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Matthew Desmond is sick of America’s approach to housing. He’s tired of the old, complex framings of poverty policy debates. And he’s over everyone letting themselves off the hook for so many of their neighbors experiencing poverty.
Desmond, the Princeton University sociologist and author of “Poverty, by America,” is serious about America’s ability to abolish poverty. And he wants action now.
At Rhodes College on May 30, 2023, he gave audience members a toolkit to help them work toward the abolition of American poverty.
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Some tools are meant to improve the political landscape, others to directly address issues.
The conversation can be viewed in its entirety above. Below are a handful of takeaways from the evening.
“Because We Benefit From It”
To launch the end of poverty, Desmond told audience members they must realize their complicity and, therefore, their responsibility.
“There is so much poverty in America because we benefit from it, and that ‘we’ is a big ‘we,’” he said.
Sure, large institutional forces are at play, but, he said, plenty of Memphians profit from poverty, whether by supporting companies that pay low wages or investing in them through the stock market. And the middle and upper classes are the beneficiaries of plenty of government policies that hurt their poor neighbors.
“The United States has this imbalanced welfare state, where we give the most to the families that need it the least, especially in the form of tax breaks. … And many of us benefit from these tax breaks,” Desmond said. “That benefiting starves anti-poverty programs.”
Therefore, to end poverty, many Memphians would have to sacrifice their own monetary interests. But it’s a worthwhile trade, he said.
“(My) book is not an ‘everyone wins’ argument book,” he said. “Some of us are going to have to take less from the government. But what we get in return, I think, is something a lot of us want.”
Reworking Housing
The country’s “imbalanced welfare state” is perhaps most visible in housing, Desmond said.
The
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