‘Poverty, by America’ Review: Poverty Is Your Fault

Despite trillions spent on social programs, a professor argues that American society is to blame for the persistence of poverty.

By Leslie Lenkowsky. By Leslie Lenkowsky. He reviews the book Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. Excerpts:

"What is needed most of all, in Mr. Desmond’s view, is a shift in perspective or a change of consciousness. We all need to become “poverty abolitionists,” he writes, “unwinding ourselves from our neighbors’ deprivation and refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” He isn’t calling for us to follow Tolstoy and take vows of poverty; he even says that he’s not calling for more income redistribution, since America already manages to do a fair amount of it, though in the wrong direction—toward the better-off, not the needy. He argues instead that, by changing how we shop, reside, invest, donate and spend public funds—by redefining the norms that guide our lives—we can help the poor enjoy the kinds of choices that other Americans have today.

For Mr. Desmond, in fact, poverty is less a matter of insufficient income than insufficient options. The poor, in his portrait, are basically compelled to work in low-paying jobs, live in rundown communities and make use of high-cost banks. It’s almost as if they aren’t allowed to do otherwise. Yet in his discussion of the ways in which the poor might be empowered, he overlooks school vouchers, which enable low-income families to bypass neighborhood public schools if they wish. He also gives short shrift to similar programs—aimed at helping the poor—in housing and health care, such as the Affordable Care Act, which was meant to aid the uninsured but which, he tells us without explaining why, has left 30 million Americans uncovered a decade after its enactment.

Nor does Mr. Desmond consider whether the poor might sometimes prefer to stay in their “segregated” neighborhoods (as he calls them) rather than move next door to people with whom they have little in common, as he thinks they should be encouraged to do. As for turning companies like Amazon or Walmart into union shops, he doesn’t say how doing so would create more job opportunities rather than limit them to those who hold a union card."

"Mr. Desmond believes that we still live in the world that John Kenneth Galbraith characterized, in 1958, as “private affluence amid public squalor.” The resources for eliminating poverty are bountiful, Mr. Desmond maintains, and need only to be put to better use. Gone are the messy complications of politics and economics or the actions of the poor themselves: The high rates of school failure or drug use in poor communities, for instance, barely warrant attention. In Mr. Desmond’s view, we have “so much poverty” because we lack the will to have less of it. If only that were so."