In fact, only 15 percent of low-income renters in the United States fell into this category, Desmond found. The prevailing assumption among scholars had been that most poor people in America’s urban areas lived in public housing. According to liberals, the real problems are structural: forces such as racism and deindustrialization, which, they contend, have entrenched inequality and prevented disadvantaged groups from sharing in the nation’s prosperity.īut what if the focus on the disadvantaged is misplaced? What if the persistence of poverty has less to do with the misfortunes of the needy than with the advantages the affluent presume they are entitled to? In Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton, argues that we need to examine the behavior and priorities not of the poor but of “those of us living lives of privilege and plenty.”ĭesmond’s decision to spotlight the privileged may surprise readers familiar with his previous work, in particular his widely acclaimed book Evicted, which told the stories of eight impoverished families struggling to find and keep affordable apartments in Milwaukee.

According to conservatives, the most significant obstacles are behavioral: family breakdown and debilitating habits such as dependency and idleness, exacerbated, they believe, by the receipt of government handouts. Training their attention on the lives of the dispossessed, researchers have identified barriers that keep people at the bottom of the social ladder from climbing its rungs, and offered arguments that usually play out along ideological lines. Those figures have fluctuated only slightly over half a century, during which scholars and journalists have exhaustively debated the reasons for the lack of progress.

I n the United States, a staggeringly wealthy country, one in nine people-and one in eight children-is officially poor.

Evicted book matthew desmond