but he’s a fast-food worker in San Jose and he had three jobs at one point. And his little brother said to him, how much do I have to pay you an hour so that you can not go to work, and you can stay with me for a minute, the mayor of San Jose raised the minimum wage, and he was able to scale back the amount of hours he was working. And he just said to you, my life is so much better. I feel a little safer and I feel like I can participate. Yeah, and that I mean, you can’t dismiss the story like that. You just can’t there’s too much there and that’s one man.  

MD 
Julio, you know, he was just working nonstop. His life was work and sleep. He worked himself and into the hospital really know when he was 24. He collapsed out of exhaustion in the supermarket. I think his story really raises the question for us, you know, what do we deny people like Julio when, take poverty wages when we underpay them for their work? And what we deny them is life itself, really, I mean, we deny them happiness and health and family. And we don’t have to, you know, I mean, his job does not have to pay him low wages and it seems like today there’s defenders of the status quo or defenders of capitalism, even that might say, Look, you know, this is just a byproduct of capitalism, there’s gonna be some jobs that are really low pay. And like the early defenders of capitalism, they would have been shocked and scandalized and frankly, embarrassed by that argument, they thought capitalism was freedom from poverty, their capitalism was about lifting other folks up. And if you go to Denmark and other capitalist countries, right, the folks at McDonald’s are making two to three times what our folks are. This is not the capitalism Julio deserves, this is not the capitalism we deserve.  

MM 
What does the post poverty world look like? 

MD 
I think that a post poverty world for the poor means that your life is no longer defined just by survival, it means that you can breathe, it means that you can dream a little bit, it means that your kids are confronting safer streets. Because a country that shares its wealth is a safer country. It means that the scientists and the poets and the artists and the diplomats that we currently deny, and waste and lose, because we tolerate so much of their poverty, become diplomats and scientists and inventors. I think that it means a whole different existence for the poor. For those of us that aren’t poor, it means you open the newspaper in the morning, and you’re not hit with story after story about food lines that are stretching for miles in Houston, or skyrocketing eviction rates, or crime rates that are out of control, you feel safer, you go to work, you get on the subway, you get on the bus, and you don’t scroll past, you know, sprawling tent encampments, and so you don’t see these exhausted faces on the bus, you’re not one of those faces, you go out to eat and you don’t feel icky. If you’re a parent, you don’t worry about your kid’s future. You know, some kids might have a lot more than others, but they’re not going to hit this deep bottom layer that we currently tolerate. So I think it’s a freer country. And I think that’s a benefit to all of us. And sometimes when these conversations are had, it’s almost like, people imagine a post poverty in America as something that’s Unamerican, right, that’s something that’s anti us. And I think this is about us really coming into our full selves as a country, like, you could still have fancy designer bags, you know, in post poverty in America, Disneyland would still exist, inequalities would still exist, you know, but I just I think that I think that it would be a country that is just a lot more free. 

MM 
Yeah, I gotta ask though when you say less American, are we talking meritocracy? What are we talking about when you say Unamerican? Because there are a couple of people who have had feelings, which you point out in the book there just you know, you were you delivered a paper years ago at Harvard, and someone raised an eyebrow and said, oh my, but let’s before I let you go, let’s just jump there for a second.  

MD 
On the one hand, the kind of economic injustice that America has tolerated and cultivated over the years, is quite American. Right? We have to own that, you know, there are these policy decisions we’ve made, there’s moral decisions we’ve made as a country to sell out the poor. But the country has also been a country committed to freedom. And, you know, Roosevelt was right, you know, necessitous men are not free men. And I think that if we are obsessively committed to freedom, we have to be obsessively committed to the end of poverty. And I think that that will bring about challenges that will bring about problems. You know, it’s you know, this is not everybody wins book, right. I think that that, that doesn’t ring true to me. But I do think what we get is going to be much better than what we have to give up on the score. 

MM 
Yeah, and I’m also going to point out to that it’s what 190, it’s less than 200. The text itself is less than 200 pages in Poverty by America–I’ve destroyed my galley–it’s okay, so it’s 189. But your argument is 189 pages, and then your notes are a good third on top of that, so yeah, folks are looking for the homework, the homework has been done, and it is documented at the end. And I will say I mean; I’m not kidding when I destroy… I didn’t really have to dig through the notes. But at the same time, there’s so much richer argument and story and I just I’m really hoping people come to Poverty by America with an open heart and an open mind. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff that you do here. There are also some very funny lines that are intentionally funny, but I’m not going to quote them because they made me bark out. You might have an idea of a couple of them, but critical intelligence being one of them. It’s a fun, this is going to sound a little weird, it’s a fun book to read, because it’s so open minded and, and the pacing is great. And you know how to move your argument forward. And I really appreciate that because it would be very easy, I think, for you to write a very wonky book. 

MD 
You know, this might sound weird, but I see myself as a writer, after Evicted came out, you know, there was a time where I saw myself as a policy wonk, there’s no time I saw myself as a straight social scientist and, and I think that I’m trying to embrace my identity as a writer, which means that it has to be told in a way that that’s accessible. It’s like what Jane Addams said, people want wicked problems simply told, and I think I tried to live up to her edict. 

MM 
Yeah, you totally do. And you are really a writer. That’s all it comes down to but I just wanted you to send it say it so we could end the show. I may be a bookseller, but I know where I want the story to go in an interview. 

MM 
Matthew Desmond, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over, Poverty by America is out now Evicted, obviously in paperback everywhere in Barnes and Noble. And also you have a chapter in the 1619 Project on capitalism. So, I’m going to use this opportunity to shout that out as well, because it’s a pretty great chapter. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 

MD 
Thank you, Miwa. Wow. So great to see you. Thank you so much.